Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

At the moment, Prince is refuting the mother’s claim. Animated and incredulous, he taps the invitation in the album and addresses the daughter in English: “Not possible, sista! This one is a hotcake. Very touchy, groovy card.”

“Bhanu,” Alice continues, nodding at the other clerk, who is staring at a computer screen. “He was fifteen when we hired him. That boy who stole from us, he offered Bhanu half the money to come along, but Bhanu said no and reported him immediately.” Bhanu scratches his chest. His button-down shirt hangs limply on his narrow frame, the fabric worn thin enough to show the exact shape of his undershirt.

Alice turns to Linno. “So. Your introduction. What do you think?”

Anxiety causes Linno to go momentarily mute. How will she ever remember all this? How will she rise to Alice’s expectations? She swallows, tries to compose herself. “Will I be tested?”

“Of course not,” Alice says. “But you do have homework.”

LINNO’S FIRST ASSIGNMENT is the Sweet Sixteen birthday party for the daughter of a plastic surgeon in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, an old college friend of Alice’s father. The girl wrote Alice an email in advance, to express her vision for the invitation.

From: Nair, Rachna

To: Alice

Subject: My Card

Dear Alice,

Hi! I’m psyched that you’ll be doing my invitations. My mom said I should email you about what I’m looking for in my card.

I think the card should be both mature and fun, and should symbolize my transition from girlhood into womanhood, without being gross or lame. I think it should also be sort of fusiony, with Indian and American motifs. Maybe like 65 % Indian and 35 % American because that’s how I’d divide myself. Nothing religious because I don’t consider myself religious, just spiritual (it’s complicated). I want the invitation to represent me. Like I want people to look at it and say, “That is so Rachna.” Or “I wish I had an invitation like that.” Or “I wish I was Rachna.” LOL. J/k.

I can’t wait to see what you come up with!

Thanks so much,

Rachna

After reviewing the email four times, the first thing that enters Linno’s mind is a magazine article that she once read, about a team of Indian scientists investigating an aboriginal tribe in the Andaman Islands. Indians investigating Indians. According to Alice, this Rachna is Malayali, and her grandparents live in Kollam, not forty miles from Kottayam. And yet, in the space of one generation, Rachna speaks a strain of English nearly opaque to Linno, who can read Newsweek and India Today without much difficulty.

After dinner, Linno remains at the table with the printout of the email before her. She underlines the percentages. Her knees begin to tremble the way they did during math exams. She looks up at the light filtering through the dusty windowpane, and somehow it calms her, the milkiness of the light, the skein of dust, the fact that she is needed to wipe the window. She prefers this, the honest work of making the home, work that proffers sure results.

“Why are you thinking so much?” Melvin asks, lugging a plastic bucket of pump water into the kitchen. Linno rises to relieve him, but Melvin shoos her away. “I know how to heat water. You go do your homework.”

She would like him to put on a shirt, in case Alice stops by, but these days, he seems too listless for shirts. Ever since her rejection of Kuku, Melvin has gone around the house in a torpor, a white towel over his shoulder. She stops herself from considering her father’s mental state any further and opens to a fresh page in the drawing tablet that Alice gave her. Melvin’s doubts, on top of her own, are too much to handle. She thinks instead of her painted windows as proof of higher possibility, their colors blossoming with light.

IN THE KITCHEN, Melvin stands before the hearth and listens to the quick downpour of rain on the broad banana leaves. These sudden rains have always sounded to him like the crumpling of paper, here and then gone before one manages to open one’s umbrella. The wet, misty smell freshens his lungs.

Melvin strikes a match to the kindling and watches the embers glow beneath the blackened pot. The other day, he heard Ammachi asking Linno, over and over, what was wrong with Kuku. Exasperated, Linno finally answered, “I didn’t feel … a spark.” It was a line that he recalled from a woman’s magazine, Vanitha , lying open on Linno’s desk the day before. Vanitha is certainly not Melvin’s domain, but in an effort to understand his daughter, he read the article carefully, treating it as some sort of scholarly text. The sentiments were awkwardly worded, filled with the kind of vocabulary that made singlehood sound like an elite club. “Today’s woman has no need to settle against her dreams…. Love you first!” The picture showed a self-loving woman in a tank top, running through a field of red poppies, holding the ends of a red sari that billowed behind her like a windswept sail.

He watches Linno at the kitchen table, a familiar sight, her head propped against her knotted wrist, her left hand drifting a pencil over paper. Her ankles are locked, one heel twitching against the other. He sighs at the folly of youth, to think that hardships are the bricks that build a better life, to invite struggle when one could so easily wake well after dawn with eager servants preparing tea, or retire to bed after a peg of XO (not Yeksho) to sweeten one’s dreams. To Melvin’s mind, this is what it would mean to be Mrs. Kuku George. And if the marriage would require Linno to surrender her notion of a spark, so be it. What Vanitha calls “settling,” Melvin calls compromise. He thought that Linno was wise enough to know as much, to recognize that the world does not abide by Vanitha ‘s definitions.

If Melvin were the father he wanted to be, he would express the ways of marriage through metaphor, using not a spark but a houseplant, explaining how love can flower when the marriage is well watered, how steady love thrives best when other factors are in place — healthy soil, good sunlight, proper fertilizer, and a well-sized pot. He imagines himself imparting reams of vague metaphorical wisdoms, the kind that are clearly based on his own experience, without having to delve too deeply into the mistakes of his past.

Linno’s face, deep in contemplation, resembles her mother’s. Melvin can see all her thoughts converging to a single point, like sunlight captured through a magnifying glass to kindle a piercing flame. Even if he were divulging all his secrets, she would not lift her head.

T ANJU’S SUNDAY SCHOOL, the Kapyar used to teach the Adam and Eve story in broad strokes of dark and light, serpent and heel, Tree of Knowledge and Tree of Life. The Kapyar could eulogize at length about the Garden of Eden, improvising a fanciful version filled with papaya and guava and lemon-drop trees, rivers of sweet, limitless milk, and glass bowls of Cadbury chocolates. What he never dwelled upon, however, was the moment when Adam and Eve acknowledged their nakedness and were ashamed. Even he who wrote the Book of Genesis, whom Anju pictured with a silvery beard and aeons of time on his hands, seemed embarrassed by the moment, as he spent half a sentence on it before hustling the story along.

Only now does Anju understand the shifting of feet, the averting of eyes, when you have seen too much of another. She wonders how long it took for Adam and Eve to recover from that first gust of too much truth, if they went through a period of sidling around each other when reaching for the papaya.