Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

At first, Anju was grateful when Rohit volunteered to accompany her to Jackson Heights, where she would have her first meeting with Rajiv Tandon. She was reluctant to ask Mrs. Solanki, who seems increasingly busy with work, along with her upcoming diabetes fund-raiser. In her rush, she hardly seems to notice the comings and goings of her son, who has been staying with a nondescript entity he calls his Ex. “Probably staying with that Ex of his,” Mrs. Solanki says. “He thinks I don’t know, but I’m his mother. I know.” What Mrs. Solanki does with her arsenal of maternal knowledge is unclear, but Anju can tell that the power lies in stockpiling, not usage.

When Anju meets Rohit at the subway station, her gratitude shrivels. Rohit has his camera bag slung over his shoulder, a paper cup of coffee in hand. Even before saying hello, he tells her not to worry. “There isn’t a person in this country who doesn’t want to jump in front of the lens. Trust me, cameras give you clout.”

AS SOON AS they enter the number 7 subway car, Rohit wedges himself into the seat next to Anju’s and asks her a number of questions, most of which begin with “where” and “why.”

“Where are you going?” he asks.

“You know where we are going.”

“I know, but for the camera. And make it a full sentence. So, where are you going?”

“To Jackson Heights. Sorry.” She starts again. “I am going to Jackson Heights.”

“Why?”

“I am going to see about how to get green card.”

“Why do you want a green card?”

“No one does not want green card.”

“But why do you?”

“Why would I not?”

As an interviewer, Rohit rates far lower than Mike Wallace, who, if frustrated, would not mutter “Forget it,” turn off his camera, and pout into the middle distance. But Anju is happy to gaze out the window when the 7 train creaks out of the tunnel, emerging aboveground, clattering on tall tracks like a geriatric roller coaster. Queens unfolds before her in rooftops and power lines, a few distant smokestacks piping gray fluff. A cluster of brick buildings wear bright explosions of graffiti, which Rohit points out as the Graffiti Museum. A museum for works of beautiful ruin. She thinks of Linno, wonders what she would say.

Anju clutches the purse in her lap. Inside it is an envelope with $500 in cash, taken from her Art Exhibition winnings. She assumes this to be the maximum fee necessary, and the rest she will give to Linno. Linno, who has begun to haunt her days and fill her dreams, whose presence, once brought here, would right every wrong.

BENEATH THE LOFTED TRAIN TRACKS that empty into Jackson Heights, children dart across the intersection at Eighty-second Street, bold against the beeping cars. White people are a rarity here where it is gray and lively, the stores insistent for attention. Dimmed neon signs declare DENTISTA and FARMACIA, and though it is not yet evening, another sign is surrounded by blinking bulbs, like a movie marquee, peddling the main attraction of PAWN SHOP. She lingers before a barber shop that shows a pictorial menu of men beside the door, offering the shape-up, the blowout, the Caesar, the low fade, and the skin fade. Inside, a few men wait and watch as a barber applies an electric razor to a man whose newly mown head is nearly as bald as when he came into this world. Why would a man choose to speed up the balding process when baldness awaits him, a decade away? The men chat happily over the hum of the razor.

On Seventy-fourth Street, the scenery switches. No more dentistas and farmacias and menus of men, all these replaced by Surekha Designs and Butala Emporium and Rupal’s Desserts, whose storefront sign offers fresh sugarcane juice. It is strange, the sense of detached belonging that overcomes her, the vague familiarity of passing through one’s home to find it inhabited by another with the furniture replaced and rearranged. All around her are people who resemble her until they break into their assorted tongues, mostly Gujarati or Hindi, some Punjabi, none of which she understands. Women wear sweaters over salwars; men shuffle their socked feet in chappals. Here is Payless ShoeSource, there Patel Brothers Grocery with boxes of vegetables in a row. Beneath the deep green cucumber is scrawled: KHIRA. Beneath the bright, wet cilantro: DHANA —2/$1.00 . Strange that she should come so far from home, to Jackson Heights, to learn Hindi words she had not studied in school.

In the windows are mannequins draped with daring saris, thin as a fly’s wing. Some of these hard, surly ladies are bald; others fare a little better under Beatle moptop wigs. They stand unmoved by the melodies flooding from the music store next door, the remixed drumbeats beneath the divine bellow of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Anju and Rohit pass an old man hunched on a stool outside the music store mumbling, “Goprice, goprice,” which Anju understands as “Good price.”

She would like to absorb her surroundings slowly, anonymously, but as she walks, Rohit walks alongside, pointing his camera at her. He tells her not to pay attention to him. Everyone pays attention to him. Bystanders lean away and stare at her with the assumption that she must be famous, or at least a local TV personality. That she is neither embarrasses her. The crowds of people make an aisle through which she can pass, following her with their stares. She walks swiftly, even as Rohit stumbles to keep up, complaining that this footage won’t be usable if he keeps bumping into trash cans. She walks faster.

By the time they reach Rajiv Tandon’s building, Rohit is in a dark mood. They ride the elevator in silence.

AS SOON AS Anju enters the office, she hears a triumphant, “HAH!

“You’ve come,” Bird says.

Once again, Bird’s Malayalam is a balm to Anju’s nerves. Anju and Rohit take a seat in the waiting room while Bird hands them Styrofoam cups of chai pumped from a large steel canister. Anju introduces Rohit as the son of her host mother. Noting Rohit’s camera, Bird says, “Mr. Tandon will not like that,” and returns to her desk.

They lapse into silence when Bird answers the phone. “Offices of Rajiv Tandon, this is Birdie, how may I help you?”

Birdie . The name does not quite fit, befitting of someone daintier. Also odd is the way that Bird seems far more knowledgeable in this place than in the library, phoning and filing and stapling all at once. Anju looks around the room, her gaze passing over the gaunt African mask on the wall, the seventeenth-century map of the world, framed behind glass, and finally Rohit, who is filming her.

“Do you have enough money to get a lawyer?” he asks.

“I think so,” she says.

“Maybe my mom can help you out. Or me.”

“You have money? From how?”

“Different ventures.”

“Why you would give it to me?”

“I look at it as another venture. Immigration is a really big deal right now.”

She watches him as he watches her through the camera. To him, she must be of no more significance than a fish in a bowl. He raps on the glass only to see which way she will swim.

“No thank you,” she says.

At that moment, Mr. Tandon emerges from his office. Rohit turns and extends his hand, but Mr. Tandon keeps his distance, as though his proximity to the camera might cause him an allergic reaction. He politely asks Rohit to turn it off. Holding the camera away from his eye, Rohit rattles off a number of practiced pleas and excuses. “It’s for a home video, she’s a close family friend, no one will see it, I just want to document her arrival.”

To Anju’s delight, none of this works. “We have too many people coming in here with sensitive issues,” Mr. Tandon says. “So, if you would be so kind.”