Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

Linno is about to move past them when the tall one addresses her: “Eddi . Don’t you have to wash your other hand?”

Linno’s feet feel stuck to the floor. She has no idea what to answer, except that she does not have an other hand.

“What does it look like?” the second girl asks, flicking her chin at Linno’s knotted sleeve. Her smile is almost kind, almost. “You can’t show us?”

“She can,” the other one says.

As Linno moves past them, her eyes on their blue chappals, she notices that the tall one has two wiry hairs on her big toe. In science class, they learned that having hair on the toes is the result of a dominant gene, and some girls curled their toes under, ashamed.

The tall girl grabs Linno’s right arm, a gesture that could seem playful, but Linno pushes her away with undue force, sending her staggering back a few steps.

Dominant, recessive. Tiny struggles turned large. Linno steels herself.

And then the girls are upon her. The back of Linno’s head hits the wall. She squirms, but there are two of them, laughing at the ease of it all, one with a hand over Linno’s mouth, the other clawing at the knot. The tall one squeals at the other to look at it, look at it!

It is here that Linno stops struggling and wilts under their weight. She looks at her wrist, a bump smooth as stone, the bone jutting sharply beneath, and a dark, shiny welt seaming the skin back together. For the first time, Linno sees it as they do, freakish in its simplicity.

The girls release her wrist and step back. They exaggerate their disgust with wrinkled noses and frowns. “Tie it back up,” the tall one orders, as if Linno forced them to see it. But Linno remains pinned to the wall, hardly noticing the sound of their soles peeling from the ground, the door swinging shut behind them.

By the time Linno goes to the sink, she does not know how many minutes have passed. Using her teeth and her left hand, she reties her knot. She smooths her hair. With her fingertips, she drops water into her eyes, to flush the red from the white, and returns to class.

ON THE RARE OCCASION that an assignment requires drawing, Linno excels. Her maps of India and the state of Kerala are scaled and detailed and gaudy as treasure maps, with color pencil legends of sprawling palms and scalloped water waves, tiny symbols of tea leaves and rice sacks to represent the regions where those industries are thriving. While she draws, the classroom falls away. She keeps her chin tucked, her shoulders hunched, as if she might dive into the page.

But words leave her when she is called upon to read or answer a question. “Speak up, SPEAK UP,” her teachers demand. With every order, she shrinks.

Another year goes by like this, with Linno forced to repeat the same grade and Anju surging ahead. Family friends ply Ammachi for hints to Anju’s academic success: What does the girl eat? How much does she sleep? When and to which saint does she pray? Ammachi refers to a stockpile of “brain foods,” the tried-and-true diet of intellectual warriors, which includes raw almonds and spinach and Tang over ice. Yet no snack or prayer can account for the fact that Anju can rattle off multiplication tables and African capitals as one might recite her own birthday. No rival can jostle the edifice of her accomplishments, top rank in all her exams and champion of the statewide Kerala Bible Bowl three years in a row, from age nine to eleven. After retiring from the Bowl, Anju skips a grade and Linno again falls back, resulting in their side-by-side seating in Math.

At twelve and sixteen, the Vallara sisters are known as the bookends of the class, both in age and intelligence. On the first day of school, Anju pretends not to notice the general classroom murmur and busies herself by selecting pencils from her National Geographic pencil tin, unaware that her new peers refrain from childish pencil tins. Linno, meanwhile, can feel herself petrifying, growing solid as the bench on which she sits, trapped by the table in front of her. She stares out the window, at a tree thick with birds. Without warning, the birds leap from the tree in one gray conflagration.

Sister Savio takes roll call. When she arrives at Linno’s name, she looks up from the spectacles that she wears on a chain around her neck. There is Linno, a head taller than Anju.

“And Linno Vallara,” Sister Savio says. “Next time sit in the middle of the bench. You’ve gotten so big you might tip the whole thing over.”

Anju goes still, but Linno can sense a quivering within her sister, from rage or maybe sadness, almost imperceptible, a silent tremor as laughter travels around the room. Linno smiles at the surface of the desk, one long crack forking into two like the lines that frame Sister Savio’s lips. One must smile at the ridicule, or be consumed.

LINNO NEVER RETURNS to school. To Melvin, she argues that Ammachi is growing older and slower, and help is needed around the house. “Why pay for a servant …,” she begins to say, before realizing the logical end to this sentence: when I could be the servant?

Her father hardly fights her on the topic, as he has just lost his chauffeur job with a wealthy couple, the Uthups, who are moving to California. It is a common sight these days, so many beautiful white houses, all empty, undwelled, like moneyed monuments to the pursuit of wealth made elsewhere. Jobs are scarce so men and now women, bearing degrees and suitcases, are pouring into other countries or going north.

Melvin was once one of those men, peering hopefully through the barred window of a train bound for Bombay, a journey he would later count among his greatest mistakes. Those were optimistic times, but now, for Melvin, optimism does not seem to apply.

“Money leaving my pocket faster than it’s coming in,” he sighs.

FOR LINNO, a day spent at school yawns endlessly. A day spent at home is a constant race with the sun.

Linno cooks, sweeps, scrubs, pickles, washes, whisks, dries, irons, and answers the door and the phone. Within the walls she knows, she quickly learns her way. The failure of chewy papadam is brief, excusable, and the very next day, she seals the papadam into an old biscuit tin so that they retain their crisp. Ammachi is happily relieved from most of her duties, so when the traveling handicrafts salesman asks for the woman of the house, Linno answers to that title. He hesitates only a moment before calling her Auntie , which seems to Linno, at sixteen, something of a compliment.

Melvin finds a job with a tea estate, driving a lorry that ships crates of tea to purchasing agents in Kochi. The cab of the lorry is a carnival of blues and pinks and greens, flourishes and florals painted along its sides and below the name: Erumathana Tea Estate , though he would have preferred a girl’s name to join the ranks of Priya Mol and Annakutty and all the other lovingly named lorries on the roads. Each evening, Melvin shines his lorry’s yolk yellow hood and complains if so much as a small pothole imperils the tires. “If only the Golden Colon came to our house,” he says. The National Highway was all but abandoned in Kerala, after newspapers reported rumors of corruption amid resignations. To Ammachi’s relief, the provincial curves and gullies have remained, but the growing number of cars still bothers her. Wealthy families have two, and the round-eyed Ambassadors of old are slowly being retired for Korean and Japanese models.

“In town you can hardly breathe the air anymore,” Ammachi complains. “Someday we won’t see the stars.”

“World is changing,” Melvin says to Ammachi. “Two options: eat or be eaten.”

This is his attitude on the days when it seems that Melvin is the eater. Then there are other days when he is told to stay home, as there are too many drivers and lorries, not enough crates. During those times, Melvin wonders if he should sell off the land that came with Gracie’s dowry, a small stretch of teak trees that he was planning to divide between his daughters for their own dowries. But he cannot bring himself to carve up their inheritance. He simply watches as his paychecks thin, vanish, and he waits, heart suspended, for his wages to return the following week.