Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

HRISTMAS ARRIVES in a torrent of holiday cards. Teeming with them, the post office delivers the Jesus-centric cards to Christians and the more secular greetings to Hindus and Muslims, images of rosy white ice skaters and doily snowflakes, mailed in a region that possesses neither. The week before, Anthony Achen had eulogized the sweet but dead simplicity of the Christmas holiday, before the advent of store-bought trees and expensive cards. “Do you remember,” he asked the congregation, while the Kapyar nodded along, already remembering, “when we would simply break a branch from a tree to bring home and decorate, and this was our tree? Do you remember when we would craft our own Christmas stars from bamboo and colored papers instead of buying them ready-made from stores? How did we arrive here in this ready-made age?”

In spite of the sermon, Ammachi demands that Melvin go to the Fancy Shoppe and buy the ready-made star that most resembles a flamboyant meteor. It is the first Christmas without Anju, but Ammachi insists, with a resolve somewhere between piety and superstition, that the ready-made star will guide her home.

Melvin returns with an extra-large star painted pink and orange, poked with holes to radiate the lightbulb within. He hangs it from the corner of the roof, just as humbler stars hover in the porches of other Christian-owned shops and homes. As children, Linno and Anju loved that first moment of illumination, as wondrous and celestial as their own private sun.

But this time, Linno and Ammachi do not stay on the porch for long, drifting off into the house toward their separate corners, their similar worries. Melvin faces the dusk alone, listening to the faint warring of firecrackers that can be heard but not seen, detonated by boys too impatient to wait until nightfall. From where Melvin stands, the trees are a chorus of protest, trembling, flailing, wringing their limbs.

Melvin, too, cannot relax, each bullet crack demanding an answer from the dark: How did we arrive here?

IT HAS BEEN THREE DAYS since they received the call from Miss Schimpf, who possessed little more information than what was contained in the note that Anju left:

Dear Auntie, Uncle, Miss Schimpf, et al .,

Due to a recent event, I am resigning from school. Please do not worry or come for me as I know several good and God-fearing friends who can give me suitable living facilities .

I am sorry I caused trouble. I promise I did not mean for it. Please tell my family (esp. my father) not to worry. I will see them soon. They will still worry but please explain them this note and tell them I am not in a cult or a gang. Thank you .

All the best ,

Anju Melvin

Linno pictured a crumpled paper thick with smudges and misspelled words. She wanted to touch the note herself, as if clues to Anju’s whereabouts would rise to her fingertips, but she assumed that the police would need it. She had always ascribed a mechanized efficiency to American police departments, believing that Anju’s exact location could be found by analyzing the DNA in an errant hair she left behind. As it happened, the police had no time for Anju at all, at least not until seventy-two hours had gone by. “They get a lot of cases like these,” Miss Schimpf explained. “They said that most runaways return in a few days.” She added that Anju’s statistics had been provided to the National Crime Information Center, an entity that sounded to Linno as large as the very country in which her sister was lost.

Mrs. Solanki also called each day, if only to reiterate her sense of helplessness. Her voice was drenched in sympathy, but there was an elegance to her teariness. “She was such a quiet, composed girl, but with the scholarship mess … Well, I think it was too much.”

Perhaps Mrs. Solanki knew of Linno’s complicity, and of her family’s knowledge as well. Linno swallowed, unsure of her English. “Who is ‘good and God-fearing people’? Was Anju having friends at school?”

“I don’t think so. Certain students have been questioned, but she was a bit of a lonely type, you know?”

“Yes,” Linno said. “I know.”

Time and again, Melvin and Ammachi asked Linno to explain her sister’s behavior. They seemed to think that Linno would know, believing that the mind of one sister was a mirror image unto the other. She wanted to tell them that in every person, there are private regions of the mind, infinite and troubling, that are known only to the self. Beyond the reach of sisters, friends, and fathers, these are the innermost spaces that can persuade a seventeen-year-old girl to wake up one day and walk out on her life.

Over the course of seventy-two hours, the frenzy caused by Miss Schimpf’s phone call began to ferment to helplessness. Each evening, Melvin, Ammachi, and Linno took their places in the sitting room and watched the phone as if it might, in a blink, convulse to life. There were no such miracles, large or small. Miss Schimpf said she was still in contact with the police department and would call them with more news, as soon as she received it.

Because the police seemed slow in their own interrogations, Melvin, Ammachi, and Linno gently interrogated one another. They did not pose the terrifying questions, but minor ones, the kind that would not crush them in the asking.

Ammachi sat up suddenly. “Do you think she has socks?”

“Did she pack them?” Linno asked.

“I told her it gets cold there, but she is so stubborn. I had to beg her to take Jilu’s coat …” As she scratched her knee, Ammachi’s voice tapered to a surrendering “Ah.”

Linno stroked Ammachi’s hand. Her skin was pale and slack between the tendons like the loose skin hanging from the throat of sickly cattle. Her finger had shrunken from its wedding ring, so that the band slipped easily up to the knuckle.

Melvin tried to assure them that Anju would be back in a few days. “I know that child. She needs people around, people she knows.” Melvin nodded to himself. “I know her.”

TO THE NEIGHBORS, they act as though life is proceeding as always. Melvin goes to work but leaves his heart by the phone. Sometimes he can hear the phone ringing as he walks away from the house, causing him to stop and turn an ear skyward, as if straining to hear an angelic whisper.

It is Linno who answers the phone every evening, crestfallen at the sound of Miss Schimpf’s voice. Though Miss Schimpf feels partially responsible for Anju’s flight, Linno will not absolve her guilt so long as it keeps her involved in the cause. Miss Schimpf is their only link, however tenuous, to the uniformed policemen presiding over shadowy alleys, badges flashing like stars in the dark. But with all her phone calls and meetings with the police department, Miss Schimpf never bears good news.

“I’ve tried, I promise I’ve tried,” Miss Schimpf says. Her early morning voice is a scraping sound, in dire need of moisture. “The NYPD has other things on their agenda. The list of runaways in this city is endless. Usually these cases are solved when the child comes home.”

“What if she does not?” Linno asks. She shuts her eyes against the question.

“Let’s just try to stay positive for the time being.”

By the day after Christmas, all of Miss Schimpf’s promises, once confident and gilded with optimism, have withered to weak phrasings of self-defense. “We’re doing all we can … We’re trying … We’re hoping … We can only do so much.” And the “we” in which Linno once took comfort — a phalanx of people committed to bringing Anju home — seems now a word to hide behind. “We” where there is only Miss Schimpf and Principal Mitchell and Sonia Solanki.