Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

By day, thinking feels like a kind of inefficient swimming, the way Anju used to do when she was a sunbaked little thing in knickers, kicking and kicking until she came up for a breath and noticed that she had gone just a few feet from her point of origin. At night, all Linno can do is sit at the kitchen table and try to drive the competing sounds from her mind, like the voices of Miss Schimpf and Mrs. Solanki, whose calls have grown fewer, both of them increasingly concerned with how Linno is handling everything, a question that Linno does not know how to answer. “Fine,” she says. “Thank you.”

Somewhere, a faucet is dripping. The pots and pans, washed and laid to dry on rags, have grown mossy with shadow. When she is lucky, darkness focuses her vision, gives contour and depth to what has transpired. Anju must have fled out of shame, but she wouldn’t have left without arranging a place to go. To whom did Anju turn and can that person be trusted? Should Linno post a reward for information about Anju’s whereabouts? Terrible idea. Some broken-nosed thug might kidnap her. Tape up her mouth. Put her in the boot of a car. Brainwash her. Ransom her. In another time, in another life, Linno could be penning an episode for Sympathy , casually playing chess with imagined lives.

GOD CREATED THE UNIVERSE in seven days, and in that same space of time, Kuku George has still not come up with a plan for Linno to pursue. Or if he has, he has failed to phone her about it. For three days in a row, she calls his cell phone, and on the fourth day, a Sunday evening, she tries his home phone and leaves two urgent messages that Kuku should call her as soon as possible.

In the meantime, Linno keeps company with the drawing tablet in her lap, trying to create an invitation for her first white client, Mrs. Judy Lambert.

Mrs. Lambert came to them by way of her tennis partner, Mrs. Nair, who had sent her Rachna’s Sweet Sixteen invitation. Mrs. Lambert immediately phoned Mrs. Nair and inquired after the name of the invitation shop, what with her own fiftieth birthday bash coming up.

Judy Lambert is Alice’s great white hope, the gleaming key to a pride of wealthy Episcopalian clientele who thrive on outdoing one another. She is a fashion magazine editor, opinionated, effusive, and where she treads, the pride will follow.

But while white people seem to favor simpler designs, Mrs. Lambert has especially requested some “Asian flair” to the invitation, to complement the Oriental theme of her party. “There will be Chinese lanterns,” she gushed to Alice, “and origami cranes and folded fans and everywhere just red, red, red!”

Linno suggested to Alice that Mrs. Lambert might have mistaken one part of Asia for another by hiring their services. “What do I know of China? And this, what about this?” Linno held up a printout of the digital file that Mrs. Lambert had sent, allegedly the Chinese symbol for harmony. “She wants me to put this in the design. How?”

“That is your job to know and my job to sell,” Alice said. “If this woman came to us by mistake, it’s a blessed mistake.”

But home seems the wrong place to ponder harmony of any kind, let alone that of the Chinese variety. Linno sketches without interest, intermittently glancing at the phone. Ammachi shuffles across the room and looks over Linno’s shoulder. She scratches her hip. These days, she has taken to wandering about the house wearing a pink floral muumuu and a dreamy frown, her hair in a wilting knot.

“Did anyone call?” Ammachi asks.

“No.”

“Where is Melvin?”

“Driving Abraham Saar.” Melvin had gone despite Abraham’s suggestion that he take the day off. Melvin declined, hoping that putting himself to work would put his mind to rest.

Ammachi eases into the plastic chair next to her. “What are you drawing a baby for?”

“No reason,” Linno says. She crosses out her sketch of a plump, jowly head intended to be that of Mao Tse-tung.

Ammachi gazes at the curio cabinet, absorbed by the marble plaque behind the glass. “Anju was a very round baby, like a matthangya.” Linno already knows this story but allows Ammachi to continue. “A nine-pound gourd, that’s what she was, hairy all over from sitting in the womb so long. At least that was how she looked in the picture your mother sent. I took the picture around with me, but I was too ashamed to show it to my friends. They kept asking and I kept pretending that it had gotten lost in the mail.” Ammachi looks at Linno. “The picture, not the baby.”

Linno nods.

“I blame your mother. She ate too much fish pickle during her pregnancy.”

“That’s why Anju was hairy?”

Ammachi clicks her tongue at such illogic. “That’s why Anju is the way she is. Impulsive. Unsatisfied. Constipated. Always trying to push her way through the world.”

Linno does not disagree. Anju is all of these things, but if fish pickle is responsible, Linno wonders what her own fetal diet was like. Perhaps plain, harmless foods like rice and yogurt, okra, a sensible gruel here and there …

The phone shrieks. Linno lunges for it.

On the other line, a woman’s voice says: “Linno Vallara?”

“Yes?”

“Aha. Linno.” The woman pauses, rallying her emotion. “Now you listen to me. I understand that you’re having a tough time these days, but you had your chance with him. What business do you have breaking up a home?”

“Who is this?” Linno asks.

“There is a right way to do things, and the right way is to have the blessings of family and God, which we have. And you? You want to go sneaking behind my back, allay? Well, no one goes sneaking behind my back and certainly not God’s back either!”

“Who is it?” Ammachi whispers loudly.

“What is this?” Linno asks. “Who are you talking about?”

“I mean my Kuku. I asked him why you called for him, twice , but he refuses to tell me the truth. He says this is private business.”

“Whose Kuku? Who is this?”

“This is Jincy.” In English, perhaps to elevate her threat level, she adds: “His finance . You und-a-stan? His soon-to-be vife.”

· · ·

“I WASN’T SURE how to tell you,” Alice says.

Linno and Alice are sitting across from each other at the drafting table. Alice taps her spoon on the rim of a mug— plink, plink —and watches the instant Bru whirl into a pasty cloud. She pushes the mug toward Linno, who ignores the offering and instead carves a spiral into a piece of paper. She listens to the hum of the printer chugging and spitting its majestic announcements.

“More sugar?” Alice asks.

Linno scrapes her blade around and around. “It’s a patient man who can love a woman like that.”

“Who said anything about love? They are getting married.”

“When?”

“Next month. You know how it goes. Fast fast, before anyone changes their minds.”

Alice watches as Linno pulls up on the center of the spiral, so that a perfect spring rises out of the table. In this, the negative space is as vital as the paper shape itself, a harmony between the tangible and intangible. She feels an idea bucking against the walls of her mind until she notices Alice staring at her with a troubled expression.

“I didn’t realize you cared so much,” Alice said.

“Hm? No, I was thinking about the design—”

“I wasn’t going to tell you just yet, but maybe this will lift your spirits.” Alice leans forward to whisper, though Prince is at the other end of the shop, taking inventory. “About your sister — Kuku seems to have found a solution.”

Linno drops the spiral and sits up.

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“Because he was trying to contact someone about some logistical thing …”