Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

But Linno is already off her stool, zipping up her purse. “I only hope his fiancée won’t be there.”

LINNO’S MIND IS FLYING faster than the auto-rickshaw wallah can take them. Scooters zip past, including one straddled by a woman in a salwar, the end of her orange shawl flickering flamelike amid the smells of gasoline and dust. It is still a strange sight to see a woman driving a scooter, as just a few years back women only rode sidesaddle, perched behind their husbands, watching the road fly by. The scooter woman speeds ahead, a shrinking dab of orange in the distance. Stuck behind a bus, Linno’s driver swabs the sweat off the back of his prickly neck with a kerchief that looks exhausted by its purpose.

“We’ll get there,” Alice says.

Linno glances at her reflection in the round sideview mirror. Who is this person — so demanding, so tense and terrified? She keeps her fingers curled around the partition bar, within a tantalizing few feet of the steering wheel.

HEY ALL HAVE THEIR SOLUTIONS. Ammachi has prayer, Linno has Kuku, and Melvin has a connection.

While Linno’s auto-rickshaw is beetling down Good Shepherd Road, Melvin is hurrying to meet a friend of a friend of a friend. This friend thrice removed goes by a single initial: G. Melvin wonders if he should call him Mr. G, but decides that people who go by single initials probably prefer as much brevity as possible.

G runs a secret currency exchange counter in the back of his tobacco store, where visitors can get a good exchange rate on American dollars, several rupees more than what is offered by the bank. In the late nineties, he thrived behind his clandestine counter, living off the fat of the illegal liquor market and giving a good exchange for hundred-dollar bills. But since the recent arrival of competition, he has branched out into another side business, this one more secret than the first.

What Melvin assumed was a bathroom turns out to be the heart of the side business, a small, windowless room furnished with a card table and a bare bulb that sheds an unsparing light on G’s face, which is scarred not so much by brutal fights but by a skirmish with puberty. Acne has left pocks and craters of a depth that make Melvin want to look away and scrub his own cheeks clean. But he does not. He heard somewhere that two dogs at odds would continue to growl until one surrendered by looking away. Melvin will not be the latter dog.

“I’m considering you as a client,” G says, “only because Berchmans could vouch for you.”

With unabashed sincerity and eye contact, Melvin says thank you.

G shows Melvin two identical visas — one real and one fake — though only G can distinguish one from the other. It is clear from G’s craftsmanship that he is not so much a visa counterfeiter as a connoisseur of fraud, and he handles his work with all the love of a father handling his baby girl. Not allowed to touch, Melvin squints at the sophistication in the doctoring of a signature, in the digital replication of a seal. G must have taken infinite care to produce a stamp identical to that issued by the Chennai consulate, at such a perfectly careless slant.

First they discuss fees, or rather, G gives a figure that Melvin has no choice but to accept. “This is not a sari shop,” G says. “No haggling here. One lakh.”

One hundred thousand rupees. A dizzying string of zeroes, but what price can Melvin put on his own daughter? What sum just to pass by her doorway and see her lima bean shape in the bed as it always was, as it was meant to be, if not for his relentless pushing?

Melvin agrees to the sum. Loans will have to be taken from places seedier than this, from persons with scars that imply worse than G’s.

“Also you should know that I invest in protection. So if you tell anyone, there will be …” G hesitates, uncomfortable with this part of the presentation. “Consequences. You know what I mean.”

Melvin doesn’t, but nods unconvincingly. With an impatient sigh, G adds, “You ruin my business, I ruin you. Okay? Broken legs are only the beginning.”

Melvin is not sure what to say after that. The bulb flickers as G busies himself with his visas.

“Would you be the one to … ruin me?” Melvin asks.

“Oh no no no,” G says reassuringly, waving his doughy hands in the air, as if declining a second serving of food. “I don’t have the heart for all that.”

THE NEXT DAY, Melvin drives Abraham’s entire family all the way to Ernakulam in order to buy kurta pyjamas at Jayalakshmi, a tall, palatial store that offers air-conditioned comfort to its visitors and sweltering chaos for the drivers trying to park around it. A man in a nondescript uniform shrills his whistle at the entering cars that slant this way and that. Beggars weave in the spaces between, specifically aiming their palms at the sunglassed patrons. A plaid-panted man passes coolly around an auto-rickshaw, but when the fingers of a beggar graze his shoulder, he recoils like an affronted turtle into the collar of his polo, crying out: “He touched me!” No one comes to his rescue.

At last Melvin drives the family back home. Abraham sits in front, his thick arm hanging out the open window, embracing his Ambassador. Mrs. Chandy and her twin sons, Shine and Sheen, are pressed against each other in the back, among plastic bags that hold far more than what they had planned to plunder. At nineteen, the boys share their father’s physique, muscled and broad, but lack his ambition. Shine is always draped across a couch or dazed before the television, while Sheen prefers to loiter outside the girls’ college, making eyes at the exiting students. At the moment, both boys are wearing earphones plugged into a music device about as big as a credit card. Melvin can hear the faint electronic pulsing of music that sounds American, but could be Bollywood just the same. Gone are the tablas and chendas of his youth, the songs that he could call his own, displaced by lyrics like “I love ice cream” and “Hey you sexy sexy,” songs that seem neither East nor West but fall through the divide.

Before sundown, Abraham tells Melvin to pull over at a restaurant. Abraham stays in the car a moment, telling his wife and sons that he and Melvin will follow shortly.

Melvin rests his hands on the bottom of the leather-covered steering wheel, unsure of what to do with them at this juncture. He loves these old cars, their British elegance, like round-eyed gentlemen in seal grays and dove whites, loves them with the sadness of watching something slowly disappear, chased away by smaller cars, bland in their global uniformity. He ponders this so as not to appear too uncomfortable in the silence of the car, unspoken words pressing in on all sides. How terrible about Anju . He has been hearing this sentence quite a lot lately, and he hates the sound of it, the morbid finality, the acceptance.

“Anju reminds me of Gracie in many ways,” Abraham says finally. “She has a certain vision of her life.”

This, a discussion of Melvin’s dead wife and Abraham’s betrothed, is not what Melvin was expecting. He keeps his eyes on a scrawny yellow puppy leaning against the trunk of a diseased tree. The puppy seems possessed of a world-weariness beyond its quaint size.

“People like that do not run off without a clear plan,” Abraham says. “It’s not in their nature. They may take risks, but these are measured risks.”

“I suppose,” Melvin says. When he was small, he beckoned to a stray puppy from the other side of a street. It hesitated, then sauntered toward him just as a lorry was hurtling down the road. Melvin never told anyone of that day, not his mother or his cousins. He had never been saddled with a story that hurt too much to tell, that required a strength beyond his means to simply open his mouth and begin. And now seeing this puppy, he thinks of the one he killed, a hot and trembling pile on the road that God must have forgotten.