Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

“I’m trying to say that she will be all right, Melvin. You will find her, and until then, she will be all right.”

Though Melvin means to say thank you, the only sound he can muster is an affirmative grunt. He is reminded of the time he misspoke the name for XO. Yeksho, Yeksho , the mistake had clung to him all that day and for months afterward, despite the graceful way in which Abraham passed over it. If only he shared Abraham’s self-possession. If only he, too, had all the right words that lined themselves up when a situation demanded it.

Up ahead, they watch the point where the road meets the sky, that thin gray line vibrating metallic in the heat. For now, they are simply two men. Not driver and employer, but perhaps, momentarily, friends.

Once inside the restaurant, however, when Mrs. Chandy invites Melvin to sit at their table, he declines and sits alone. This is partly why Melvin is considered a good driver. Quietly, he abides by the old way. He knows his place. He comforts them with the knowledge that even if the entire country is changing, the important things are not.

AFTER WORK, Melvin visits Gracie’s thicket of teak trees. The trunks rise to five times his height, slender and old, shades of their fragrance borne on the breeze. The leaves cluster thickly but allow the sun to filter in pieces, casting a mosaic of light on the ground. Here in solitude, Melvin finds all the aging gravitas of a library.

He rarely visits, feeling uncomfortable around these trees. They seem to carry something ancestral and disapproving in their postures despite the fact that he never sold them, not even during the jobless times. He used to look forward to the day when he would give the land to his daughters, for their dowries, happily leaving him with nothing more than the knowledge that his final job as father was done.

He remembers when Anju, then a little girl, asked him if he regretted having had no sons. Anju’s classmate Naresh had informed her that “daughters drain their Appa’s finances.”

He paused to think. It was important to say the right thing.

“I have excellent finances,” he said. “Did I ever tell you about your mother’s teak trees? Dozens of them. I could marry you off several times over.”

To which Anju said, in a small voice, “Oh.”

What he meant to say was this: he has never felt anything but the most engulfing love for each child, before the infant was declared boy or girl, before it was neither he nor she but ours , a love that turned nearly fierce at each baptism, especially at the moment when the priest took the baby and sat her vulnerable bum in a cold basin of water, chanting, oblivious to her torrential screams. From a very early age, Linno demanded to dress herself, and Melvin was quite sure that the sacrament of baptism had something to do with it.

He thrived in his flat of women, not least among them Gracie. She was smarter than he was, a fact that other husbands might have found irritating, but he enjoyed. When he read a political cartoon or editorial in the newspaper, one that he actually understood, he wanted to tell her about it, not to impress her with his learning but to hear what she might say.

And what would she say at a time like this? That these trees mean nothing, that money itself loses all value if it cannot be spent on their children.

He has thought it all out; he has staked each step of the plan. With this money, he will buy a fake visa for himself under a false, non-Islamic name. (He is still trying to come up with the name, but something plain and pronounceable. No gaping vowels and absolutely no z ‘s.) He will secure himself a two-week passage to New York, find Anju, bring her back, and they will slip right back into their lives as if nothing at all has changed. It is exactly Linno’s plan, but illegal and therefore much more efficient.

As for Ammachi’s plan, fat lot of good will come from praying to a saint, aloft on its pedestal, its crescent-eyed gaze fixed on a realm beyond the earthly one. Lately Melvin has begun to wonder if God is not a thing that can be seen through so clear a glass as Anthony Achen offers. He still feels the pull of his faith, but he prefers the fogginess that he read of in a Tagore poem as a boy: “… and the time come to take shelter in a silent obscurity.” He was made to recite it from memory in front of the class, an exercise that he mostly failed except for the one line that, to this day, tolls with all the depth and truth of a church bell through his mind.

Melvin was not always so unsure. As a child, he was devout, granting particular adoration to St. Yohannan Nepumocianos, patron saint of confession, whose expression seemed somehow more benevolent than the others. But things began to change when Ammachi told him a story about her father’s miraculous encounter with the saint.

Ammachi’s family used to attend the northern church of St. Yohannan Nepumocianos, as opposed to the southern church of St. Yohannan Nepumocianos. Though built by entirely different denominations, both churches honored the martyred Czechoslovakian priest who, according to lore, refused to reveal to the reigning king the details of the queen’s confessions. For this, the king cut off the priest’s tongue and drowned him in a river. Though a little-known saint, Yohannan Nepumocianos was also the patron saint of floods, which won him the worship of two churches in Kumarakom, a land beholden to the mercy of the rainy seasons. Every year, both his churches held their annual Perunal in his honor, each festival full of competitive pomp and vigor.

One night, after a raucous Perunal at the southern church, the day before the Perunal at the northern one, Ammachi’s father went stumbling home with a friend, trudging along the banks of the river. At some point, through their drunken mists, they felt the growing pound of hooves along the ground as sure as the thump of their heartbeats. And then, out of the black it appeared: a white horse galloping toward them, a robed man astride its back. As the horse passed, it struck them both so hard across the heads that the men fell unconscious. When they awoke — they found themselves on the other side of the river!

Clear to them then: that horseman was the spirit of St. Yohannan Nepumocianos, on his way from one Perunal to another. Others had seen him, too, in earlier years. And of course it made sense that he would be traveling overnight. How else could he be expected to attend both festivals?

Ammachi had meant for the story to strengthen her son’s faith, but instead it filled the small Melvin with dread for every time he had to attend church and face the statue of St. Yohannan Nepumocianos. Thus far, he had operated on the belief that saints looked on from a kindly distance and did not kick mortals around on their way home from a party. To this day, he grows uncomfortable bringing his petitions to stone-cut saints and their irisless eyes. For many reasons, it seems more sensible to bargain with the living rather than the dead.

EASIER SAID THAN DONE when living with a mother like his own. Melvin is sitting on the front steps beneath a mulberry-colored sky, smoking a bidi that he found in the pocket of his shirt, the first small mercy of the week. The mosquitoes veer about but rarely bite him, bored with local blood. He listens to the thrum of winged things, the rustle of tiny lives and deaths, and wonders what it would be like to struggle as everything else in the world struggles, without sense of past or future, without regret or foreboding. But the mango trees look reproachful tonight, shimmering their leaves, in agreement with his mother’s belief that they too suffer pain. He remembers how, when he found himself in trouble, Ammachi would snap a branch from the tamarind tree out back, apologizing to the tree for doing so (I’m sorry, it hurts you, I know it hurts you) . With that branch, she proceeded to whip her wayward son without a trace of her arboreal empathy.