Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

Linno has never seen anything like this website, whose colors surpass those produced by the television. The lines are clean, the writing luxurious, the pictures dissolving from one into the next. Most girls Linno’s age are Internet-savvy, having learned to type and surf in their computer classes, but since leaving school, Linno has always felt herself trapped in the pretechnological Dark Ages. It feels impossible now to catch up with the rest. Better to leave this world to Georgie, who speaks with hurried excitement about the wonders of Flash animation, continually moving his cursor and tapping on various features. A navy menu panel appears to the right, inscribed with phrases like: Our Mission, Contact Us, Our Preferred Associates , and Collection . Each phrase pulses when touched by the cursor and leads to a new page when clicked. Though most of these pages are as yet empty, Linno is astonished by the overall elegance of the design. It is like entering a wealthy, wallpapered mansion that bears little resemblance to the actualities of their shop.

“I’m paying Georgie to be our webmaster,” Alice says proudly.

“See, the simplicity sets you apart from the rest,” Georgie says. “Nice and clean, not too much text.”

He summons up the Mission Statement, a letter signed by Alice about her commitment to quality, innovation, and style, no matter the budget: The invitation is the gateway to a blessed event. If you want to personalize your event even more, you can work with our in-house designer, Linno Vallara, who has the vision and talent to imagine a new dimension in paper artistry .

“You wrote this about me?” Linno asks.

“Prince and I wrote it together. We stole some of it from an American website.” Alice points at the screen. “But the collection is what you need to work on. We need at least ten new designs. I’ll send them to Georgie, and he will take pictures and … what is it?”

“Upload them,” Georgie says.

“Upload them. Will you do this, Linno? Design ten more?”

But Linno does not answer, her mind already drifting to the shelves of rainbowed color, a spectra of combinations, a frontier far less foreign.

THAT EVENING, Ammachi begs Linno to watch an English film with her, one that she saw on television a month ago. She insists that Linno needs a break from her anxieties, which have etched unwelcome lines across her forehead. Linno refuses, noting how most of these outdated films have dismal titles and infantile storylines— Home Alone 3 , for example, or Demolition Man —films that have been rejected by the very country that made them and funneled, like refuse, into third-world television sets. But Ammachi defends this particular movie, about “a Madhamma teacher who goes to a Chinese kingdom to make the Chinas speak better English.” That Ammachi, who has little good to say about colonial Britannia, is giving the film a glowing review makes Linno take note.

And how lucky that she does. As it turns out, the film is neither Chinese nor British but American, filled with pagodas and gongs and bonsai trees. The King and I takes place in old Siam, in the court of a king played by an American actor whose painted complexion is an odd golden brown, a color too metallic for any race; his eyes are also outlined to seem aslant. Similarly, the pretty white actresses are fashioned into mincing Siamese wives who approximate an accent by speaking slowly and squeakily, whinnying behind tiny hands. And then there is the white woman teacher taking her long, confident strides within her bossy hoop skirts, her grammar as flawless as her coif, come to civilize the court. And though Linno has never seen a picture of Mrs. Lambert, she imagines her in a hoop skirt, absorbing the many marvels of this misty land.

So Linno designs a scarlet and gold-leafed card that opens up from the bottom edge. Modeled on the silhouetted set pieces of The King and I , a flat-roofed pagoda lifts from the back page, complete with two thin columns and two tiny steps that lead into a shallow inner chamber bearing the gold symbol for harmony. The party details are printed on the lower half of the card, in a computer font called Chopsticks.

After sending Mrs. Lambert the dummy card for approval, Linno receives a phone call a week later. “You’re a genius,” Mrs. Lambert says. “You’ve captured the essence of Asian flair. It’s like you climbed inside my head! How did you do it?”

“Research,” Linno says.

HERE ARE THOSE in Jackson Heights, Queens, who well know the name “Action Jackson,” a neighborhood group that demanded a list of “aesthetic guidelines” for storefronts in the Jackson Heights area, as proposed by the Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1995. Store facades would be restricted to a mature palette of colors—“black, brown (not bronze), dark gray, tan, dark green and dark red.” The proposal eliminated most if not all of the signs hung by Indian and Pakistani shopkeepers along Thirty-seventh Avenue, like John Muqbel’s ten-by-twelve-foot candy pink awning, which disagreed with the proposal. “This is purely motivated by prejudice,” Muqbel complained to The New York Times . “They have no right to impose this on me. I don’t live in their house.” But the fed-up district manager of Community Board 3 denounced the signs as “absolutely atrocious.”

Along came the Apsara Salon with a sign that made every atrocity look quaint, with its crenelated edges and black-on-orange design that unintentionally evoked Halloween. If this Muqbel could get into The New York Times , Ghafoor reasoned, so could he. Ghafoor proudly boasted of the competitive mentality that he shared with his fellow Indians, the very reason that Indians were # 1 in the Guinness Book of World Records in subjects as varied as “longest fingernail” and “tiniest handmade chess piece.”

But the Apsara Salon arrived after the commission proved unable to control the colors that rudely bloomed along the street. And when Pay-less Shoes arrived with its bubbly mango-colored letters, it became clear that the street would have little recourse against crimes of design.

INSIDE THE APSARA SALON, the decor is blandly inoffensive. The rectangular main room narrows into a hallway, leading to a bathroom that wears an out of order sign. Favored customers know the secret — that the bathroom has always been in working order, but this is Ghafoor’s way of curbing cleaning costs and the occasional sabotage of a sanitary napkin. These privileged few slip in and out of the bathroom without sullying the floor or saying a word.

But now with Anju, Ghafoor’s new hire, he can remove the out of order sign. The new girl is from the old country, which he considers a plus, as she is ingrained to take on the most menial of tasks. She squats like only a third-worlder can, froglike for minutes on end, brushing tumbleweeds of black and hennaed hair into a dustpan. For months, the floor seemed perpetually veiled with scum, but since her arrival last week, every surface has been shiny and slippery and spotless, not a stray hair in sight.

The new girl says very little, which is understandable, seeing as how all the beauticians are either Punjabi or Gujarati and this Anju is Malayali. Ghafoor once tried to instate a Hindi-only policy to prevent sectarian conflict (and to make sure no one was talking behind his back), but implementing such a rule is like trying to cut a hole in water. The words flow around him whether he approves or not.

The only person that Anju speaks to is Bird, who brought her the week before and practically begged Ghafoor to hire them both. Luckily for them, he had recently come across the funds to do so. A rival salon called Surekha Designs had declared bankruptcy, allowing the Apsara to open its arms to Surekha’s huddled, hairy masses. Still, to maintain some sense of power, Ghafoor felt the need to hold an official interview in his office, a tiny room postered over with the avatars of ruling Bollywood starlet Aishwarya Rai. Bird and Anju sat across from Ghafoor and Aishwarya the woeful bride, her marine blue contact lenses welling with unspilled tears.