Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

“I heard about your Rajiv Tandon,” Ghafoor said, setting his elbows on his desk. “Terrible, just terrible.”

Bird nodded.

“Are you sure you can work at my salon after coming from a place like that? Do you remember everything about the beauty industry?”

“I do.”

Ghafoor jutted his chin at the girl. “And what of this one?”

“Anju. My niece.”

All this time, the girl had been staring dreamily at her shoes, and at the mention of her name, she looked up.

“I can’t take a girl with no papers,” Ghafoor said. “It’s not like before in this country. People are watching.”

Bird considered her words before speaking. “She has some problems back home. She needs the money.”

“What kind of problems?” Ghafoor waved away all unuttered problems. “No, no, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

Back and forth they argued, Bird pleading and Ghafoor no-no-ing. “What about Rajini?” Bird said. “Remember her? She didn’t have papers.”

“I did that as a favor. But that was before. I bet you my phone is tapped so that if even I say ‘Salaam aleikum,’ the police make a note of it.”

“Her name is not Salaam aleikum.”

He cut his eyes at Anju, who sat with shoulders hunched and fingers laced. “How do you know each other?”

“I told you, she is my niece.”

Ghafoor nodded. “And I am your sister.”

“All these years I asked you for nothing,” Bird said. “This one time. Please.”

In the end, out of pity, Ghafoor agreed to take the two of them, though he and Bird haggled over Anju’s wage, finally settling on $5 per hour, cash only.

“Part-time,” Ghafoor said. “I will help her, so long as she is helpful.”

“Thank you, sir.” These were Anju’s first words of the meeting.

Looking at Anju, Ghafoor hesitated. The girl was frightened, he could tell, but not in the sudden way inflicted by horror movies and tarantulas. Worry had been following her for some time, had drawn a faint line, small as a stitch, in the space between her eyebrows. If he could do nothing about the line, he could do something about the eyebrows.

“Come,” he said. “Let’s have someone clean up your face.”

ANJU HADN’T PAID any attention to her appearance for a full week, not since the day that she confessed to Miss Schimpf and then arrived home to find Mr. and Mrs. Solanki in the living room. Mrs. Solanki’s throat was wreathed in fat white beads like an oversized rosary that her fingers kept worrying. This time, there were no samosas on the elephant-ankle table.

They had been apprised of the situation, Mr. Solanki told her. “And as you know from the handbook, Sitwell has a very strict interpretation of the Honor Code. As is, they are suspending you for the next three days, at the end of which time they will make a decision as to whether you should be expelled.”

Pushed or punched?

Stabbed or shot?

Thrown off a roof or thrown off a cliff?

Anju found herself nodding, her eyes lost in the carpet underfoot whose peacock blues and greens she had somehow overlooked.

“The award money,” Mrs. Solanki said gently. “It would help if you could return it.”

Anju swallowed hard and barely heard herself say, “I don’t have it.” The application had been filed the week before, the money now irretrievable.

No one spoke. There was only the clicking of beads between Mrs. Solanki’s fingers. Anju could see what the Solankis assumed, that she was impoverished and distraught, that her thievery was without calculation, that poor people lacked the luxury of a moral compass. She felt small. She had brought herself low.

Suddenly, decisively, Mrs. Solanki planted her hands on her knees. “You know what? I am going to straighten this all out. They know who I am. This will all blow over, I’m sure.”

Yes, Anju thought. All this would blow her right over.

DURING THE FIRST DAY of suspension, Anju condemned herself to no television, no phone, and no outdoor excursions, though with both Solankis at work, only Marta the cleaning lady was there to witness Anju’s efforts at self-flagellation. Even Marta, who mostly communicated in smiles, seemed to know of Anju’s guilt. Perhaps out of pity, Marta made lunch for her. Staring at the mustardy sandwich between her hands, Anju wondered if Marta would do what she had done. Having little other mental stimulation, Anju repeated this question several more times, inserting different names in place of Marta, like Mrs. Solanki, Miss Schimpf, Nehru, P. C. Mappilla, Bushes Senior and Junior. As she divvied up the sides, she was not proud of her team.

Twice the phone rang for Anju, and it was Marta who conveyed the messages to her. “Is from a woman … Bird?”

Anju assumed that Bird was calling about the application. “I will call back later,” Anju said to Marta.

Having assumed that she could not sink any further, Anju was surprised to find that there were always new depths and sharper plunges. She learned as much on the third day of her suspension, when listening to Mrs. Solanki explain the school’s decision.

Mrs. Solanki’s fidgeting made her furious energy seem on the brink of coming uncorked. “It appears,” she said, “that the school had a few cases last year involving cheating and plagiarism, and since then they’ve tightened up the rules. Of course, I find it quite odd that they didn’t think to tighten up the rules every other time, for far worse crimes. Oh no. Only when we’re dealing with a foreigner—”

“Sonia, please.” Mr. Solanki turned to Anju. “They feel that the prize money is the main issue. Technically that money is owed to someone else, another winner.”

“As if anyone else needs it.”

Mr. Solanki clasped his hands between his knees. With head bowed, he looked as though he were the one being punished. He explained to Anju that they had tried to pay for the lost money themselves, but the school would not accept it. “The board feels that it’s important to maintain their stance. So they have decided to expel you.” Mr. Solanki visibly swallowed. His Adam’s apple moved up and down. Anju wondered why it wasn’t called Eve’s apple. Wasn’t Eve the one who lunged for it, who made the first, unforgivable mistake of wanting more than she was allowed? “They have already canceled your return ticket and are reissuing an earlier return date, at their expense, of course. And until then you can still stay with us.”

Abruptly they lapsed into silence, a long stretch divided by the ticking of the antique grandfather clock.

“I mean for God’s sake!” Mrs. Solanki threw up her hands, her cork burst. “That little ferret, what’s her name?”

“Miss Schimpf,” said Mr. Solanki.

“Schimpf!” Mrs. Solanki laughed at the very lunacy of the name itself. “She acted as though she had no idea what I was talking about! As if it is pure coincidence that an all-white institution’s first expulsion in fifty years is a penniless foreign exchange student. And when I said as much, she babbled some do-gooder nonsense about her sabbatical in India, and I said, ‘People like you think of foreign countries as places to plunder, natives as product.’”

Mr. Solanki, having heard several thousand versions of this speech over the course of their marriage, stared at his shoes. “And what exactly was Miss Schimpf trying to plunder with the scholarship project?”

“A feeling of inner peace. Spiritual relief. Why else do people come to India?”

“Sonia, please don’t make this into one of your crusades. What is the point?”

“My point is this: they trotted her out like a poor savage. But when the savage is flawed, they throw her on the fire.”

Meanwhile, Anju was looking from one to the other, imagining an intricate web of words being built in the air above her, a web that had very little to do with her.