Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

“Maybe you should call your parents,” Mr. Solanki said gently.

Anju could have laughed at this suggestion. Laughing at her terror. So this was how a person went crazy.

Instead she nodded. Her tongue had gone dead. At that moment, the hands of the grandfather clock met, causing the clock to chime “Ode to Joy” while a blue painted bird glided out of an open door in the clock’s face, its beak opening and closing, opening and closing, before gliding back into its secret chamber whose tiny doors made her want to plunge her hand inside, like a child, and strangle the sound.

LATER ANJU WOULD WONDER how she did it. How on the third day of her sentence, she shed no tears in bed. How she got up at two in the morning and quietly began to divide her things into what was needed and what was not. She kept her focus on the smaller decisions — two skirts or one pair of pants? The shampoo or the block of kiwi soap? Comb or brush? Bible or sketchbook?

Run home or run away?

She could imagine the coming months, if she went home. Ammachi would never show her face in church again. Melvin would avoid his Rajadhani Bar, perhaps preferring to drink alone. Linno would never look her sister in the eye. All of them had known of her betrayal long before Miss Schimpf’s discovery, and in their silent way, they had even condoned it. Now, after running through the muck, Anju had tracked her deception all over the house, across their names as well as her own.

Run home or run away. Shame would follow both routes, but only one could possibly lead to a hopeful end.

For the first time, she began to believe her father’s tales of successful immigration, people who got their green cards overnight. Someone won a lottery of sorts. Someone else found the right lawyer and in no time at all, for $2,500, Melvin said, “he took the I–L out of ‘illegal’!” Whereas once she had scorned these stories, they now attained a hopeful sheen such as can be seen only by the young or truly desperate, and she was both.

If anyone could work such wonders, it was Rajiv Tandon. Her application was already in process, and if she were to be sent back now, the $1,000 she had spent would be all for naught. Perhaps he could speed things along. In the meantime, she would find Bird, who could show her to a temporary hostel or maybe cousins with whom she could board, for a fee. It was liberating to ruminate over the questions and options, to imagine the road ahead splitting and twisting like sinuous banyan roots rather than the dismal singular route that led home. She was free! Her world was boundless, borderless. Life had not begun until now. So what if her plan had holes? She did not pay them heed. People could become slaves to excessive thought. Instead she recalled Anthony Achen’s sermon on the day she left Kumarakom, railing on about the Virgin Mary and her visitation by the angel Gabriel. Did she doubt? No. Did she say, “Can I have a minute to think?” No. Did she say, “I am the handmaiden of the Lord. Do with me what you will?” Absolutely yes. Because when God calls, we do not think. We trust. We go. We do .

FOR A RUNAWAY, Anju worried that she was moving a bit slowly. In fact, she was not moving at all, but hovering within the brass canopy of her brief but beautiful home, the Monarch. It was 6:30 a.m., the cold morning smudgy with mist. She watched steam ghosting out of a grate and a man in a coffee cart stacking jelly doughnuts like bricks. Nearby, two bicycles were chained to a parking sign, though the front wheel of one had been wrenched away in the night. Any minute now, the owner of the bicycle-turned-unicycle would appear and curse the city he called home.

She would miss the vanilla cake, spired and many-storied, with its sleek banisters curled like treble clefs and uniformed doormen, all kid gloves and courtesy. From this side of the glass, the man at the desk seemed less of a concierge and more like a sentry. But she had no need for these palatial entries and marbled floors, or the gym with its lofted televisions, or the indoor pool quavering with filaments of light, or the fountain and its constellations of copper coins, as if the residents of this building needed more luck than they already had.

Anju left a note on her pillow saying that she was spending the night at a friend’s house and would be back by tomorrow afternoon. She wondered if the Solankis would think her ill-behaved. She wondered if they would be surprised by the mention of a friend.

On her way to the subway station, she dropped an envelope addressed to the Solankis in a blue mailbox, containing the note she had penned the previous night. Luckily, no one was around to see her hustling into the elevator in her sleeping bag of a coat, each pocket packed firmly with Fruit Roll-Ups, bags of almonds, and Mrs. Solanki’s Slim-Fast bars, plus a duffel bag of her most valued possessions. She had chosen the sketchbook over the Bible, a choice that seemed blasphemous but she hoped God understood. The rest, she assumed, Mrs. Solanki would send back to Kumarakom.

As much as possible, Anju tried not to think of her family. She had struggled to write them a letter the night before, explaining her intentions, but failed to bring pen to page. Each thought of them nibbled at her courage. They would not understand the banyan tree of freedom she had imagined. Better to pretend, for the time being, that she had no family at all.

So for now, Anju focused on the matters at hand. The 7 train or the N train? Or avoid public transportation altogether, for fear of the police? The latter was not an option. Anju envisioned her face as a criminal sketch, her nose made regrettably larger than what it was, or perhaps the school would supply her class photograph: a robotic pose in which her fist was awkwardly propping up her chin.

The world seemed to spread so much farther than ever before, a cement veldt of strangers with collars up, hurrying away. Where Anju was going, no one would know her name. She would christen herself anew, seek a path around the muck. If it was possible anywhere, it was in this city, where the streets were already dense with sound — the squealing of buses and the grumble of trains underfoot, the flutter of fliers from a fortune teller’s hand, the sad rattle of change in a Styrofoam cup, all the harsh, accidental music of morning.

As casually as possible, Anju descended the subway steps.

Running away. Simple as that.

IT IS ANJU’S FIFTH DAY of employment at the Apsara Salon. In the spirit of welcome, Anju’s coworkers have begun to speak in English when she is present while she, in turn, has learned the cast of full-timers plus a few of their distinguishing traits.

In descending order of rank:

GHAFOOR … The ringleader. Looks 50, but probably 55. Formidable hairstyle. Cannot pass a mirror without glancing in it. The salon is all mirrors.

NANDI … née Nandini. 40. The best threader in the salon, she can weave subtle crests and arches from caterpillar brows. The word nandi means bull, a nickname she has earned from her heavy nasal breathing as she works on a face, the ends of the thread in her mouth, her brow furrowed in concentration.

LIPI … Ageless and expressionless. The best blow-dryer in the salon, she yanks the curl out of the unruliest heads of hair. She is slight but tough, a Nepali who landed on the Asian side of the genetic divide, and thus blessedly lacking in facial hair. Lipi’s brother works as a sushi chef in a grocery store. “In his kimono and hat,” Lipi says proudly, “no one suspects a thing. Even a Japani lady tried to talk to him.”

SURYA … A competent waxer, able to do everything though she refuses to excel at anything in particular. She is studying to be an engineer and plans to quit in a few weeks.