Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

Y THE TIME LINNO REACHES NINETEEN, Melvin has collected too many of her drawings to fit into the cigarillo box, which seems a shabby place to put them anyway. So with an absolute faith in the capabilities of his hands intrinsic to many a man his age, he decides to make her a sketchbook.

This is during a lull in his lorry job, after he has already completed other manlier tasks in order to distract from the most vital of these — bringing home a paycheck. He has patched up the hole in the outhouse wall. He has pulled a whole new batch of ola fronds onto the roof. And now, after running out of tasks: the sketchbook.

THRESIA PAINT HOUSE is owned by Kochu Thresia, a compact bundle of a woman who has a habit of cracking her knuckles whenever Melvin speaks, smiling all the while, as if his very presence is a question she yearns to answer. Though she has always seemed sweet on Melvin, he hardly thinks of women anymore, having assumed that the libido-centered lobe of his brain has iced over, gone dead, except for those moments when a certain lady reporter’s sweltering alto comes over the BBC radio. He is soothed by the thought that there may yet be some life beneath the ice, but Kochu Thresia would not be able to restore it. She has so many moles on her face that he has a hard time looking at her without trying to mentally connect them.

As smitten as she is, Kochu Thresia readily agrees to teach him how to make a book. He buys twine, reams of drawing paper, and two thick pieces of cardboard. She shows him how to line up the holes along the spine, how to fold the pages into valleys. She gives him a leftover can of paint, a regal red, with which to paint the covers. Happily bemoaning the ineffectuality of men, she takes over the task and stitches the pages together herself.

After dinner the next day, Melvin presents the book to Linno. He has never made anything for anyone, as far as he can remember, at least not since he was drawing pictures for his mother at age six. The whole ceremony of it all suddenly seems childish. A simple bracelet or necklace would have been more appropriate, black beads on a gold chain.

Linno lifts the book into her lap and stares at the cover. She thanks him quietly, her fingers gliding over the blank pages as if she can see sketches yet to come. Ammachi asks how he crafted such a sturdy, handsome thing, and Melvin admits a tiny bit of guidance, though he prefers not to specify from whom.

“Look what he made,” Linno says, offering Anju the book. “Kando?”

Anju reaches out and strokes the cover, then rubs her fingers against each other. With a vague smile, she says it is nice.

AROUND THIS TIME, Melvin receives a used television from Mr. Uthup, who has returned to sell his property. “For your faithful service,” Mr. Uthup declares, waving to the small, surprisingly heavy television behind him. Melvin hefts it onto a borrowed wheelbarrow which he pulls all the way home, picking up a pain in his shoulder along the way. The family gathers in the sitting room, patting the thing, dusting it off, fiddling with its antennae, ogling its backside, waiting for something besides snow to show up on the screen. Melvin’s cousin Joby, who works for the cable company, gives him a discount on the monthly package, whose installation introduces the family to a selection of semi-clear, colorful channels. Immediately Ammachi befriends the television, enjoying its company to a greater degree than she did the radio’s. Mostly she watches the news.

But Melvin grows to dislike the very gift he brought home. He does not enjoy the fact that the news is now ever present in his sitting room, a guest that brings unfamiliar faces to dinner (one of whom, the BBC lady reporter, has turned out to be a high-pitched man). Melvin tries to watch as little as possible until an evening in September, when he cannot bring himself to turn the television off.

Family and neighbors gather in the sitting room to watch a plane stabbing an American building through its middle. Another clip shows the building fall while its sister building remains standing, and then another clip in which the sister, too, gives out in a swarm of dust. Over and over, the buildings are folding. Melvin remembers watching the Windsor Castle Hotel rising up in Kottayam over the course of a year, but to watch an even taller building fall in a matter of seconds is like watching rain in reverse, flying back up into the clouds.

Violence seems a global contagion. Later that year, Melvin finds himself sleepless in front of the television again, as India and Pakistan toe the Kashmiri Line of Control. Political pundits foresee nuclear fates. India points a finger at Pakistan. America warns against pointing fingers; the following year, it points its own at Iraq. The television shrinks the world and drops it in Melvin’s lap, a Pandora’s box of terrors that seems to show how these days every country is stepping up to some line or another, lines that have grown filament thin and are easily crossed, lines that lead nowhere but form a web that make it impossibly unclear who is on whose side anymore.

T TWENTY-ONE, Linno goes in search of a job at the Princess Tailor Shoppe, something small to pad the family income. She has been coming to this tailor for years, a stout, laugh-less woman who grows incensed if a customer’s opinion conflicts with her own. “You want to be a seamstress?” the tailor asks Linno, eyebrows raised behind her spectacles, implying what the other seamstresses think. They are Linno’s age, perhaps younger, one waifish and one chubby, both with oiled braids and chalky hands. The waif darts looks from behind her Usha sewing machine, a blue sari blouse passing beneath the needle. The chubby seamstress is sitting down to her lunch, a steel tiffin of rice with a pocket of vegetable curry. The whole shop is a room no larger than the sitting room back home, with a back doorway that opens onto a dusty patch of yard beneath the bare blue sky.

“I came to bring you more business,” Linno says. “I came to paint you a window.”

The tailor glances at Linno’s knotted wrist. “Paint what?”

Prepared for this reaction, Linno pulls her sketchbook from her satchel and opens to what she has designed in pencil. A woman stands smiling demurely in a sari, its fabric like liquid silk over her hips, the pallu billowing behind her and tapering into the needle of a sewing machine. Behind the machine is a plumpish woman in spectacles, smiling with motherly satisfaction at the sari-clad woman, her muse.

The chubby seamstress hovers at the tailor’s elbow, cooing over the picture with pickled breath. “This looks just like you, Chachy!”

The tailor makes a noise of grudging agreement and points at the sketch of the woman in a sari. “But my hips should be a bit wider than this.” The chubby seamstress begins to protest but, reconsidering, keeps quiet.

By this time, the waif has come to peer over the tailor’s shoulder as well. “Make the sari red,” she suggests.

The tailor waves the suggestion away. “Better to be subtle. Maybe rose … or peach color,” she decides. “You know what peach color is?”

So she is hired! Elated, Linno asks for a measuring tape with which to measure the window, unless—

“Wait, wait,” the tailor says. “Just because a woman can stitch doesn’t mean she knows how to work a sewing machine.”

The tailor bends behind a counter, on top of which are binders full of possible dress designs and collar cuts, and surfaces with a large roll of white parcel paper. She unravels a lengthy piece which she slices with a swipe of her scissors.