Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

POWDER … Surya’s younger sister, age 27 (24 according to her online dating profiles), with bovine hips and unhealthily pale skin. She ascribes her pallor to her mother’s complexion, though by no small coincidence, she specializes in facials and bleaching regimens.

Sometimes, when Nandi is threading a client, Anju strategically sweeps near her station, in order to study her technique. At first, Nandi’s methods are swift but simple to follow — unraveling the thread, biting off the end, winding it around her fingers into some sort of web with one end still in her mouth. Her client lies back on the seat. “Hold,” Nandi commands through clenched teeth, and the client’s fingers pull the skin taut on each side of the eyebrow. Her regular clients always know where to hold.

But as soon as Nandi bends over her client, the process dissolves into miracle. Impossible to deconstruct how an eyebrow can be thinned by merely the crossing of threads, plucking hair by hair. The only noise is the zipping of threads and, of course, Nandi’s heavy nasal breathing, periodically interrupted by her command to hold somewhere else. At the end, she mows the space between the eyebrows, scrutinizes her work, then gives the hand mirror to her client, who always responds with a satisfied nod. Nandi pats the pinkening skin with a soothing aloe gel and talcum powder, and sends the client back into the world with eyebrows that the client’s husband or boyfriend will never notice. “You don’t want people to notice,” Nandi always says. “That is the key to good eyebrow.”

But the key to threading remains beyond Anju’s reach. She asks Bird, but Bird has no idea of the technique. Her eyebrows, fat and feathery, betray as much.

Lately Anju has been sweeping and wiping what is already clean, trying to seem more useful than she is. If she does not find a way to make herself useful, perhaps by becoming a threader, Ghafoor might suggest that she find a dirtier floor to sweep and wipe. She spots Bird at the cash register, counting out bills, chatting with the ladies in the waiting room with all the casual comfort of one who owns this place. Maybe Anju will not be fired, not with Bird on her side.

For Bird to care so unsparingly for a stranger, it is almost an act of sainthood. Over the past two weeks that she has lived with Bird, Anju has come to feel both guilt and gratitude for the only friend she has left in this city. Gratitude that Bird has taken her in, and guilt that Anju persuaded her to do so only by spinning another lie.

UPON RUNNING AWAY from the Monarch, Anju took the 7 train to Jackson Heights. When she emerged from the subway, the Technicolor intensity of certain signs offered at least a visual relief. She walked the route that she knew by heart, past landmarks that she recalled from her first trip, signs declaring BOLLYMUSIC WORLD and BANANA LEAF CAFé, past the boxes of fruits and vegetables kept behind a plastic drape to protect them from the chill. Yesterday it had seemed nearly impossible to venture out in the world with one’s entire life crammed into a single bag, but at least now Anju was moving with purpose. There was promise in the air.

And yet she could not remember the exact location of Mr. Tandon’s office. She stood in the lobby of the building that she had thought was his, surveying the list of lawyers that hung on the wall, each name next to a room number. Rajiv Tandon was not listed. A uniformed black man sat behind a podium, signing in each visitor with a deliberate hand, no matter how they huffed or glanced at their watches.

She hurried in and out of every building on that block and the next, dizzy with the tiny white letters she read on each wall, none of them meeting to form Mr. Tandon’s name. When finally she returned to the first building, she was sweating within the plump confines of her coat.

Noticing her distress, the guard asked, “Who you looking for?”

“Rajiv Tandon,” she said, and was going to give more information about Mr. Tandon’s height, his coloring, his nationality, but upon hearing the name, the guard raised his eyebrows. Not in a way that boded well.

“That guy? What do you want with him?”

It occurred to her that men of good standing were not referred to as “that guy.” She felt a stirring in the pit of her stomach. “I have come about business.”

The guard scratched the bristle of his unshaved cheek. “Well, the only business he’ll be doing is from the corner of a jail cell.”

SOMEHOW SHE FOUND her way out into the cold. Her legs carried her down one block and then another, but her mind lagged behind, taking note of the unlit Christmas lights creeping vinelike around the trunks of skinny trees, the signs bearing greetings of HAPPY DIWALI and EID MUBARAK. It was a wonder that she finally noticed a pay phone.

She found the scrap of paper in her purse, worth more than the twenty-dollar bill she had stuffed next to it. Following the directions on the pay phone, she inserted a quarter, dialed the numbers, and waited. When Bird answered the phone, a sudden clot of tears rose at the back of Anju’s throat, but she did not have enough quarters to cry on paid time. She said, “This is Anju.”

“Anju?” There was a pause. “Where are you? Where have you been? I have been calling and calling….”

Anju looked around for the nearest street sign. “Kalpana Chawla Way.”

“Here? You are here?”

Anju nodded into the phone. “Yes.”

“Wait inside the grocery store, by the front. I am coming.”

Anju listened to the shrill purr of the dial tone and then the kindly voice of a woman telling her what to do if she would like to make a call. She felt a sharp hatred for the voice and the phone through which it came, but as much as she would have liked to slam the phone on its hook, she would not. “This is not your house,” Linno once scolded her when she rested her foot on Rappai’s plastic coffee table. The reprimand returned to her now. This was not her phone to slam. This country was not her house.

ON BIRD’S COFFEE TABLE was a blue glass vase that Anju remembered from her first visit. It held a bunch of dried flowers, mummified in red and orange dyes. They smelled of eucalyptus, almost pleasant, slightly medicinal. For now, this was all she could digest of the room — a flower, a hue, a smell.

Bird placed a bowl of hot white mush before her and called it Cream of Wheat. When Anju did not move, Bird pushed it closer. “You have to eat something.”

In a small voice, Anju asked if Mr. Tandon had killed someone.

“Him? No!”

“Then what happened?”

Perhaps it was unwise to receive bad news on an empty stomach, but Anju was quite certain that any Cream of Wheat she ingested would come right back up in the same form.

“Please,” Anju said with such frailty that Bird sighed in concession.

TWO WEEKS BEFORE, Bird had gone to work, punctual as always, to find Mr. Tandon frantically making phone calls in his office. She figured that he was working on a very stressful case, though she never guessed it was his own.

The next day and the day after, she came to an empty office and tried to field all the calls of clients who had heard rumors that Mr. Tandon had been arrested and charged with both fraud and aiding illegal aliens. Bird tried her best to assuage them, but it was impossible to assuage those who had handed over so much money, their thousands of dollars dissolving before their eyes. A Bangladeshi cleaning woman had counted out her entire life savings of $8,000 on Bird’s desk, rustling each bill between two fingers with all the wistfulness of a little girl pulling petals from a flower. After news broke of Tandon’s disaster, the lady shrieked over the phone at Bird, calling her Mr. Tandon’s sister-fucking whore. Bird did not bite back. Where else could these people air their grievances? They were illegals, most of them. They had no voice.