Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

It had taken a day to bury Gracie, but for Bird it had taken no less than a decade. Now it seemed reasonable to wonder if life did not, in fact, hinge on death, and whether the door to Gracie’s life could fall open years later with an inquisitive creak.

Anju’s hands gripped the sofa cushion beneath her, her shoulders hunched, waiting for the fall of Bird’s judgment.

“Okay,” Bird said. “Stay with me.”

HE DAYS SPEED BY, with no one counting them but Ammachi. The week before, Mrs. Solanki called and only Ammachi was there to answer, resulting in little more than a confused duet of syllables and half sentences. Ammachi could tell that Mrs. Solanki was slightly relieved to find Linno not at home. These weekly calls were becoming a useless routine.

A month has passed and Ammachi hardly sees Linno anymore — how late that Alice keeps her! Can she not work from home as she used to? Ammachi wonders if it has something to do with their fancy new computers, Linno’s current object of infatuation. Then go marry the computer, Ammachi would like to say. It knows everything about her already — announcing her name in some strange public space where everyone from Bangalore to Brazil can see it. The Web , Linno calls it, a term that does not sound palatable in the slightest. “Everyone is connected this way,” Linno says, making it sound as though everyone around the globe is holding hands. Why would a stranger want to hold your hand? Ammachi wonders. Probably just to yank you in his direction.

But she does not begrudge Abraham for keeping her son all day. Best that Melvin be made to work, rather than leaving him idle to concoct foolish plans. Ammachi has always felt a great admiration for Abraham, his noble bearing having bestowed him with the quiet force and equanimity of his father. She hopes that he might talk some sense into her son.

With no one to read to her, Ammachi winces at the pictures in the newspaper, but the quality is so blurry that she must turn on the television, a joyless act, as the newscaster has no time to listen to her disquisitions on current events. Melvin is not home, having abandoned whatever secret plan he has been keeping from her. In his off hours, he visits the invitation shop and helps Linno until they both take the sundown bus home.

In the meantime, Ammachi has nothing to do but go rustling through Melvin’s room, halfheartedly cleaning. The mattress is buckling in the middle, despite bearing the weight of such a slight, single person. She strips it of its sheets, which smell mildly of fennel, and gathers the four corners into a bundle. Into this, she puts Melvin’s dirty undershirts and goes on to sniff the armpits of those hanging in the closet. She grasps the shirt he wore yesterday and notes the bulge in the front pocket — a beaten package of his beloved bidis kept ever close to his heart. Without a second thought, she removes one from the package and goes to the back of the house for a smoke.

Throughout her seventy-seven years, Ammachi has smoked a total of three times. The first time was when she was twenty-eight years old, during a walk with her husband to see the construction of the railroad track. It was the first to be built through Kerala, then only a raised vein of earth muscling its way toward the horizon. The tracks had not yet been laid. He guided her down the berm on foot, talking about the railroad as he smoked. He had only recently taken up smoking, and she smiled privately at the way he held his bidi like a pencil.

She had heard all kinds of things about the railroad. When she was a little girl, she had heard Gandhiji over the radio, deploring the railroad’s construction in the northern regions. Back then, some of the elders claimed that the British were laying the long, looping track across the country like a mechanical lasso, to drag the country back to England. Others ventured that the British were using poor Indian workers to dig up the ground, to steal the country overseas by the shovelful. Why wouldn’t the sahibs do so? They tried to steal everything else. No one believed those theories anymore, but there remained a residual distrust when watching the migrant Tamil workers, glistening and dark, heaving baskets of tiny stones on their shoulders, pouring them over the slender berm. She and her husband sat on a hill overlooking the workers, watching their version of the Golden Colon take shape.

“Want?” he said, offering her the bidi.

He was only joking, but she took the bidi between two fingers and, drawing a shallow breath, sent a billow of smoke into the space between them. They had been married eleven years, and whether he loved her or not, she did not know. Nor did she know if she loved him. But she surprised him sometimes and he silently liked it, she could tell.

Now, at seventy-seven, she holds the bidi in her husband’s pencil grip. She smiles faintly, but the pleasure lasts only so long. Being alone, there is no freedom in it.

AMMACHI IS APPALLED when Linno insists on missing church the following Sunday, but Linno cannot spare a single hour where work is involved. “Skipping Qurbana at a time like this?” Ammachi asks.

“Pray for me,” Linno says.

The very amount of labor and time that Linno is putting into the B-i plan confirms to her that she will get the visa. Work achieves a prayerlike consistency with every cut and fold and smear of paste, and like prayer, her work will be rewarded. It is the purest faith she has left.

OVER THE COURSE of two weeks, Linno has designed twelve new invitations for the handmade collection. She draws them in pencil, then in ink, and with Bhanu’s help, she scans the designs into the computer in order to add any digital graphics or fonts. Georgie transfers the finished invitations to the website, while Prince and Alice concoct descriptions based on the terminology used in an old American catalog, words like “flourish” and “lavish” and “gaily,” christening each invitation with titles like Blooming Butterfly and Zenchantment. Made with the lovely ivory tones of our Pearl handmade paper and chiffon ribbon, the Spring Riches invitation makes a lavish and gay impression .

A whole day is required to finish Judy Lambert’s invitations, a task taken up by Melvin and Prince, who despite his usual salesmanship has all the efficiency and humor of a machine when faced with a manual task. For every five cards that pass through Prince’s fingers, Melvin completes one. Melvin moves with care, pressing his fingertip to the knot of red silk ribbon, scraping away the excess threads of glue. At times like these, when the whole shop is humming with activity, Linno senses that her family’s fortune will turn.

But then there are the nights. Lying in bed, Linno recalls the figures she read in the used New York City travel guide that she bought from an outdoor book table, stacked with a skyline of dismal titles and outdated Time and National Geographic magazines. That she had spotted the city name amid the surrounding titles seemed a promising omen, until she read the introduction: “New York, the fifth-largest city in the world, boasts a population of eight million inhabitants, including all the five boroughs.” The sentence stopped her in the middle of the crowded sidewalk, to the reproach of a bicyclist swerving around her.

At night, Linno stays up thinking. Even if she gets to New York, where will she begin? How can she know her sister’s mind? It is a maddening circle of questions sometimes leading Linno to the conclusion that she hates her sister, though the hate does not contradict the love. Love and hate, hope and fear, all of these mingle in the same quarters of her heart.