Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

Like all the fanciest receptions, this one takes place on the lawn of the Windsor Castle Hotel, beneath a sprawling lily white tent. Two great bronze bowls, filled with water and scattered with red rose petals, flank the entrance through which the newlyweds glide, like king and queen, to sit on an elevated platform. Kuku appears happy, though Linno can hardly tell what lies behind those black lenses. Since their last meeting, they have not seen each other.

After Alice serves the ceremonial tea to the new couple, Jincy’s nine-year-old niece lip-synchs a Bollywood-inspired dance number, complete with pouts and blown kisses, while her mother — an older, squatter Jincy — looks on from beside the stereo with frigid intensity. The audience members solemnly watch, as if they have mistaken the evening’s entertainment for a form of punishment, but Jincy joyfully claps along. After the nine-year-old strikes her final pose (hip thrown to the right, hands over heart), she bows and bows to the tepid applause, hoping for an encore that never comes.

N THE BATHTUB, Bird keeps a bucket and plastic cup whose purpose is a mystery to her roommate, though Gwen never mentions it, assuming that doing so might be a cultural impertinence. In a similar spirit, Gwen welcomes the new tenant without reservation. Bird later hears her speaking to her boyfriend over the phone. “God no, I’m not going to ask for a reduction in the rent…. Because she’s her niece, Brian…. It’s cultural, you know? The close familial bonds? I respect that.”

Initially, it was a bond of desperation. On the first morning that Bird left for work without Anju, she detected the faint anxiety in Anju’s eyes, her hand clamped over the house key. Anju clamored after her with questions: “Should I answer the door?” “What about the phone?” “But what if it’s you?” It was obvious that the girl had never been home alone.

“We have an answering machine,” Bird said. “If you hear me, pick up.”

“Oh. Of course.”

Bird was startled by the girl’s nervousness, an anxiety that was also endearing. “You are welcome to call me at work,” Bird told her, before leaving. “If you need anything.”

“No, no. I’m fine.”

Bird put her hand on the doorknob, then abruptly turned around. She wanted to say something but, reconsidering, she said good-bye and left.

Lately, Bird has begun to feel a simmering impulse to reveal to Anju the source of their connection. Sometimes she thinks that doing so might strengthen their bond, and other times the past seems heavy enough to crush whatever tenuous relation they may have formed. Telling now, it seems, would be premature. For the time being, Bird is content to simply prepare extra meals, to add another pillow to the bed, to ask Anju a question as if addressing the face she tried for so long to forget is the most natural thing in the world. As if time itself is a collapsible thing.

IN THE SEVENTIES, Bird’s father was a character actor in the B-movie industry, mostly Malayalam films but a few Tamil films as well. Time after time, he played to type — a lovable, gullible, sweet buffoon — all the things that her father, in life, was not. As a child, she was confused by these two fathers, the one she preferred, lofted on a movie screen, and the other she feared and avoided.

Much later, a lover would try to convince her that her coldness stemmed from her fraught relations with her father. She was nineteen at the time and thought that they would marry, having just succumbed to the singular act that, her lover had claimed, would bind them to each other in deeply spiritual, revelatory ways. But lying in a motel bed with her supposed future husband, Bird felt nauseated by it all, the linearity of life that seemed to lead in a direction that no longer held her interest, and she was sure that she could not live with a man who occasionally gifted her with his psychiatric diagnosis. “The problem is not my father,” she told him. “The problem is that I was expecting a full-length play and you barely made it through the first act.”

It was surprising, that sureness, that rage — where did it come from? She had thought herself like most women, muddling prettily through her late teens, but from that moment on, she was intoxicated with the possibilities of taking a solid, solitary step into the world.

So she auditioned for her father’s next film, against his wishes. “It’s not a fit job for a proper woman,” he said. “No one wants an actress for a wife.” Bird won the part; she played the confidante of the lead actress and though she had very few lines, she delivered them in a way that must have impressed the producers, as they expanded her role as filming went on, to her father’s dismay. When the film was released, it seemed from her fan mail that quite a few men wouldn’t have minded an actress for a wife, but at the peak of her popularity, her father kicked her out of the house. His disapproval had more to do with competition than propriety.

Soon after, she took a room at a women’s hostel in Madras and never spoke to her father again. Through a connection, she found work as a costumer’s assistant on a Tamil film, and by sleeping with the director, she won her next role as a backup dancer in a mobster film that required her to wear glittery plastic pants. The director was adamant that the love scene in his film should not surpass a heated embrace, so as not to alarm the Censor Board, but where his own morals and vices were concerned, he cared nothing for ratings. Bird had thought that treading this line between sex and money would sicken her, but the nights were nothing extraordinary. The weight of a man seemed the same every time, slightly pleasant, slightly crushing; they always seemed to carry that aura of sweat and smoke and need.

By the time she was twenty-four, she was fed up with the weight. One producer, full of love and rum, slapped her clean across the face when she demanded an end to things, and then collapsed and wept into her skirt. Holding her cheek with one hand, stroking his hair with the other, she decided that this was enough.

So when Ghafoor, an old cinema acquaintance, invited her to join his drama troupe, she readily agreed. In the Apsara Arts Club there were sixteen members in total — actors, stagehands, plus technicians for music, lighting, and sound, all financed by the deep and generous pocket of Ghafoor’s friend, Rani Chandrasekhar, a retired film actress who had long dreamed of being a patroness of the arts. It was Rani who selected the name Apsara Arts Club, after the bedazzling Hindu nymphs whom some said she resembled in her youth. She had withdrawn from public life years before, due to a disease that she blamed on a curse from her sister. She tried to issue a retaliatory curse, which flopped, so she resigned herself to an occasional insult. (“Always jealous, that kushumbi,” she often sighed.) Rani Chandrasekhar, who used to command the silence of thousands, could no longer command her own hands to stop trembling, the onset of a lifelong earthquake that would gradually consume her body.

Rani offered one of her sprawling homes in Kochi to serve as a base for the troupe. Those who lived nearby commuted from their homes, but Bird stayed in one of the bedrooms. Being one of only three women in the troupe, Bird was forced to put up with the faint, fluting snores of Anita and Binal, the two other actresses whom she privately termed the Woodwinds. There was a veranda, a spacious living room, and a dining room with a long table at which they all met for meetings and meals. After two months of rehearsal, the troupe dove into the season, two hundred shows, sometimes two or three in one night. They traveled by van, slept in hotels and houses, and awoke in a new village almost every morning. It was a rare relief to return to the comforts of the Kochi house.