Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

“It’s nothing. But don’t say anything to your father. He will feel the need to pay me back.”

At five o’clock the next morning, Bird accompanies Anju to the Apsara Salon, where they use Ghafoor’s computer before his arrival. It is a clandestine operation that requires noting the mouse’s position on the mousepad before and after use. “He doesn’t allow anyone to touch his precious machine,” Bird says. “As if we all have hooves instead of hands.”

Compared to the handheld gizmos people use on the subway, Ghafoor’s computer is a fat, gray hulk, leading Anju to make the correlation that the fatter the machine, the more primitive. But as promised, Anju treats the hulk with all the care and fear of one who has never owned a computer herself. In school, she excelled in computer classes and could type faster than all her peers, but she was never good at understanding the inner logic of the computer itself. If a program threw a fit, she never knew how to pacify it and usually ended up pressing her palms to the warm monitor, frantic, like the mother of a feverish child, and finally, despairingly, shutting the whole thing down.

Bird has brought a piece of paper with the website of an online high school course that came recommended by a friend. Though intangible, the institution sounds respectable enough: James Madison High School Online. From that day on, Anju spends the morning on Ghafoor’s computer, scribbling notes that she can study later at home. No matter how early the hour, Bird sits nearby, paging through a newspaper and clipping coupons, most of which will live long past their expiration dates in her wallet.

Not once does Bird try to hurry Anju along. Bird’s patience is limitless, and she mothers Anju with a care usually reserved for family, perhaps to fill some void of her own. Anju wants to know how Bird came to be so alone, but asking might be an insult. She simply assumes that Bird’s story is the usual tragedy, a woman who missed marriage as one might miss a good song on the radio, by changing the station too many times in search of a better tune.

At first, Anju feels quite pleased with this analogy, as if she just made an incisive comment in class. But most of the debate and discovery goes on in her head, where there is no Miss Schimpf or Mrs. Loignon to nod as if the world revolves around her words, no circle of minor philosophers in which every answer holds the truth. There is only Correct and Incorrect and Final Score.

THROUGHOUT FEBRUARY, Anju lives mostly between two destinations — Bird’s apartment and the salon. One day, while walking to work, Anju bumps into Linno, causing Linno to spill her armload of books. So struck by the impossibility of it all, Anju does not kneel to help Linno gather her books, but simply stands there, staring down at Linno, who is not Linno at all. It was the braid that deceived her. Like Linno’s, this woman’s braid is loosely woven.

Angered by Anju’s refusal to help, the Not-Linno rises with her books and says, “Move.”

The woman’s face is petite and pretty and repulsively nothing like Linno’s. Nevertheless, Anju watches her walk away and disappear into the grocery store.

In this same way, Anju happens upon Melvin from time to time, strolling along with a plastic bag swinging from his hand, or rustling through a box of oranges in front of the grocery store. She never spots Ammachi, whose look and voice are too singular to mistake. Anju learns not to approach these faux Melvins and Linnos, knows to wait and watch as their faces turn into those of strangers. Even if given the choice, she would not wish to see them in person, not yet. But still it is a painful thing what guilt and longing will do, over and over again, to the mind.

BY THE END OF THE MONTH, Anju receives a letter from the headmaster of James Madison High School Online, congratulating her for passing her high school exams “with flying colors!” She took them the week before and found the questions disturbingly easy, so easy that she wondered if she were mistaking their underlying complexity. She missed only a single question about a dangling participle, which she would have contested were there a warm-blooded teacher with whom to argue.

Bird insists on photocopying the letter and sending it to Anju’s father. Obediently, Anju accepts the photocopy and later slides it into the bottom of her duffel bag.

To celebrate, Bird suggests that they go to a movie. At first, Anju protests against the expense, as every envelope of cash she receives from Ghafoor goes directly into a Folgers canister in the corner of Bird’s closet. “We could rent a video,” Anju says.

But Bird insists on going to the movie theater. “My treat.”

At the kitchen table, Anju scans the Movies section of the newspaper when Bird says abruptly: “I used to be an actor.”

Anju stares at her. “In films?”

“Mostly Tamil films.”

“Which ones?”

“Durga … Rajaraja Cholan … Idhaya Veenai . Your father would know them. But no need to tell him,” she adds with a short laugh. “They make me sound old.”

Anju nods, saying nothing, which is always the case when Bird mentions the unwritten letters.

“Those movies were long before your time anyway.” Bird goes to the sink and refolds a dishtowel. “Back then, as soon as a girl married, her husband would start making demands. This role, not that role. I didn’t want that.” A moment passes in silence before she adds, “In case you were wondering why I am alone.”

“I never wondered.”

“But I am not alone, allay?” Bird turns to Anju with a smile that makes Anju wonder what she did to deserve it. “Now read aloud the movie titles.”

On Bird’s recommendation, they go to a Charlie Chaplin film called Modern Times that is showing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Throughout the entire bus ride, Anju keeps her arms folded tight over her chest, her gaze averted from strangers. Since her arrival in Jackson Heights, this is her first time taking public transportation. In her attempt to seem inconspicuous, she catches her reflection in the window and finds that she looks thoroughly irritated with the world.

But when the lights darken in the theater, she forgets everything. Who is this small man in his shrunken coat and clownish shoes ambling from accident to catastrophe, none too great to defeat him? At the outset of the film, he takes a job at a factory that eventually drives him to a nervous breakdown. When Chaplin inadvertently gets dragged into the guts of a machine, his body slithering up and around the giant cogs and spools, she almost cries with so much laughter. And not far from her laughter is her pity for this man, running after a world that advances without him. Once in a while, she and Mrs. Solanki used to watch comedic movies in the home theater, but Anju never knew why and when to laugh. Sometimes she understood the jokes, but they were too dry and sharp, too sarcastic for her taste.

Bird is watching but not absorbing the film, having seen it twice before. She does not need Chaplin to make her happy. Nothing could make her happier than when she entered this theater or when she woke up this morning and the morning before with Anju by her side.

She senses that Anju is growing close to her, if not with a daughterly intimacy then with a sisterly one, as Anju has begun to call her Chachy. In that one word, which no one has called her in so long, Bird perceives the depth of her past loneliness, the hollow in her being, which has become apparent only now that Anju is here to fill it.

WHEN GRACIE WAS ALIVE, she inspired the same feelings in Bird, that need so long in hibernation, gathering its strength, its grip. Bird woke with it buzzing around her insides like a fly that would not escape a room, even after one opened all the windows and doors, as if it preferred frenzy over freedom. That feeling, that need, it frightened her. She began to wonder if she should distance herself from it.