Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

One night, after arriving at their host’s home in Kollam, Bird sat on the front steps, massaging her feet, hoping that Gracie would fall asleep before Bird went to bed. But Gracie soon found her and took a seat on the step below. She raised Bird’s heel into her lap, even though Bird warned that her nightgown would get dirty. Gracie replied: “It doesn’t matter, Chachy.”

The steady rhythms of her fingers sought out the knots in Bird’s feet, but with every knead and roll, Bird found her muscles coiling a bit tighter than before. She tried to relax by gazing at the moon; it was radiant but flawed, mottled like a bead whose paint had flaked away. She wondered if a pulse could be felt in the feet.

“I received a letter from my mother today,” Gracie said. “She could not believe I’m playing a servant. She said, ‘Do they know who you are?’”

Gracie pushed her thumb into a hollow in Bird’s sole, causing Bird to wince and smile at the same time. “Mothers want the best for their daughters.”

It was an easy thing to say, and Bird was slightly relieved to see that Gracie was not listening but staring off into the sky, her hands in gentle movement. “Maybe she wishes she were me. She could have been an actress or a singer, you know, she has a beautiful voice. I remember once, when I was small, she spread newspaper on the kitchen floor and we sat down to shell a bowl of beans. We worked, and she sang, and my father came in and pretended to read his newspaper at the table, but his eyes never moved from the same spot.” Gracie’s fingers went still; she held Bird’s feet. “We had so few times like that.”

Bird sat up and put her feet on the ground. “Thank you,” she said.

Gracie hugged her knees. Bird stared at Gracie’s fingernail polish, chipped into the shapes of tiny red countries with ragged borders. On Gracie, even the chipped polish was charming. Bird thought of her own mother, who was beautiful in a rational way, her features of a perfect symmetry to which everyone had been drawn. But Gracie possessed some kind of strange, specific beauty that only Bird could see, like a woman witness to an apparition.

That they had grown close in only a matter of weeks was not altogether surprising to Bird. She knew well how the cycling days and nights of troupe life could accelerate friendships and seal lifelong bonds. Gracie occupied her thoughts as soon as Bird woke and just before she drifted off to sleep. But she did not dare try and remember her dreams or imagine worlds where what she wanted was possible.

After a silence, Gracie asked what Bird would do when the season was over.

“I have a brother in California, some cousins in New York,” Bird said. “I am going to ask my brother to sponsor me for a visa.”

Gracie turned to face her. “You’re going to California? When?”

“Most likely New York. I don’t know. Soon as I can, I suppose.” It was true, what Bird’s cousins had said to her last time they spoke: one had to leave or be left behind. And perhaps everyone in the troupe could have used that advice. Their audiences were growing smaller as television serials attracted whole populations of viewers with the single click of a remote. At first, Bird assumed that people preferred the convenience of staying at home to watch a show, but it seemed that people also liked returning to the same hysterical characters every week, speaking of those characters as though they lived just down the street. And in any case, it would be only a matter of time before Bird herself was replaced by some young, sunny ingenue who had studied at a famed theater school, under gurus who had penned books and toured continents. No, Bird would abandon the theater before it gently, politely abandoned her.

Gracie looked perplexed by the decision, and in a small way, Bird was pleased that she had made some impact. “I always wanted to go,” Gracie said. “Not to the States. To New York.”

“Why only New York?”

“There are all kinds of people in New York. You can be whomever you want in that city, with no one to bother you. You can disappear.” Gracie plucked at the end of her braid. “Maybe, someday, I will end up there too. People move. People find each other. We could be neighbors.”

“It’s a big city.”

“But very organized. Everyone has a place in the phone book, A to Z. I’ll find you.”

And as the night went on, what began as a joke turned into a world with a logic of its own. They would live in the same apartment. They would share a garden of okra, bitter melon, and tomato, but on Bird’s request, absolutely no eggplant, and nothing that was grown would belong to just one or the other, but both. When Bird said she wasn’t sure if she wanted to have children — a fact she had admitted to no one until then — Gracie did not hesitate in saying, “You can call mine your own.”

“So by this time next year,” Bird said, “you’ll be married.”

Gracie did not hide her resignation. “Probably.”

Bird found herself trying to effect a kind of playfulness, a girlish curiosity about marriage that had never thus inspired her. “Is there someone …?”

“My father doesn’t tell me these things.” They were quiet for a moment, and Gracie looked up at the sky in some desperate, unblinking search for other worlds, other lives unlike her own. With her head lowered, her hands in her lap, she drew herself into a compact shape. The bone at the base of her neck protruded ever so slightly, smooth as a stone in a riverbed, so smooth it called to be touched.

Gracie said, “I wonder what kind of movies you will make over there.”

And so they continued talking and pretending a world that would never exist. Years later, Bird would wonder if Gracie had ever truly believed in such a life, and if she understood what building this fantasy could do to at least one of its listeners. But Bird was not without fault. She could have ended the night long before the first streaks of pink appeared on the horizon, before they wandered down the path toward a mirage of their own making. But part of the torment was wanting the torment in all its shimmering, vexing forms.

MONTH INTO THE NEW GIRL’S EMPLOYMENT at Apsara Salon, Ghafoor must admit to himself that he made a mistake. Already there are too many beauticians, five full-timers plus four part-time girls coming in and out. He hired Anju as a favor to Bird, but he is no idiot. Bird and Anju are too kind to each other to be related. Ghafoor has considered letting the girl go, but he senses that she might be in some kind of grave trouble. Pregnant? he wonders, stealing glances at her belly. An employee wearing her disgrace in such a frontal manner simply will not do, but by the second month, when he has determined that she is without child, he tries to come up with some use for her. For years, he has been a sturdy agnostic, but he fears the karmic retribution of pushing a good girl out into the world. She may be a bad apple, but better leave that judgment to higher powers.

IT IS LATE FEBRUARY. The air has turned brittle, the wind unforgiving. Seventy-fourth Street is still asleep, the accordion doors of each store shut like so many eyelids. With rattles and clangs, up goes the door of the hardware store, then a music store, a bakery, a sari shop. Usually Bird is the one to open the salon, but Anju volunteers to arrive early on the days of her shifts, to undo the padlock and flip the switches. Glad to have an extra hour of sleep, Bird lends her the shop keys.

Inside, Anju hangs her coat on one of several empty pegs; the others have yet to trickle in. She sits on the stool and stares at the box of red flowers pressed against the window, meant to convince passersby that within these walls is a perpetual spring of tattered petals and plastic stems.