Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

“Make it in color.” The tailor pats the paper. “On this. Then we will see.”

MEANWHILE, Melvin’s job search has become something of a passive hunt, as he spends more and more time in the company of a bottle of Kalyani beer and Berchmans, the bartender and owner of the Rajadhani Bar. Berchmans, named after the seventeenth-century saint, thinks himself a fairly god-fearing and compassionate man, which would have made him an excellent psychologist, if his father had allowed him to take his master’s degree in psychology. Instead, his father demanded that Berchmans take over the family tavern.

In all parts of his life, Berchmans exercises temperance: he does not smoke, barely drinks, exercises, and eats well. So he remains younger than his years, with a drum-tight belly and pectoral muscles that he can activate separately — left, right, left — beneath his shirt. At the risk of losing business, he tries to advise his patrons with priestly patience to forgo the next drink or add roughage to their diets or see the argument from the wife’s perspective. As well, he watches out for patrons like Melvin, on whom he could rack up quite a bill over time, if he wanted to.

“I found you another driver job,” Berchmans says.

Melvin straightens up.

“For Mercy Chandy’s family. She’s been looking for someone since their last man left.”

Melvin scowls at his beer. “Abraham Chandy’s wife?”

“Yes? So?”

“Don’t you know about …” Melvin gestures at the stool next to him, as if the stool will elucidate everything. “My wife. Gracie and him.”

“Edda , they broke it off! So what? That was twenty years ago! You think a rich man like Abraham Chandy, a man with a wife and two sons, you think he even thinks about that old business?”

“He might. Sometimes.”

“Did you know that he has put seven girls through nursing school on his own donations? Seven . Not even relations, simply poor girls whose parents went up to him at church. This is not the kind of man who holds on to petty feuds.” Berchmans pushes his sour-smelling towel across the counter. “It is you who can’t put the past in the past.”

IN THE EARLY EVENING, Melvin irons his second-best shirt and leaves for the Chandy house. His best shirt has a pearlescent sheen that Ammachi deemed too “disco.” Melvin has no idea which TV show gave her the word “disco,” but he agrees that this might be the impression he would make under intense lighting. He has a feeling that Abraham is the type to install so many bulbs and fixtures that one might mistake night for day.

Melvin walks slowly, taking the time to inhale the damp exhalations of the earth. After rain, the air always has a gentle, smoky taste, and it was this that he missed most while in Bombay, where the air was ripe with competing odors. At a street corner, he pauses by a cold drinks vendor slouched on a stool in front of his stall. Melvin asks for a cold bottle of Coke, to which the vendor spits over his shoulder, a sickle of crimson paan on the dirt. “No Coke,” he says.

“Pepsi?”

“No Pepsi.”

“Thumbs Up?”

“No Thumbs Up.”

The vendor explains that he, like all shopkeepers in the area, is partaking in the boycott of Pepsi and Coke products. “Anti-var protest,” the man says in clipped English, between chews. He points to a poster on the side of his stall that reads: Boycott superpower business like Pepsi and Coca-Cola! Protest military action in Iraq! Brought to you by the Anti-War Samithy’s General Council .

“For how long?” Melvin asks.

The vendor shrugs. “I’d sell it to you, but the Anti-Var Squad will come and bother me if I do. Not worth the trouble.” He scratches his chest and squints at the sky. “But all these things can’t go on forever.”

THE HOUSE IS a two-tiered stucco structure with a tiled roof the color of cinnamon and an upper-level veranda where a hammock swings languidly in the breeze. Standing before the house in his second-best shirt, Melvin pictures Gracie in that hammock, her slender arm hanging over the side, a glass of lime water in her hand.

The servant leads Melvin into the sitting room, where Abraham rises from a plush armchair, his hand extended. He is tall with hairy wrists and a chest like a slab of wood. His handshake has all the brevity and precision of a military salute.

“She is in the kitchen,” Abraham says. “My wife.”

“Ah.”

“Hm.”

They stand for a moment, lost without a woman to direct them.

“Sit!” Abraham almost cries out, both shocked at his own ill manners and glad to say something useful.

They sit. On the television is the ever-present Mammootty, the mustached megastar whose classic swagger Melvin had long ago tried and failed to emulate. Here, Mammootty is turning away from a man who possesses two traits quintessential to villains: a sleazy voice and a boulderlike paunch. The villain calls out: “Hey big shot, wait.” He scratches his cheek with a smile. “You can’t leave just yet—”

Mammootty turns and smacks the man across the face with a loud dshoom!

In shock, the man clutches his cheek. Mammootty says: “How about I leave now?”

Meanwhile, Abraham is talking about the satellite that he recently installed on the roof so he could capture channels from around the world. “We also get American channels, but all we want is our Mammootty. Isn’t it?”

Melvin nods, though he is more of a Mohanlal man, the huskier, equally mustached counterpart to Mammootty.

At that moment, thankfully, Mercy Chandy emerges from the kitchen with a plate of cutlets and a dollop of ketchup in a crystal bowl. Melvin rises. “Sit, sit,” she says, and glances at the TV. “This one again?” Sheepish, Abraham mutes the TV, leaving Mammootty to swagger, slow-motion, in silence.

Mrs. Chandy is one of those women who moves easily through any social circle, whose greetings are like an invisible hand on one’s shoulder. Melvin admires the nobility of her chin, something Greek and classical about her profile. As one with a rather prominent nose, Melvin envies those whose prominent noses somehow work in their favor.

The interview is conducted by Mrs. Chandy, though mostly she asks about his family’s health. No one mentions anything about the driving job, and Melvin is suddenly stricken by the thought that this is not an interview at all in the Chandys’ minds, but simply a house visit.

“About the job,” Melvin says carefully, “I used to drive for the Uthup family. If you need a reference letter …”

“Reference letter?” Mrs. Chandy tilts her head. “What for? This is not an interview.”

Melvin hesitates. “No?”

“Of course not. This meeting is to discuss a schedule. You had the job as soon as Berchmans suggested you to us.” Mrs. Chandy looks to her husband for reassurance.

“No, no, we don’t need an interview. We know you. And Gracie, of course.” Absently, Abraham gazes into his glass in which a lime rind is floating like a dead fish. He looks up with a sudden smile. “What more is there to know?”

Melvin clears his throat and thanks them. He feels as though he is courting two people who are both out of his league, a feeling with which he is not inexperienced.

CURRENT CUT.

It is announced from house to house as if the snap-sudden darkness and slowing of ceiling fans were not explanation enough. Small children are ordered to stay still. Fathers tell sons, “Find the torch, the torch,” and sons go blazing the flashlight around the house, attempting to rescue whomever is stuck in the bathroom, mid-bath, without a light to distinguish floor from toilet hole. Out of the darkness, mothers appear around the corner, bearing candle flames behind cupped palms. Candles and flashlights are kept within easy reach in every house because this evening, as with many evenings, the electricity workers are on strike, unsettled by their wages, powerful in their unions.