Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

They like this persona she plays, this expert little grouch with the thick accent and occasional joke on hand. The mannerisms give her the appearance that she has been doing this for years.

Day after day, Anju waxes the thickets of arms and legs, the overgrowth in between, smoothing and prettying her clients so that they walk with chins higher than when they first entered. At day’s end, she shrinks into her coat and slips into the flow of the sidewalk, hoping to disappear. Ridiculous to think that anyone from her old life would follow her here, not Fish, not Miss Schimpf, certainly not Mrs. Solanki. They seem to her like characters from a movie she watched long ago, many times over, the kind of movie wherein a strong wind rips the pages from a daily calendar so as to suggest the frantic passage of time. It seems to Anju that she has been living in Jackson Heights for much longer than three months, pulling the cord to reveal the storefront to the morning, eating dinner across from Bird every night. Have the days and hours gone fast or slow? She hardly knows, which seems a dangerous thing, this sense of time both jelling and jetting by.

And yet, there remains an underlying constant, a famished sort of feeling ever feeding on her insides, a feeling that could be quelled by calling home. But after the first call, guilt would be replaced by more guilt, longing replaced with despair. She convinces herself that in the end, her family will understand. The end will find them all renewed. So as time goes by, she grows used to the hunger, like a changeless climate, like an endless string of windy days.

T NIGHT, Anju always falls asleep first. Her position, which begins supine and straight, gradually rotates into a belly-flopped sprawl, while Bird withdraws to a sliver of space on the opposite side of the bed. She does not mind allowing for Anju’s sprawl, and in fact, Gracie had warned of it. Making room is the first act of motherhood, in the most literal sense, as when the body creates space within itself for someone else. Bird runs through all the possible permutations of happiness. Someday, Anju could take Gwen’s room or move into the apartment next door. She could cycle back and forth between New York and Kumarakom, according to the plan she once explained to Bird, and gradually, she might come to see Bird as a true aunt, or even a kind of mother.

These are slippery thoughts, difficult to hold for very long. Anju is hardly closer to a green card than when she first arrived on Bird’s doorstep, due to her utter unwillingness to ask Melvin for help. Bird wonders if she should find his address and ask him herself. That Anju continues to hold fast to her dream is admirable in one so young, but she is too young to understand that the greatest obstacle to any dream is, quite simply, time.

WHEN BIRD FIRST ARRIVED in New York, she found the days unbearable in their lengthy stillness. But being alone, she felt, was the necessary solution to the feelings she wanted to leave behind. She was unused to her band of merry, trash-talking cousins who pleasured in their disgust of American women, their vulgar attire, their mediocre meals. They perceived Bird as a kind of harmless oddity — quiet, mannered, a terrible cook, uninterested in marriage, and not as gorgeous as the rumors that preceded her. But so long as Bird kept herself available to babysit their growing warren of children, the cousins were happy to host her.

In this way, eight years went by without a word between Bird and Gracie until Bird’s cousin casually dropped some news at dinner one evening. “My friend Lally — you remember Lally from church? Yohannan’s father’s brother’s niece by marriage? Lally .” The cousin repeated the name as if the syllables would awaken some recognition in Bird, who finally responded with Ah yes, Lally , just to get on with the story. “Lally ran into your old friend Gracie in Bombay. Said she looks much thinner. Had two children and lost all her youth.” The cousin shook her head with no real pity.

Gracie’s name was a note that kept strumming in the hollow of Bird’s ear. Enough time had passed, she decided. She had grown beyond the contours of her former life, and there was no rupture that the intervening years of silence had not mended. So from Lally, via the cousin, Bird procured Gracie’s address in Bombay and sat down to write a letter.

And yet she found herself so full of words that her hand did not know which ones to transcribe. Had eight years really passed since last they spoke? To practice, she wrote a rough, disjointed assortment of things on the back of an old electric bill.

She wrote: You want to know how tall are the buildings? So tall, a man’s hat falls off just looking up at them .

She wrote: I heard you married and had two children. What are their names? Do they look like you?

She wrote: I work at the cash register in a drugstore. For lunch, my cousin sends me off with a plastic container of chapathi and chicken, but my coworkers don’t like the look or smell of it. So I have started rolling up my chicken in the chapathi and folding up the ends, like a packet. The Mexicans call this fajeetha. I don’t know what to do about the smell so I try to eat in the bathroom .

And: Are you happy?

She had wanted to compose something fluid and musical, a missive deserving of quill and ink. But her letter seemed to convey one overarching thought — that in their years apart, Gracie had become an adult and Bird had regressed into childhood. Try as she might to write a more mature version of the letter, the maturity felt bland and cold, so she sent the scattered, childish version.

A month later, she received a response nearly bursting with questions but scant of answers. Had Bird seen the Kennedy son with the lustrous hair and the beautiful mouth? Did she have a garden? Did snow feel like talcum powder, and if not, what was so special about it?

My husband’s name is Melvin Vallara , she wrote.

We live in Bombay. He works in a fancy hotel called the Oasis, where many sahibs stay. Linno, my older daughter, she is learning Hindi very fast. I wanted to name my younger one Anjali but Linno could pronounce only half the name. So she is Anju .

The guts of this city spill right into the sidewalk. I am sure that New York is the cleanest city in the world. My husband’s sister lives in U.S., in a place called Texas. How far is that from New York? Do you remember how I wanted to come with you?

Bird did not ask why Gracie hadn’t married the man named Abraham, to whom she had been betrothed so long ago. Instead she seized upon the words that leaped from the page: “Do you remember …”

Yes, she remembered. She also remembered how, when she first arrived in New York, she felt as though her mind had receded into a state of waking sleep. Sometimes her cousins would clap in front of her distracted gaze and ask, “Anyone there?” while searching her eyes in jest. No, she wanted to tell them. No one was there. She was still thousands of miles away, years apart, in a dressing room in Kottayam.

Why don’t you come? Bird wrote. Melvin could apply through his sister and bring the rest of you a bit later. It wouldn’t take more than a year, most likely …

FOR A TIME, letters flew between them, saddled with questions and answers. Here they were again, building a fantasy that this time bore the possibility of realization. Every other week, Bird folded and sealed her growing hope and dropped it in the blue mailbox, hovering there a moment before she walked away.

Dearest Gracie ,