Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

I moved yesterday, out of my cousins’ apartment. There is only so much room where children are involved, so my new roommate is well past that age. Her name is Mrs. Spandorfer and she wears her hair in a white fluff atop her head. Mrs. Spandorfer is Jewish and tells me she remembers when this neighborhood was full of Jewish, like her, and people from Ireland and Italy. She said: We took the gays when nobody else would! She was talking about theater people in the 1920s and 1930s, who took the train from here to a place called Times Square. She said that this neighborhood will never stand still .

The good news is this — there is a space in the apartment across the hall opening up. A Gujarati man lives there with his wife, and they will be looking for a new roommate. Should I tell them to keep the space open for Melvin? They are good people, but they don’t allow meat in the fridge .

Chachy, it will take some time to convince Melvin. His own sister is in U.S., but he thinks that his life is tied to his parents, who are still in Kumarakom. I let my parents go a long time ago. Sometimes I think life is easier with hateful parents. They make it easy to tell your happiness from theirs. You and I share the same mind, but Melvin still thinks like everyone else here. Slowly. Patience, patience, he says, but I feel as if I have been waiting my whole life .

Gracie, you will not believe it, but I saw Ghafoor in the window of a bakery, eating a pastry and reading the paper, as if he has lived here forever. Remember him? He said Rani Chandrasekhar died, and all the actors and technicians went looking for jobs in film — better money there. He says that he will go back home as soon as he raises enough money to put up another production. He is very sure of himself. Still I feel sorry for him. He has taken a job as the assistant manager of a grocery store. When you come, we can visit him .

Chachy, with all these adventures who will take care of the children? Anju is eating everything. Yesterday I forced her mouth open and found a cockroach on her tongue. She wants and wants. I think she takes after me .

After a month, the letters from Gracie suddenly dried up, a dearth that Bird initially blamed on the post office. Still, her hopes continued to snow one upon the next. She thought how lovely it would be to take Gracie to the Cloisters, far north on the island, and listen to that particular strain of cathedral quiet. They would walk the stone paths around the herb gardens and mispronounce the Latin names on the tiny labels. Theirs was a sisterhood that could overcome what nearly undid them years ago, so profound, so pure was their friendship. Bird had transgressed, she understood it now. She had mistaken one feeling for another, but she would not need to apologize, not to her dearest friend who already knew her words before she spoke them. They would return to that friendship like swans returned to water with the ancient knowledge of how to swim embedded in their limbs.

So for the time being, she tried to grow accustomed to Mrs. Spandorfer’s apartment. Bird’s was a strange and stuffy room that Mrs. Spandorfer had preserved for untold decades under the title “Morrie and Samuel’s room.” The walls were blue and decorated with sailboats and potbellied bears in sailor hats. There were two narrow beds where Morrie and Samuel must have slept, but Mrs. Spandorfer refused to shift the beds from their position, flanking the portrait that hung on the wall. The boys’ cheeks and chubby knees were tinted pink in the way of old pictures, one boy smiling, the other serious and self-contained. Bird did not ask Mrs. Spandorfer why her sons never visited, a filial negligence she simply assigned to the American way, but the Gujarati woman across the hall informed her that the boys, twins, had died at seven years old, in a car accident. “One died, then other followed,” the woman said with admiration. “They left this world just as they came into it. Together.”

A MONTH AFTER Bird sent her last letter to Gracie, there came a message that conveyed how completely Bird had misinterpreted the silence. The post office had been slow to forward the Malayala Manorama to Bird’s new address, and when finally she sat down to thumb through the first of several old issues, she found Gracie’s message in the obituary section.

KUMARAKOM: Gracie Vallara (27), wife of Melvin Vallara of Kumarakom, passed away on August 3, 1989. Mourned by her husband, her parents, Thomachen and Claramma Kuruvilla, and her daughters, Linno (7) and Anju (3).

Bird stood in the center of her bedroom with the newspaper in her hands. The nerves in her fingertips seemed to go numb. She read the obituary countless times before she fell to her knees, before the words became as distant as the beautiful roar of the sea in a conch shell.

N JACKSON HEIGHTS, there is no smell so pleasant as that of a sari store, for reasons that Anju cannot quantify. Packed into boxes and shipped across the sea, the saris are flung onto hangers and mannequins with the aging odor of their origins still clinging to the thread. She slides her hand across hanger after hanger of slick satins, chiffons, and silks with no interest in taking anything home. It is a minor fetish, maybe a bit odd, but she draws some faint, wordless pleasure from a faceful of custard-colored georgette when no one is looking.

She has come to value these rare hours alone, but Bird prefers to spend every last moment with Anju. It was a strange and subtle shift in Bird’s behavior, the slightest need in her now that makes Anju feel alternately irritable and guilty. On Friday, Ghafoor tells Bird to stay late and straighten out the books, leading Bird to turn her plaintive gaze on Anju. “You don’t have to wait for me,” she says. “Unless you want to.”

“I thought I would go to the sari store,” Anju says. “Just to look.”

“You want a sari?”

“No. Just want to see the new styles.”

Bird hesitates, then consents. “Be home in an hour, okay? Don’t wander too much.”

Anju waves, already out the door and with every intention of wandering. She walks down the street toward the lofted 7 train as it rattles across the tracks, drowning the argument of two men gesturing wildly outside Rajan Exchange. She stands before the window of an electronics store where a television is tuned to her favorite news commentator, a marshmallowy white man with fists that occasionally pummel the desk. He begins his show looking puffy and pale, until he works himself up into a merry rage over the various wars his country is facing, including the War on Terror, the War on Obesity, the War on Illegal Immigration. She tried to watch him yesterday evening, but it was difficult to do so with Bird beside her, groaning and heckling.

ANJU CONTINUES DOWN Seventy-fourth Street on her way to the sari shop. Later she will wonder how her life might have been different had she not decided to toe a stubborn ball of ice down the sidewalk, opposite from home, had her name never been bellowed from a distance:

“HEY! MELVIN! ANJU!”

In reverse order, but it is her name all the same.

She freezes. Glancing up, she sees a bearded man starting toward her, and by the time he is within half a block, she recognizes the camera strapped to his right hand.

“IT’S ROHIT!” Like King Kong, he slaps his chest with his free hand. “ROHIT!”

Unlike most in Manhattan, people in these parts are not used to blatant disruptions of normalcy: no VCR thrown from the window of a warring couple, no street-corner evangelists, no solo protester going up and down the blocks, clanging two pots together and announcing the number of dead civilians in Iraq. No one shouting and running without reason. Heads turn, and even the two men in front of Rajan Exchange pause their argument to look at Rohit, then Anju, then Rohit again.