Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

With no other obvious option, Anju breaks into a run.

Aside from a few triumphant badminton serves, Anju was never exactly an athlete. Running, she discovers an agility born of pure fear, of the sound of wind and soles on sidewalks, the muffled urgency of a thudding pulse. She does not think of Rohit or his intentions, only that he represents the place she once fled.

“HEY, WILL YOU RELAX? I JUST WANNA TALK!”

Unwilling to lead him to Bird’s house, she has somehow run them into a residential area of narrow sidewalks and frosty lawns. This can continue for only so long before someone assumes that Rohit is a predator and calls the police. Over her shoulder, she yells: “TURN AROUND! GO HOME!”

Which comes out as a ragged gasp rather than an order.

“TURN IT OFF?” he asks. “YOU WANT ME TO TURN THE CAMERA OFF?”

She stops, her hands on her knees, heaving. Rohit stops a few yards away from her. She does not want to face him and his camera, nor is the current shot of her backside very flattering.

“Anju, listen. Can we talk?”

Still the camera is on. She would like to hurl it against the sidewalk if she weren’t so sure that rising would cause her to cry.

“I don’t want that camera on me,” she says.

“Fine.”

Once she hears the ping , she straightens up to face him. The camera is hanging at his side, still in his grip.

“What the hell you are doing here?” she says.

But before she can say anything more, Rohit suggests that they take their conversation to a more private place than the sidewalk. In a rare moment of agreement, they settle on McDonald’s. His treat.

STANDING BEFORE THE COUNTER, Rohit begins explaining the menu items to Anju. “A hamburger is a piece of beef between two pieces of white—”

“Number five,” she says. “Super-size, large soda, no pickle.”

They take a booth by the wall, near a glass cabinet that guards a treasure trove of cartoon figurines from an animated movie about sea creatures. Anju had seen the commercials with Bird, who found it disturbing that computer animation could give a cartoon guppy more breadth of expression than what is possessed by most actors in the flesh.

Anju turns her attention to Rohit. His beard is new, slightly coppery in contrast to the brown of his hair, a haphazard attempt at adding maturity to his face.

“You look great,” he says.

Without a word, Anju inspects her burger for pickles. Her courtesy will not be purchased for the price of a Junior Mac.

“Okay.” He slouches a bit, as if to say that he is somehow surrendering a false persona and offering her the Real Rohit. “I’ve been looking for you for so long, it’s like, now I’m not sure where to begin—”

“Why did you come here to wave a camera in my face? How did you find me?”

“All right. Easy question first: I figured that the secretary from Tan-don’s office was the only other friend you had. So I went all Columbo, you know, just came here on a hunch and checked with that guard in Tandon’s building. I showed him your picture and he said he’d seen you around. You have no idea how long I’ve been combing this same strip of Seventy-fourth Street, looking for you.” Rohit beams, rapping his thumbs on the tabletop, waiting to be thanked or congratulated. Anju dips a fry into a mini cup of ketchup. “As for the other question, I’m here about my film. I think you can help me. No — I think we can help each other.”

“Me? I thought it was a personal film about you.”

“It is a personal film. About you.”

· · ·

OVER THE LAST TWO MONTHS, Rohit has been hard at work in his editing suite, otherwise known as a corner of his Ex’s apartment. Here, Rohit pursued the impulse that struck him as soon as he received news of Anju’s disappearance — to make a seven-minute trailer that, if picked up by a production company, might evolve into a feature-length documentary film.

“My entire life I’ve been waiting to strike gold,” he says. “That’s what it’s like sometimes, being a doc filmmaker. It’s not necessarily the smartest or the most skilled that land on the best film. Sometimes the best film just lands on you.”

The landing began on the day of Anju’s disappearance, while Mrs. Solanki was sorting the mail. “I had my camera with me,” he says, “because I had this feeling that something was about to go down.” When Anju presses him for specifics, he admits that nothing had been going down in relation to his personal film, whose plot had long been flatlining. At a loss, Rohit had planned to conduct an on-the-spot interview with his mother concerning his childhood, hoping to stumble across some revelatory jewel of poor parenting.

“So I’m shooting her and asking her questions, which she’s trying to evade by opening the mail, but I can see by the way she’s using that letter opener that she’d like to slit my throat. Nothing special. I mean there are only so many close-ups you can get of a letter opener. But then there’s this one letter that she unfolds and reads silently for a couple minutes before she even notices I’m still there. It’s a great shot, a really slow, steady zoom. And in this deathly voice, she goes, ‘Oh God. Rohit. Call your father.’

“So I just kept filming everything else, like my mom freaking out and my dad yelling. I also had those tapes of you at dinner, plus the meeting with Rajiv Tandon. I never turned off the camera.” He gives a macho shrug. “I just put it on my knees. Lucky I invested in a Sennheiser mic. Picks up sound like you would not believe. I interviewed Miss Schimpf, your principal, your friend Sheldon—”

“Fish? You interviewed Fish? What did he say?”

Rohit sat back, grinning with satisfaction. “He cried.”

“Cried?”

“Almost. There was definitely a pregnant pause. Anyway, I got to learn about this amazing story that all goes back to you and your sister. Linno, right? And for once, I find myself at this nexus of luck and drama and serious fucking issues , and I’m like, what do I do with it all? I have to make a film.”

“About me?”

“About immigration, both legal and illegal. About sisters, about family pressure, about the cross-cultural divide between Indians at home and Indians abroad. All through the lens of your life.” Rohit is on a rampage now. When someone in a neighboring booth glances over at him, he lowers his voice to a lusty whisper, which only further attracts the neighbor’s attention. “I cut a trailer of everything I got and showed it to a contact at a production company. He loves it. He thinks it’s topical and riveting and he wants to fund me to make the rest if I can promise to come up with more good footage. Which is where you come in.”

Rohit pauses pregnantly. Anju is overwhelmed by the choreography of this speech, each word buffed and clean and effortless.

“I know what you’re thinking: What do I get out of all this? Well, you get the visibility of being in a full-length film and probably a string of festivals, which can’t hurt your cause. And while most documentarians would consider this unethical, I’m willing to pay for a top-of-the-line immigration lawyer, so I can follow you step-by-step on your way to obtaining legal status. I won’t screen the film until you’ve practically got a green card in your hand. I won’t ask you to sign a release until the very end, and if I haven’t made good on any of my promises, you refuse to sign the release and I’m screwed. See?”

At this moment, with his palms upturned on the table, Rohit resembles a lovelorn desperado, a look that he does not wear well.

“Okay, I see you’re a tough sell,” he says. “And that’s smart. You should never agree to anything until you read the fine print.”