Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

I truly hope that we can work together on bringing Anju home.

Yours,

Sonia Solanki

Upon hearing the news, Alice is immediately wooed, having long been a fan of Sonia Solanki’s Mysteries of the Orient cookbook series. “You’re going to be on TV!” Alice says, radiating joy. “With Sonia Solanki!”

“I don’t know. What is ‘per diem’?”

Alice grows stern. “You are going to be on TV.”

“How can I go on television and announce to the world my family’s private business?”

They argue a bit, though Linno folds more easily than usual. Sonia Solanki could bring Linno to New York in half the time that Kuku’s plan would require. Her immediate concern is twofold: how she will hide her wrist, and how she will stop herself from crying. She has seen shows of this kind and their guests, how even the most stoic middle-aged man will turn to the camera lens and, perhaps seeing his loneliness magnified in the dark reflection, will become overwhelmed by his secret sorrows and collapse into tears.

MEANWHILE, Melvin waits on the front steps. It has become his favorite place, beneath the star that Ammachi refuses to unplug and detach, as doing so would be akin to dislodging the moon. It is here that he waits for Rappai to come walking up the road as the sun goes down, to partake in their evening nightcap. Melvin has decided to limit his bar visits to once a week, occasionally relying on Rappai’s bottle of bootleg arrack, so as to save money for the time when money will be needed. Linno is working hard, but if her plan falls through, Melvin has only to make a call and Plan G will be under way.

Avoiding the bar is taking its mental toll on Melvin. Its daily presence in his life provided a therapeutic calm with which he could rise above the current mess in a kind of mental, angelic ascension and tell his corporeal self, slouched at the counter, that everything would be fine. But now, on the front steps, he succumbs to the opposing pulls of pessimism and optimism. The questions tug him back and forth, questions that have no answer, so that by evening’s end he is exhausted, not by physical exertion but by the futility of going nowhere.

He fears what is done to illegals over there. It is a different country than years before, trying to corral its evils. What if they catch her and question her? He is not sure who “they” might be, but he imagines sweatless men in suits and dark glasses, coolly cracking their knuckles. A girl like Anju could fumble, say the wrong thing. Melvin’s cousin Kuriacko is a policeman, and once, while drunk, Kuriacko said that when questioning a suspect, there were times when he wanted to hear a confession more than he wanted to hear the truth.

Melvin gazes down the dirt path for Rappai, who is a poor conversational substitute for Berchmans. The other day, Rappai asked Melvin how Linno got to be so headstrong, a question he was tactless enough to pose only because the liquor in his veins made him so, knowing well that people do not favor the term “headstrong” when speaking of young women, usually applying it to girls who marry against their parents’ wishes. Melvin asked Rappai what he meant, and Rappai held his glass up to the moon, either in awe of its powerful contents or in search of his own backwash.

“Well first, she said no to that rich blind man, and now she runs a business with the blind man’s sister …” Rappai dispelled his own question with a grunt. “Ah, but what’s the use of these questions.”

“She got it from her mother,” Melvin said.

Rappai fell silent, knowing better than to respond.

LINNO WAS SEVEN YEARS OLD and Anju just three when Gracie began to propose her plans for New York. Nowhere else in the States would do. Her eyes shone when she spoke of her friend who lived in an apartment outside the city proper, connected by a web of subterranean tunnels by which one could visit the brightly lit heart of the city that pulsed, unblinking, all through the night.

Around that time, Melvin’s father died. Gracie phoned Melvin at work to give him the news, but he knew before taking the phone. While she told him of Appachen’s stroke, a few silvery clichés crossed his mind— It was his time … God wanted him —words meant to take the place of an emotion he could not quite conjure up. All day, the news felt like nothing, and his sadness stemmed from this absence of feeling rather than the absence of his father.

Melvin gathered up his family and took the train home for the funeral, where he completed the rites of the only son. His father’s face was wreathed in cloth, his nostrils plugged with cotton to suppress the draining humors of the dead. At the grave site, each relative gave Appachen one last kiss on his cold, powdered forehead, more kisses than he had ever received in life. Watching kiss after kiss, Melvin thought of the times when he and his father would go to the river, where walls of stones had been built along the banks. Appachen reached into the gaps between the stones and magically withdrew small, scrambling lobsters in his fist, dropping them into the bag that Melvin held out. “Kochu Konju,” Appachen called him, Little Lobster, a name that felt almost like a kiss. But eventually, a dam was built on Vembanad Lake, blocking the salty tidal waters of the Arabian Sea, clogging the freshwater with sewage and chemicals, and the lobsters disappeared, as did the name Kochu Konju.

At last, Melvin draped the white satin handkerchief over his father’s face, and as he did so, a sharp, torn cry came from his mother, a sound that he had never heard, that made his hands shake. Ammachi stood with her younger sister, Chinamma, whose husband had died several years before, a space of time long enough to heal her bruises. And there were other widows as well, with lowered lids and stone-cut faces, dressed in white chatta and mundu, the last of their kind.

Through the cloth, Melvin kissed his father’s forehead before they closed the lid of his wooden coffin. For days and days after, Melvin recalled his mother’s cry. It was not the sound that continued to surprise him but the fact that his parents had loved each other, a secret they had kept between them for almost forty years.

THE NEXT DAY, Gracie took Melvin to her teak trees, where she pointed out a dab of blue among the branches, a ponman that took flight as soon as it was sighted. It was nice, for once, to leave the children with Ammachi, to have the world as their private aviary. Gracie kept singing the same two lines from a film song, unable to remember the rest: “O blue ponman , my blue ponman … ” He wished she knew more lines.

Melvin tentatively stepped around the trees, deep in his own thoughts. That morning, he had seen a picture of Abraham Chandy in the newspaper, as the new president-elect of the Lion’s Club. It was the first time Melvin had seen the man, and even in such a small photo, he could tell how proudly Abraham Chandy filled the space. This was the man whom Gracie might have married. No woman in her right mind would have turned him down.

“Shouldn’t we pay your parents a visit sometime?” he asked.

Her eyes grew wide. “Did you see my mother at the funeral? She looks like a lizard! All that weight she’s losing, it makes her chin look too sharp.” Melvin always found it strange the way Gracie spoke of her parents like a pair of curious acquaintances. Ever since their marriage, she had kept no real relations with her family beyond sending a belated birthday card. This was because Ammachi kept all important dates in her black address book, and when she called to remind Melvin, he in turn would remind Gracie.

Her gaze grew distant. “I wonder how much a few trees would fetch.”

“What for?”

“To get us started over there.”