Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

Linno thinks of the time she taught Anju how to swim by a stone footbridge that spanned a stream. She remembers small silver flecks of poonjan fish and the little boy on the bridge above them, obliviously peeing into the water while Anju clung to Linno, hands fastened about her neck, squealing. Anju’s watery weightlessness, her primal need stripped of pride, these made Linno feel strong and loved in ways she would never admit aloud. “Don’t let go!” Anju begged, fearful on several counts. “Don’t let me go!” And though Linno laughed to reassure her sister, she answered without a trace of teasing to her voice: “No, never.”

THE NEXT FEW WEEKS are uneventful. Linno dedicates the entire time to a royal blue wedding invitation that opens into a peacock’s tail, scalloped around the edge and studded with faux emeralds. The bride’s father, a hedge fund billionaire, requested an invitation that would acknowledge Indian Independence Day, as it was also the date of his daughter’s wedding, without using the color orange, which the billionaire’s daughter considered “overdone and simply over.” It is Linno’s most involved job, requiring two weeks for completion. During her lunch breaks, she phones Duniya about sponsoring her visa, but no one responds to her messages.

After finishing the last invitation, she goes to dinner at Alice and Kuku’s house, which has become Kuku and Jincy’s house, as the decor now implies. Portraits of Jincy’s family grace the bookshelves, the walls, and the top of the new television, a gift from Kuku to Jincy, which he learned of upon its delivery. “So far from my family,” Jincy says over dessert. “I need a little entertainment.”

Kuku notes that her family lives ten minutes away.

“But still it is a sorrowful moment when the girl leaves her family and joins her husband’s.” Jincy glances at Linno, and finding no empathy there, reaches over and clasps Alice’s hand. “Chachy, you know what I’m talking about.”

Linno recalls the ceremony performed before Jincy’s wedding wherein she received her mother’s blessings, a symbolic gesture of departing her family. In Jincy’s case, all pathos was drowned by the soggy chorus of sobs, a cued symphony of aunts and sisters, while Jincy and her mother clung to each other. Interlocked like this, the two reminded Linno of a crumpled butterfly unable to rid itself of its cocoon. As Jincy went down the steps amid a decrescendo of noise, her mother wiped her eyes and looked around. “Anyone for tea?”

Linno rose to leave. “I should go. It’s late.”

“So soon?” asks Alice.

“Let me and my driver drop you off,” Kuku says.

This, Linno was not expecting. Throughout dinner, Kuku hardly directed a word at her, which Linno thought was only appropriate, considering the way their last private discussion ended. But Jincy brightens at the suggestion. “All right, then. Let me pack up some dessert for you to take home. Promise to return my Tupperwares? They were wedding gifts. Not just any old plastic containers.”

Linno promises.

“People borrow and borrow the Tupperwares,” Jincy says, shaking her head. “It’s hard to be generous with no more Tupperwares.”

· · ·

DUSK HAS SETTLED by the time they climb into the car. Kuku takes the front seat while Linno sits behind the driver, giving her an angle on Kuku’s jaw. He unwraps a peppermint from plastic and pops it in his mouth, and for most of the ride, the only sound is the rumbling engine and the candy clacking against his teeth.

When they near her home, Linno suggests that they let her out, so she can walk the narrowing road alone. The driver slows to a stop. Suavely, Kuku hands him a rolled bill and suggests that he go buy himself a pack of cigarettes. The stall across the street is closed, but the driver seems to know this is coming and gets out of the car with no questions asked.

Linno puts her hand on the door handle. “Good-bye, then.”

“Wait.” Kuku raises a hand. “I won’t waste your time. I came along for one reason — to ask you a question.”

“If this involves a pagoda, I don’t want to be asked.”

He clicks his tongue as if it is foolish to reference such distant history. “I want to talk about my sister. Alice.”

Kuku shifts in his seat so that he is nearly facing Linno while she, at a loss, waits for him to continue. He sighs, allowing for a moment of dignified silence, which is broken by the mating croak of a toad.

“I’m sure you know that Alice and I have had a hard life. Loneliness can make you do strange things, can make you imagine feelings where there were none before.” Almost wistful, Kuku tilts his head. “I know. I was lonely once. Alice looked after me in those times, and now it is my duty to look after her, as well as the reputation of our father’s name. So I have to ask you. What is the nature of your friendship with my sister?”

“The nature?”

“You know what I mean,” he says. “Don’t make me say it.”

“But I have no idea what you mean.”

Kuku presses his lips together and then finally blurts: “Are you in love with her?”

Linno stares at him until he repeats himself.

“I know what you said. Are you mad?”

“When you refused me that first time, Linno, I accepted it. When you and Alice decided to spend night and day together, I said fine. But I have been hearing things. Not just from anyone, but from a respectable source.”

Linno fights between two urges — the desire to push her way out of this car and the need to know more. “From who? From who have you been hearing things?”

“From Abraham Saar.”

It is as though he has reached into her head and rattled her brain as he would a snow globe, and try as she might to construct a thought, she cannot. Abraham Saar, who absorbs the Sunday sermon with his eyes closed. Abraham Saar, who took them to Kovalam Beach long ago, who spread a large blue sheet over soft sand and staked the corners with stones.

“Abraham Saar was a great friend of my father,” Kuku continues, “and he invited Jincy and me to his house for dinner. Afterward, he and I were having drinks on the porch and I let it slip that you refused my hand in marriage, which he could hardly believe. But then he told me I should be careful. He said, ‘She might take after her mother.’ He had had several drinks by then. I asked what he meant. And he told me.” Here, Kuku pauses, knowing to step carefully when speaking of mothers, however scandalous the story. “He told me how he was meant to marry your mother. How he found out about the relations she was having with another woman. Some kind of traveling actress in a local drama troupe. He said, ‘Gracie was a headstrong girl, but I would have married her if not for that.’”

Linno’s tongue moves slowly through a syrup of half thoughts. “Abraham Saar?”

Kuku nods. Only then does he seem to recognize that she has known nothing of this affair.

“Of course, I will never tell anyone of this,” he says. “Not even Alice, if the answer is no. But Jincy also felt I should have this conversation with you. After all, she is very concerned about the family name, now that it’s hers as well.” He softens his voice. “Jincy has read that these inclinations might be genetic. Which is why we wanted to make sure that you … that your feelings for my sister are of a proper kind.”

She hears a noise in the bushes, a rustle of birds in the dark. The toad resumes its lonely, interrogatory croak.

“Linno?”

“One minute,” she says. Tupperware in hand, she gets out of the car and wedges the Tupperware just behind the rear wheel. When she re-enters the car, she takes the front seat.

“Shashi?” Kuku asks. She presses down on the brake and puts the car in reverse, as she has seen her father do many times before. “Are you wearing perfume?”