Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

“This is not Shashi.”

“Linno? Are you crazy? Are you licensed?”

Though Linno has never driven a car on open roads, she doesn’t plan to go very far. Letting up on the brake, she reverses about a foot, until she hears a faint and satisfying pop. She then puts the car in park once again.

“Stop the car!” Kuku yells, his hands gripping the door handle.

“We are stopped.”

“Then get out of it!”

Linno obeys. She gets out of the car. On her knees, she fishes out the bag of crushed Tupperware and rasmalai, and circles the car to Kuku’s side just as Shashi is hurrying back across the street. She tosses the bag into Kuku’s lap. “Jincy is too generous with her Tupperwares,” she says.

“Linno? Linno!” Kuku leans out the open window. Walking away, she can still hear him barking into the night. “You listen to me, Linno! I am trying to be discreet but I had to ask! Just because something is genetic does not make it right!”

A RUMOR WILL METASTASIZE if one lets it. Linno decides that the quickest way to remedy this one is to never mention it again, not to Alice, who may have heard by way of Kuku, and especially not to Melvin and Ammachi. It pains her to think that Abraham Saar is privy to knowledge that her own father does not possess. Now the mere thought of Abraham Saar fills her with discomfort, and she feels ashamed, made naked by what he knows.

Alice comes to work the next day and the next without any change in her behavior, so Linno assumes that Kuku was satisfied with his investigation, if not with the mangled Tupperware. Linno will ignore what was said, and in doing so, the mother she knew will remain intact. Dead people should be treated as sculptures, dusted on occasion but never shifted too drastically, and life has made Linno particularly skilled at this, at turning her back on what should be left alone. As a child, it was Anju who tried to make Linno look at the feathery smudge of a tire-flattened bird or the pat of cow dung in the shape, she insisted, of Sri Lanka. Unless tricked, Linno never looked.

But she cannot help but consider the kind of woman who would love another in that way. She once saw a pair of white tourists in town, a girl holding hands with a boy who, upon closer inspection, had breasts! Not flaccid man-breasts but those born exclusively of estrogen! The “boy” had mastered boyishness in the shuffle of her walk, the careless haircut with cowlick, the khakis shapeless and rumpled. It is too far a jump between these features and Linno’s mother, who frowned upon ladies with short haircuts. When their neighbor in Bombay cut her hair into a bob, Gracie took to calling her Mrs. Mushroom. “All cap, no face,” she said.

Occasionally, the phrase comes streaking through Linno’s mind, raucous and taunting, throwing up its skirts at her while she goes about the most banal of tasks. Brushing her teeth— an affair with another woman! — or calling Duniya, Inc. — an affair with another woman! What is most disturbing is not the thought of her mother masquerading with cowlick and khakis, but the chance that she might have harbored a love that had nothing to do with Linno and Anju and Melvin, a love that scaled uncertain heights, that ran upstream, along its own dangerous course, a love that Linno will never understand. However much she might want to, she cannot defend a mother she barely knew.

When such thoughts creep up on her, Linno closes her eyes and grits her teeth, thinks: I. Will. Not. Look .

LINNO ARRIVES at the shop to find the Me & You article laminated and posted in the front window. She stands before it, trying to reconcile the face before her with the one she had assumed was hers all along. In the picture, sunlight falls softly across her left side, and her eyes seem larger than usual, captivating and flecked with light. For the first time ever, when looking at her own picture, her gaze does not go directly to her knotted wrist.

Linno notices that Alice clipped only the part of the article that praised her invitations, leaving out Linno’s answer to the question of whether or not she planned to visit the States.

“I am wanting to,” Linno said. “My sister, she is there. She is liking it so much that she did not call me in too long. I very much wish to see her.”

According to the date on the article, the picture ran last week. Linno wonders what Anju thinks of it, whether Linno’s voice and face might jolt her into action or cause her to withdraw further from them. Or maybe this picture will lead nowhere at all.

“So?” Alice says, emerging from the shop. She is beaming. “Pretty good, isn’t it?”

“We shouldn’t hang it here.”

“Why not?”

“It will send the wrong idea. That I am vain. Or dead.”

“You should be vain!” Alice says. “If I had a picture like this, I’d turn it into a full-size poster.”

Linno follows Alice into the shop, inhales the comfort of percolating coffee. Bhanu is on the phone with a customer, and Prince is seated before the computer, driving the mouse in circles.

“Doesn’t Linno look good in the picture, Prince? Bhanu?”

Bhanu nods emphatically while listing the different shades of white. Prince, who cannot be bothered with anything outside the screen, offers efficient English: “Very gorgeous.”

Linno pours herself a mug of coffee. “I suppose I don’t know what makes a woman beautiful. I don’t look at women that way.”

“What way?” Alice asks.

“In a way that notices a woman’s beauty.”

Blowing on her coffee, Alice winks. Linno wishes she hadn’t. “Lucky for you, maybe someone at Duniya does look at women that way.”

It takes a moment for Linno to make sense of Alice’s statement. Duniya. Linno nearly spills her coffee as Alice sits her before the computer and clicks on the message awaiting her.

From: neha@duniya.com

To: linno@eastwestinvites.com

Subject: Re: I WOULD LIKE TO BE SPONSORED FOR VISA

Dear Ms. Vallara,

Greetings. I am the president of Duniya, Inc. We greatly apologize for our delayed response, but we receive hundreds (!!!) of emails with similar subject lines, as you can imagine. Yesterday, luckily, our intern brought your email to our attention, as well as an AMAZING and moving piece about you in Me & You magazine. Not only this, but we have visited your website and find it to be one of the finest displays that we’ve seen. We literally cooed over your creations! Your work and your life story are truly truly INSPIRING, and we would be thrilled to have you lead a seminar on wedding invitation trends during our June Exposition.

We can speak more via phone, once you know the details of what kind of booth and seminar you would like to put together. I am sure we can provide you with whatever support materials you need for your visa application, after you send us a check for $1000 made out to Duniya, Inc.

I look forward to speaking with you.

All the best,

Neha Misra

President

Duniya, Inc.

Bhanu looks over at the commotion with a puzzled face, never breaking his on-phone presentation voice (“Yes ma’am, most people prefer gold leafing on the eggshell …”), all the while wondering why Alice and Linno are jumping up and down like little girls.

ITAL TO ANJU’S INVOLVEMENT in the film is an imperfect equation that she has formulated over the course of Rohit’s rambling pleas:

Anju + documentary film = immigration lawyer = green card = Anju’s rise from illegality and failuredom

He has promised these things, in so many words, over pastries and buttery, creamer-tainted coffee. Most of his credibility comes not from his own appearance, especially not with that coppery smear of a beard, but lies instead with his silent partner — the camera.