Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

It is sleek yet hefty, a James Bond among cameras with the stylish plume of its microphone and its dark, seductive lens. Without the camera, Rohit is just a boy with idle hands in the pockets of his Dolce jeans, for whom the world holds neither consequence nor challenge.

On one occasion, Rohit reluctantly eases the camera into Anju’s hands, hovering about as though she is an ogre handling an infant. She slips her fingers under the strap, as she has seen him do for the past two weeks, and weighs its expensive, humming power in her palm. She puts her eye to the viewfinder, expecting spectral visions, slightly dismayed by the black and white of it all. At the end of a branch, she sees a lone leaf twirling against the wind. The control is exhilarating, the power to record the last moment of this leaf, to potentially capture the seething essence of nature. Gently, she nudges the zoom button, as she has noticed Rohit doing whenever he thinks she is saying something of import, usually about her family. This happened the other day, when he asked her to call Linno on his phone card, while he filmed.

At first, shifting her feet before the pay phone, she resisted. Rohit peeked from behind his camera when she hung up the phone, her quarter and dime jangling into the coin return niche. “What’s the problem?” he asked. “Don’t you think they want to hear from you?”

She had no doubt they wanted to hear from her. But after that first blissful greeting, the inevitable questions would come tumbling: What has she done? Why has she done it? How will they survive this disgrace? If she calls, they will arrange to bring her home, and she will be as much a child as when she left. Each day she does not speak to her family serves to harden her resolve. “I will not call until I have good news,” she said. “Until you get me the immigration lawyer.”

“I told you, I’m in touch with an attorney. With a couple, in fact.” But as usual, Rohit gave no specifics on the subject, preferring instead to swaddle her in vague encouragement. “I know times seem tough right now, but the thing is, you have to start from zero for the audience to care about your problems. So in the end, when everything works out, the audience will totally love you and be on your side. It’s called the dramatic arc , see what I’m saying? Now.” He put his eye to the camera. “Go ahead.”

It was comforting to think that Rohit had made himself the dramatic architect of her life, that he felt so zealously optimistic about the future. But as she put her fingertips to the depressions of the silver keys, she could not dial. She did not speak, but by Rohit’s silence, she could sense that he was slowly pushing the zoom button, closing in on her.

At the time, she did not understand why he so loved the combination of silence and slow zoom, but now, as she pushes closer to the leaf and its frantic dance, she understands the heightening of emotion when coming closer and closer in the attempt to comprehend, to find significance, to see something of one’s self in the leaf.

ON THEIR SUNDAY OFF, Anju and Bird go for a walk in Central Park, which, when they arrive, seems as bad an idea as Anju initially suspected. Ever since her first meeting with Rohit, she has harbored the disquieting feeling that gazes are trained upon her wherever she goes, pairs of dark, alarming eyes beneath wide-brimmed fedoras. It does not help that the fedora seems to be in style, as she has seen two different preteens wearing them on the 3 train. No doubt some detective movie has fed this theory, but she has the illicit sense of being Wanted, and not in the tragic way of children’s faces on milk cartons. The INS has her under surveillance, watching her from parked sedans, teasing her with this limited semblance of freedom. She wonders if there is something foreign about her gait.

But Central Park, she must admit, is fantastically groomed and beautiful. All around are the trillings and cawings of wildlife, though rarely seeing any insects and birds gives the feeling of walking through some sort of nature-themed park, the noises emitted by carefully hidden radios. They walk into a place called Sheep Meadow. Bird sits and Anju lies on her stomach, watching the white people play their games of catch and kites, backed by a deep green border of trees and, beyond this, a bevy of handsome buildings against a fading sky. From Anju’s vantage point, the meadow is so broad, so subtle in its changes of velvety green that the land seems to curve with the earth. There is a beauty here of which she will never be part, but this is the pleasant melancholy of witnessing anything beautiful, the wish to enter and become it.

“Relax,” Bird says, offering her an open bag of salted almonds. “No one is looking at you.” No one except for a disturbingly fearless squirrel. It stares with hostile eyes even after Bird shoos it away, as if biding its time.

“So what did you do yesterday?” Bird asks. “On your day off?”

Anju delays, picking almond skin from between her teeth. She has been trying to keep Rohit a secret from Bird, at least for the time being, as she is sure that Bird will disapprove of the film idea. Bird hates movie people, finds them untrustworthy, making the blind assumption that Anju trusts Bird enough to believe in her judgment. But ever since Anju discovered her illegal status, she finds herself sharing more silence than secrets with Bird, perceiving that autonomy and adulthood require a measure of distance. Still, the silence feels wrong.

“I tried to call my family yesterday,” Anju says.

Bird stops chewing. “You reached them?”

“No one was home.”

For a time, they watch the disks flung through the air, the flight of a rainbow-colored kite on a string, an animated tableau of comets and planets against a field of blue.

“You never told me about your mother,” Bird says. “How did she die?”

“My mother?”

Bird nods.

“She drowned in the sea.” Speaking of her mother’s death, after all these silent years, feels more strange than sad. “I don’t remember my mother. My older sister does, but she never speaks of these things. My sister was there when she died.”

Bird squints at her as if from a distance, absently plucking a few blades of grass. “Did your sister ever tell you about that day?”

Anju had tried to coax the subject from her sister on one or two occasions, long ago, and she had watched Linno’s expression cloud over, stowing her memories in some sealed mental space. A familiar image returns to Anju’s mind, formed in part from Ammachi’s description and her own imagination: a rigid little Linno, the way she was found that day, with dirty feet and eyes that would not blink. “All we know is that she drowned herself.”

Here, Bird stops plucking. “What do you mean, drowned herself?”

“It was a suicide.”

“How do you know that?”

“Everyone knows.”

“And a thousand years ago, everyone knew the world was flat.” Bird brushes the crumbs from her skirt, somewhat forcefully. “Everyone knows only what they are told. Easy that way.”

In the gauzy blue of dusk, the signs and windows of the buildings have suddenly, without notice, turned luminous at once. A neon sign reading ESSEX HOUSE glows red. Anju wonders how long she should wait before changing the subject.

“And she loved you and Linno,” Bird says softly.

“Maybe she did, maybe she did not.”

“But I’m sure she did—”

“Not enough. Not enough to stay.”

Careful with Anju’s anger, Bird remains quiet.

“How did you know my sister’s name is Linno?” Anju asks.

Bird looks up. “You said so.”

“I did?”

“Many, many times. Linno this, Linno that …”

But always Anju has tried to do just the opposite, attempting to keep her family at arm’s length from everyone else.