Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

HAD BIRD RECOGNIZED her last day with Gracie when it came, she would have devised something better to do than sit in the dressing room. It was the opening night of their Kottayam performance, which had taken place outdoors, on the Thirunakkara Maidan, with the statue of Gandhi looking on from the north and two pale minarets in view from the east. All had gone well, it seemed. Gracie had tempered her lines, and rain had not swept away the show at intermission, as it had in Thiruvananthapuram. But while the others had gone off to celebrate, Bird preferred to take her time as she sat before the mirror and removed her makeup. Gracie perched on the ledge of the dressing room table and spoke of a man in the audience who had liked her ruby red hat. “Strange fellow. Something sweet about him, but definitely not his nose. His sneeze could topple a small child.”

“You went into the audience?” Bird said. “You can’t do that.”

“Why not? My part was finished, and I wanted to see you up there.”

“Because there should be some space between us and them, some mystery. People can only believe from a distance.”

With a damp towel, Bird stroked the makeup from her cheeks, the coats of pink and peach, until her face was marbled with flesh tones. On the counter were the compacts from which the colors came, slender brushes resting neatly beside them, and a steel bowl of water.

Gracie sighed. “It doesn’t matter anyway, whether his nose is big or not. He is not the one I’m marrying.”

Bird’s hand stopped mid-stroke. “Your family made a match?”

“Six months from now I will be a married woman.”

Slowly, Bird dipped her rag into the steel bowl. She steadied her voice. “I thought it was a year.”

“My father found me someone sooner.” His name was Abraham, she said. A dignified name, such that belonged to the sort of man who would raise an army of sons. “My father says it is dangerous for a girl to be alone for too long. She might start to like it. And my mother says, ‘Always pluck a bud before it fully flowers.’”

Bird looked at the girl before her, nineteen years old, eager and angry, bright but unsure. The ceiling light skimmed the outline of Gracie’s hair; seated beneath her, Bird felt herself within some fleeting shade. “I’ve always thought,” Bird said, simply to fill the silence, “that a flower is best on its second or third day of blooming.”

Gracie nodded; Bird could not read her thoughts. Turning to the mirror, Gracie dipped the end of a clean rag into the bowl and drew the rag across her eyelid. The kohl was smudged but still there.

“Not like that.” Bird unscrewed the lid from a jar of Vaseline and dabbed some onto a clean rag. She stood up and steadied Gracie’s chin with one hand while wiping her eyelid with the other. The kohl came away in thick streaks of bruisy black until finally her eyelid was slick and shiny, her lashes like thorns. Gracie kept both eyes closed as Bird stroked the rag across the other eye, now more slowly, gently, taking the time to contemplate the features that she might not see in another six months, down to the finest detail, to the pink tendril of a vein on across an eyelid. This was the face that Abraham’s hands would hold and study for years as age carved its way around the scant freckles, the mouth. Bird removed the rag, but she did not remove her hand from Gracie’s chin. The muscles in Gracie’s throat shifted up and down. With her eyes still closed, she reached for Bird. She laid her head on Bird’s shoulder, and Bird, too, closed her eyes.

In that moment, the world was in perfect balance, undisturbed. Bird’s sense of smell blossomed briefly so that she could pick apart the layered air — the dull sweat, the sultry perfumes, the sprays and Vaselines, Gracie’s breath. Bird felt the shape of her friend curled into her chest.

Bird opened her eyes to the sloping curvature of Gracie’s neck, where she could distinguish the finest layer of down. Her own nose was not more than two inches from that shallow. Bird lowered her head and rested her lips, briefly, in that spot. The earth did not shudder. In fact, it was the world beyond these walls that had suddenly dissolved, along with the man Gracie would marry and the sons she would mother, the houses she would have, and time itself. There was only that fine, soft shallow which Bird met once again, for the last time, feeling Gracie’s breath flowing calmly through her throat.

There was a noise at the door. Gracie sat up. Sharply, she called out: “Who is it?”

Someone had seen. This much Bird knew. She could not have imagined, then, that the someone was Abraham, with flowers in hand, that he had lingered and watched until, startled by his own sound, he hurried away with his heart full of turmoil and wonder. And what had he seen? An embrace, a kiss, which led him to form a story of seduction and sin, so that when he went to Gracie’s father the next day, he painted a picture much closer to what he believed than what he had seen.

But now, in the dressing room, Bird could not help but lie, if only to reach for a moment lost. “It was nothing,” she said.

At last Gracie looked back at Bird and smiled the kind of smile that was tossed off at a glance, brisk and clean. The kind of smile that tidied things up, that took a step back. Gracie slid off the counter and moved to the door.

“We should join the others,” she said.

For years, Bird would remember Gracie disappearing through the door, and she would imagine any number of ways that Gracie could have turned, could have come back inside and stayed for longer with her head on Bird’s shoulder, forever ignorant of the world pressing in on them, hovering from the doorway, watching.

HAFOOR IS THRILLED at the prospect of having the Apsara Salon featured in a full-length documentary about ethnic beauty salons, but he demands a day’s notice for the shoot so that he can “prepare.” Rohit warned Anju not to confess the true topic of the film while he, in turn, promised not to disclose the name of the salon.

To Ghafoor, Anju tries to explain what Rohit once told her about the editing process, how all the many hours of shooting must be condensed into a ninety-minute dramatic arc , one that will not necessarily include the Apsara Salon. Ghafoor laughs away her warnings. “Well then, Miss George Lucas, we will have to do our level best.”

Over the phone, Ghafoor and Rohit settle on a Wednesday shoot, but after Ghafoor hangs up, Bird complains of a burgeoning ache in her stomach. “My appendix,” she tells him.

“Are you going to the hospital?” he asks.

She manages to wince and shake her head at the same time. “Could be appendix. Could be something else. I’ll wait it out at home.”

And while normally Ghafoor interrogates all sick leaves, today he says, “Okay, see you Friday.” He has known Bird long enough to know that she is faking it, that she hates cameras as much as she hates the bearded ladies who come in expecting a face lift from a simple threading session. But he cannot be bothered with Bird’s negative energy, nor does he want an invalid shuffling up and down the aisles, hands on her belly; if he wanted that, he would’ve invited his mother. No, the Apsara Salon must exude cool and comfort, and the employees must be neat, well-chappaled professionals, as close to pretty as possible.

At the cash register, Ghafoor thumbs through his shoe box of cassette tapes, trying to decide whether old Bollywood music or carnatic music will be appropriate to set the mood. Powder suggests her own bhangrareggaeton remix tape courtesy of DJ Kaur, which he vetoes by ignoring her.