Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

“Rohit will ask you to turn the music off,” Anju says, recalling one instance when he roamed Bird’s apartment with his headphones on, searching for the vague sonar hum that was ruining the shoot. When finally he concluded that it was the neighbor’s music, he knocked on the suspect’s door, to Anju’s horror, and asked Mrs. Ortiz to turn off her radio for the next thirty minutes. The solely Spanish-speaking Mrs. Ortiz nodded, closed her door, and turned up the radio.

“Rohit is his name?” Nandi asks, combing the finished eyebrows of her client, who is gripping the arms of her chair as if it might launch her out. “You know this man?”

“He is not a man,” Anju says quickly. “He is student only.”

“How did you meet him?” Lipi asks.

“At a social function.” For the past six months of her employment, she has kept her personal life as shrouded as possible, which usually means listening to other people’s stories and contributing very little of her own. “In the park. A church function in the park.”

The other stylists seem doubtful.

“Enough dillying and dallying,” Ghafoor says. He tells Powder to buy some flowers tomorrow morning, before work. “Cheap and colorful. Now who is going to dye my mustache?”

Just then a mother and her teenage daughter walk through the door, faces that Anju does not recognize. The mother looks around, unsure, while the girl gnaws on her fingernails. “May I help you?” Anju asks.

“I would like brow and lip threading. And she,” the mother glances back at her daughter, lowering her voice, “wants the bikini wax for some reason, godknowswhat. She says swimming, but I tell you, children are crazy these days—”

“Mom,” the girl says. “It is for swimming. I swim . God.”

Anju seats the mother with Lipi and guides the girl toward the back. She has had several girls like this, those who claim the same official alibi — swimming — and who demand the kind of waxing that Anju has unofficially termed the Eve.

“Really?” Lipi asks, after the girl and her mother leave. “At her age?”

Anju shrugs, expertly pulling off her gloves. “Not even a fig leaf.”

ANJU CANNOT BLAME Ghafoor for ecstatically assuming that the salon will appear in the film. She herself had a difficult time understanding that the past two months of shooting, from February to March, would mostly be discarded on what Rohit calls “the cutting room floor.” It never occurred to her what it meant to condense so much time in such a way, until Rohit showed her a scene that he had edited on his computer, from the first time they met for dinner at the Solankis’ home.

What Anju remembered as lasting two hours had been chopped down to six minutes. The discussion was not just shortened but shaped beyond recognition, airbrushed and paled to a bleak semblance of its previous self. In the scene when Rohit announced to his parents that he was going to be a filmmaker, the subsequent shot showed Mr. Solanki refilling his glass of wine and giving his wife a look that, after any other shot, could have conveyed his curiosity or indigestion, but its placement after Rohit’s announcement sent the story in a different direction than Anju remembered. And as well, there were many close-up shots of Mr. Solanki pouring red wine into his glass, more than Anju remembered having occurred in so short a space of time. Gone was the discussion about Rohit’s supposed gayness, and Mrs. Solanki correcting Mr. Solanki’s grammatical usage of “gay.” Instead, the scene clumsily jumped to Anju asking Rohit questions about his film, and Rohit answering that he didn’t know what exactly the film would be about, a much more reticent answer than the one Anju recalled. Cut to: Mr. Solanki refreshing his glass yet again, before adding, “Why don’t you finish a film? Now that would be a revolution.”

This Mr. Solanki was not Mr. Solanki. This Solanki was mean and abrupt and alcoholic, shooting stiff looks at a soft-spoken wife who, likewise, was wholly unlike the version Anju knew. They had been edited into neater, simpler paper-doll versions of parents, dressed in outfits of frustration by the son who wielded the narrative scissors. And the problem lay in this — that time, once pruned and reordered, could tell a different story entirely than the one that Anju remembered. Was the scene Anju remembered even the one that had occurred? Did it matter? The only story that mattered was the one told by the very person who was doing the pruning and shuffling, and for the first time, Anju began to wonder what outfit he was designing for her.

WHEN ROHIT ARRIVES the next day, the salon is waiting for him. Mismatched bouquets of long-stemmed carnations and peacock feathers sit in vases at every stylist’s station, and the movie star posters that used to panel the walls have been replaced by Rajasthani tapestries of garba raas dancers and one long panorama of a Mughal emperor on a royal hunt, loaned by the trinket store down the street. For the first and only time, Ghafoor demands that everyone leave their shoes at the door, not for the preservation of the motherland’s customs, but for the preservation of the Oriental rugs that overlap all the way to the back of the salon, and are also on loan. If an employee should spill on the rug, Ghafoor calmly threatens to extract a sum from her paycheck. He has also directed everyone to wear salwars of “the red and marigold color palette,” and Anju, having none, borrows one from Lipi. “Spill on this,” Lipi says, “and I extract it from your paycheck.” Anju cannot tell if Lipi is joking or serious, so limited is her palette of facial expression.

When Rohit begins to shoot, it seems fairly obvious that the film is not, as Anju claimed, about beauty salons. Rohit follows Anju up and down the floor, even when she is doing nothing more than taking a box of Kleenex from one end of the store to the other. He lurks behind a vase of flowers and feathers to film her while she answers the phone. He zooms in on the notebook where she writes “CANCEL” next to her two p.m. appointment. This was her only appointment for the day, so she spends the rest of it thumbing through the notebook, trying to look diligent, which is even more difficult than actually being diligent.

Meanwhile, Ghafoor is roaming from station to station in a khadi kurta pyjama as opposed to his usual brown slacks, arms crossed, feigning expertise. He looks in on Nandi’s work, nods approvingly. He meanders over to Powder’s station, where she is blow-drying straight a client’s unwieldy shrub of curls, and points at the curly half of the client’s head. “You missed this section,” he murmurs and walks on, oblivious as Powder cuts her eyes at him. Sensing drama, Rohit goes over to film Ghafoor and the others.

Anju watches Rohit sidling about, zooming in on a face, drawing back to include Ghafoor’s directions. Today, she feels a kind of camaraderie with the camera and almost takes pleasure in the importance that it gives her. She wishes she could rise to the occasion by doing something of use, weaving brows like Nandi, the thread between her teeth. Already Rohit has documented her descent from student to illegal, but now she wants as much attention given to her ascent, from hard worker to citizen.

In the early afternoon, Anju receives a walk-in client, a white girl with long orange hair. White girls are rare but not foreign to the salon. This girl seems to thrive on her rarity, wearing a belted shirt that stops a few inches below her rear, tall burgundy boots, and nothing resembling pants.

“I’d like a bikini wax,” she says to Anju.

Rohit moves close to them, but the pantless girl does not turn her head. Anju writes down her name — Jaclyn — and says, “Come with me.”