Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

Still filming, Rohit steps aside, then follows Anju and Jaclyn to the back room. Anju stops short of the door. “What you think you are doing?” she asks Rohit.

“I’m filming you work,” Rohit says. “Otherwise it’ll just look like you sit around all day.”

Though this is exactly what Anju does, she prefers not to emphasize that fact. “This you cannot film.”

“Oh no, it’s cool by me,” Jaclyn says. “Ro and I go way back.”

“You know each other?” Anju asks while Rohit brings the camera down and nods impatiently. She glances at the burgundy boots. “You are his Ex?” she asks Jaclyn.

“Um,” Jaclyn says, as if trying to decide from a menu. “Yes and no.”

“I asked her to come,” Rohit says. “As a favor.”

“And I’m about due for a wax anyway.” Jaclyn punches him in the shoulder. “He’s paying for it, though.”

Anju looks from the camera to Jaclyn to Ro.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Rohit says. “But all documentary is a form of manipulated reality. As long as you conform as much as possible to some skeleton of the truth, it’s fine.”

Anju notes how Rohit expands his vocabulary whenever he is trying to convince her of something. The only argument she can depend on is this: “I don’t like some man in the room when I am trying to wax.”

“Look, I’ll keep my distance. I’ll even lock it down on the tripod, no handheld. It’ll be totally tasteful and artistic, not like a porno at all.”

The sudden presence of the word “porno” in the conversation makes Anju ill at ease.

Jaclyn steps in with a carefree laugh. “Oh, if you’re worried about me, I honestly don’t care. I mean, Ro has seen, like, all of my student films. If that’s not naked, I don’t know what is.”

AT THE END OF THE DAY, after Rohit, the stylists, and a freshly waxed Jaclyn have left, Anju helps Ghafoor put the place back in order. She refills the water in the vases, though the carnations have already begun to sulk. She unpins the tapestries while Ghafoor rolls up the rugs and slumps them against one another in the corner. He whistles an off-key rendition of “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?” from The Sound of Music , happy with his performance earlier in the day. “Do you think he liked us?” Ghafoor asks.

“I think so,” she says.

“We looked professional, isn’t it?”

Tired of these questions, Anju points at a framed poster on the wall. “Where do you want me to put this?”

“I think it was professional to have everyone’s salwars matching-matching. Like the Air India flight attendants.” Ghafoor sprays Windex onto a paper towel, which he squeaks up and down the glass of the frame in question, the Doll’s House show card Birdie had forbidden long ago. When finished, he stares absently at the words: Apsara Arts Club presents … Kalli Pavayuda Veede . He taps the first and largest in the receding list of cast members, Birdie Kamalabhai . “Good thing this woman didn’t come. If she saw this show card, she would take it down herself.”

“I never saw it before.”

“That is because of your auntie. She makes me keep it in storage.” He polishes the plastic frame. “Does she ever speak of those days?”

“Not really.”

Ghafoor looks offended. “Did she tell you that I was a director?”

When Anju says no, Ghafoor grows indignant, gesturing heatedly with his Windex bottle. “Well, maybe she thinks she fell from the pedestal, but I am proud I was ever up there.”

Still irritated, Ghafoor shifts over to wipe the next frame while Anju gazes at the Doll’s House show card. He remembers the first time he hung it on the wall, which led to Bird’s cheeks turning a rare shade of pink. She would allow any wall hanging but that one, for reasons she would not explain but that he attributed to the nonsensical dramas of the female species. “But it is the nicest decoration I have,” Ghafoor argued. And more than that, these show cards represent the best and purest part of himself, the version of himself that he always aspired to be and now can only look back upon with melancholy fondness, though the world around him has changed absolutely and no one remembers the man he was. If there were some subtler way of reminding the world, he would. Often he wonders: How many like him are out there, behind cash registers and brooms, with the best part of their lives behind them? How do they bear the weight?

He is mummifying the Mughal portrait in bubble wrap when he realizes that Anju has been asking him a question in the smallest voice he has ever heard from her.

“Who is this?” she asks again, her finger on the glass of the show card.

He goes over to her and squints at the smallest name on the cast list, next to Anju’s fingertip.

“Gracie Kuruvilla,” he reads, the name meaning nothing to him.

“Do you know her?”

Ghafoor wipes her fingerprint from the glass. This girl has no idea how many actors came in and out of the troupe, not to mention lighting technicians, sound technicians, music technicians, and God knows who else. He was the director , he is about to remind her, sometimes hated but always needed as is the way with people in power, when, with a start, he remembers. “Ah, Gracie Kuruvilla! Of course I remember. Tragic girl. Her part was very small, but her parents were important people—”

“Where was she from? Gracie, I mean.” It seems to take some effort for Anju to say the name.

“From some small place in Kerala. Near Kumarakom or …”

“Chengalam?”

“Ah yes, she was from Chengalam. Did you know her?”

“What else?” Anju insists. “What else about her?”

“Oh, I hardly know. Her parents pulled her out of the troupe all of a sudden, never even made a donation. You should ask Bird; she and Bird were great friends back then.”

“Bird? My Bird?”

“Yes, but people grow out of these old attachments. Gracie married some local boy. Bird came here.”

Anju neither moves nor nods but seems to anticipate every word with unblinking eyes. Her gaze slowly returns to the show card. For years, Ghafoor considered himself an expert in direction, yielding subtleties of emotion from even the dullest actors, but he has never learned how to coach people through the narrows and depths of their actual problems, their true vulnerabilities. There, he does not pry; one’s own troubles are enough.

“Come, come.” Ghafoor plucks the Doll’s House frame from the wall. “At this speed, we will get home by midnight.”

AT HOME, Bird emerges from the bathroom, her hair wrapped in a terry-cloth beehive. She is rubbing lotion between her fingers, from one of Gwen’s bottles; the fragrance seems to be blossoming all over the apartment from this single, surreptitious usage. Hearing noises in the kitchen and assuming that these belong to Gwen, Bird almost heads straight into her bedroom before she notices Anju easing into a chair at the table.

“It’s late,” Bird says. “Where were you?”

“Helping Ghafoor clean,” Anju murmurs. Her eyes are fixed to the saltshaker in the center of the table. “We were talking.”

Bird gives a short, false laugh. “And what did Ghafoor say that was so interesting?”

“We talked about my mother. You and my mother.”

Bird nods automatically, her mouth going dry. She walks to the sink for a glass of water but absently opens the silverware drawer instead.

“He hung up the posters from your plays,” Anju says. “There was one with my mother in it.”

A glass, a glass for water.

“He said you were close.”

Bird turns the faucet on and watches water rising in a mug that was here when she moved in, same as the rose-rimmed dishes and the plastic tablecloth and the perpetually empty chairs. She tries to collect Anju’s words, to make sense of what has transpired. Ghafoor’s show card, his stupid pride and joy. The one time she was not there.