Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

Melvin roams the perimeter of the house, puffing on the last bidi in his pack. In Chennai, he had waited by the gate rather happily, having felt no gastric hint of ill fortune to come. He bought a roasted ear of corn, rubbed with lime and spices, and nibbled on this while eyeing the other applicants with pity. He peeled a mango and shared it with an old man who was anxiously waiting for his wife to emerge with a visitor’s visa which would allow her to visit their pregnant daughter in Chicago. The old man was so nervous he could eat only a few bites, no matter how much Melvin encouraged him. When the man’s wife emerged weepy and empty-handed, Melvin was ashamed of his own small pang of hope, that a “no” for this wife meant a “yes” for Linno. Guiltily, he gave the old man his only other mango before the couple made their way home.

But as soon as Linno emerged from the consulate building and found Melvin at the gate, he felt something crumple in his chest. His stomach had betrayed him. Pending investigation … “About Anju?” Linno asked him. “Did someone tell them? No one even knew we had applied.”

Were Melvin in a lucid state of mind, he would acknowledge that there might be several ways that a visa officer would be informed. He might conjecture that the investigation could have nothing to do with Anju at all, but rather a glitch in a system so overworked that at times its decisions rank among acts of God. But at the moment, he has only blind, fatherly vengeance on his side, and as soon as he hazards a guess, his body fills with a furious eureka, as close to a holy experience as he has had in years. For the first time, he knows where he is going, what he will say and how loud. Isn’t this the P. C. Mappilla in his blood, the ore of resolution? It was the absence of God that made Mappilla’s faith so unbreakable, the vacuum that enabled preachers to bellow on God’s behalf about what was godly and what was not. Melvin’s faith is just as firm in this way, thriving on Anju’s absence.

Melvin quashes his bidi underfoot and walks down the road.

Halfway down, he stops to look back at his house. He has heard of illegal immigrants living in America for years, gathering piles of money and returning home to sons who have surpassed them in height. Will Anju be one of those? Remaining until she is someone else? Will she know this house or, like a spirit, will she simply pass over it, presuming that it belongs to strangers? This is still her house, even more so now that she is not in it, and so long as Anju is gone, it will be a haunted, unfinished thing. Not a place of rest but a place of unrest, her hair in the combs, her shoes in the doorway, her echo in every room.

ON THE STEPS of Abraham’s veranda, Melvin waits for the servant to fetch his employer. Melvin studies the small wasp’s nest growing beneath the eave of the roof like a solid gray goiter, a wasp floating languidly around it. At a safe distance from this are two white wicker chairs and a table between them. So many places to rest in this house, to linger and idle and scheme undisturbed. Melvin will not sit down, as he has never done so for the entire time that he has called himself Abraham’s driver. Usually he leans against the car, waiting, but this time he has arrived on foot.

Abraham emerges, wiping his hands on his munda. “Ah, Melvin! I was not expecting you.”

Melvin points at the roof. “You have a wasp’s nest up there.”

“Oh yes, about that. Do you think you could help me with it today? Mercy wants me to call an exterminator, as if I’m made of porcelain….”

As Abraham complains about the price of exterminators, Melvin remembers his original mission. Before he can interrupt, Abraham says, “My God, I almost forgot. How did it go in Chennai?”

“Badly.”

Abraham sighs. “It’s the Mexicans. Taking up all the spots in that country. So what did the officials say?”

At this, a pivotal point in Melvin’s life, he feels himself steered by a new philosophy. Thus far he has believed that a boy becomes a man over the course of years and lessons and mistakes, a stone worn smooth by an ocean. But now it seems he was quite wrong. A man is made in a series of moments, an evolution in bursts, and maybe this is his final turn. These thoughts come to him not in sentences but as a tidal throbbing in his gut, a now, now, now .

Melvin crosses his arms over his chest. “You know what they said. You told them yourself.”

“Told what?” Abraham tilts his head, a movement whose subtlety sends a fissure through Melvin’s resolution; perhaps he is wrong. Too late now for doubts such as these. The first words have been fired and the rest come in bullets.

“You called. You told them about my Anju.”

Abraham hesitates, then brays a laugh of disbelief.

“They never would’ve known,” Melvin says.

“Who fed you this nonsense?”

“Before I left, I told no one about this meeting, no one except you. How else would they find out?”

Abraham gathers himself up, fits his hands on his hips. “I don’t like this tone, Melvin. It is not the tone an employee takes with his employer.”

“I am not only your employee. I’m Gracie’s husband—”

“Melvin—”

Pure madness, this train of words without brakes. “And for this, you never forgave me. For this, you wanted to get back at me.”

“Who are you to tell me about forgiveness?” Abraham jabs a finger at his own chest. “I have been very forgiving! How easy do you think it was for me to hear your name with hers? She was mine, she was to be my wife.” On “wife,” he hits the back of a wicker seat, as though Gracie would be sitting right here were it not for Melvin. “And then you bumble into the picture as if you of all people could belong to a family like that.”

“She told me you did not want her. You gave her up.”

“So I did. But just because a man does not want his dinner doesn’t mean he wants the servant to step in and have it.”

Servant . They have crossed into terrain where neither meant to go, and now the word sits between them as it always will, implacable and pulsing with life.

“My wife hired you out of pity and politeness,” Abraham says formally. “Were it up to me, we would never have met.”

“I am not your servant. You are not my master.”

“I don’t need you to remind me of what I am. You are the one needing reminders, so here is one. There are only two good reasons a man should have more than his share of the world — by being born into that share or by earning it. You did neither and ended up with more than you deserved.”

With his heel, Abraham kicks up the edge of his munda so as to tie it around his waist. “If not for me, Melvin, you’d still be stuck at that bar, asking Berchmans for a peg of Yeksho.”

The Ambassador key has grown warm in Melvin’s breast pocket. He thinks of hurling it at Abraham’s forehead so as to scar him, to brand a permanent reminder onto his skull. But these are fantasies. He and Abraham are too old to survive old feuds, too young to be free of the past.

Instead, Melvin drops the key into the wicker seat where Abraham’s Gracie would have sat.

Abraham refuses to glance at the key. And though Melvin is already down the steps, Abraham shouts after him with all the volume and vigor of a real-life Mammootty: “I’ll take care of the wasps myself!”

AND SO, in an effort to reinstate his manhood, Melvin has entered an early retirement. He always imagined that he would be older when he retired, dentured and content, surrounded with grandchildren to guide him by the hand through the waning years. Instead he finds himself bewildered by his recent explosion, and having nowhere better to go, he ends up at the Rajadhani Bar.