Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

“Well, you’re grasping at leaves,” Sonia Solanki says, gesturing with a pen, rendering her the most erudite of the group. “Our country is heavily dependent on illegal labor from the millions of undocumented workers who are already here. They are more necessary to our economy than you think.”

One person in the audience claps.

Bird is hardly paying attention to the conversation as it unfolds, focused instead on Sonia Solanki. Her long, unaging neck and her lacquered fingernails. Her crisp, clean words and her posture, that of a dancer. Bird shouldn’t be jealous but she is, not simply because Sonia whisked Anju away, but because here is a woman entering the latter half of her years with grace, who is watched by thousands every day, listened to and talked about. Quite simply, she matters.

Does Bird? Will Anju look back on this strange streak of time and recall her with any warmth? Bird clings to the memory of Anju in the kitchen, asking the question, Did you know my mother? It was so easy to forget, sometimes, how vulnerable Anju was, how still a child full of doubt and wanting, and how the loss of Gracie had stained her as well, though she was too young to remember anything but absence.

DURING THE COMMERCIAL BREAK, Bird goes to the nightstand by her bed and from the drawer pulls out an empty chocolate tin. From this, she retrieves the last of Gracie’s letters. The paper is blue and cottony soft, the creases delicate from disregard, having been opened and read on so many occasions. There was a time when Bird knew the look of every word, could string each line in her mind’s eye like pearls on a strand.

April 6, 1988

My dear Chachy ,

It has been a long silence, but this will be a short letter. I am writing to tell you that I won’t be seeing you for some time, maybe never, unless you come to see me in Kumarakom. We have decided to live with Melvin’s mother. His father has passed away .

Just yesterday I saw a man climbing a betel nut tree — have you ever seen it? They are tall and thin, these trees. They look so fragile compared to the others. But a man climbs all the way to the top to cut the betel nut, and when he is finished, he does not climb down to climb up the next one. He throws his weight back and forth, still holding on to the treetop, so that the tree bends forward and backward, farther and farther, until he can grab the neighboring treetop and jump onto that one. The betel nut tree is thin, but you can’t break it, it’s so strong. You know my meaning? It will not break because it bends. The same with me .

I know you will say that I lost my sense of adventure. You would be right. But I have my girls now, they are my life. And we have our smaller adventures. Linno is as high as my waist — we measured. She is sleeping on the edge of the bed while I write you this letter. Anju tends to roll on top of her, even though there is more than enough room for both. For such a little one, she spreads like a starfish in her sleep. They are your girls too. I would’ve made you godmother if you were here for their baptisms, but you can be something else to them, something better. You should know these things for when you meet them, because you will someday .

Please forgive me. And don’t take too long to respond .

Your loving friend and sister,

Gracie

The television show has resumed, and it comes to Bird from the other room like the faint noise of an ocean. She remains on the bed with the page in both her hands, grateful to her younger self for preserving it. She presses the letter to her face, then her chest, and stays like this for a very long time, long after the show ends, watching the sunlight cross her lap.

The phone begins to ring, but she lets the answering machine pick up.

Ghafoor’s voice: “Bird, are you there? I don’t want to bother, but I am looking at the appointment book and it seems that you double-booked Mrs. Majmudar and Mrs. Mazumdar. Mrs. Majmudar is the one with a wedding to go to, but Mrs. Mazumdar will jump on my head if I push on her too much. I think you should call and explain, lady to lady. Bird, come now, I know you are there. Hello? Pick up, Bird. Are you there?”

And hearing her life calling to her, she puts her past back in the chocolate tin and takes up the phone.

“Yes,” she says. “I am here.”

HE JFK AIRPORT has not undergone any major changes since Anju’s last visit. Near the ticket counter, a father and son squat before their suitcases, a small one and a bulging one, trying to shift the contents so as to magically reduce the overweight status of the latter. Surrounded by soaps, loofahs, T-shirts, and boxes of Old Spice aftershave, the man and his son look mystified by the arithmetic of it all. The son mutters at the father in a tongue that Anju does not recognize, but whose tone roughly amounts to: “I told you not to tell anyone we were going back! Half of this is for people we don’t even know!” Which is a refrain Anju heard in Hindi during her first foray into an Air India terminal, where the ticket takers seemed proudly empowered by their authority to turn whole duffels and pullmans away.

In her own suitcases, Anju has stuffed a number of gifts for her family, mostly clothes, but also more selective purchases. Among them: a Jesus nightlight for Ammachi and a tiny hula dancer doll that Melvin can affix to the dashboard of Abraham Saar’s car. Its hips jimmy at the slightest tremble so the doll will hula enthusiastically on Kumarakom roads. The most impressive gift is a used book for Linno titled The History of Art . Each page is slick, with a pleasant chemical smell, the space taken up by a famous painting and a brief block of text. The yellow sun and crescent moon unscrolling from coils of gray cloud in The Battle of Alexander at Issus . The white turban of an Arab and the black top hat of an Englishman, framed by the arch of a giraffe’s bending neck in The Nubian Giraffe . “With the development of communication links,” the caption reads, “traders of the early nineteenth century were able to travel farther and farther afield and return with increasingly exotic gifts.”

She wishes she could call home, to see what other exotic and unexotic gifts her family might want, but Mrs. Solanki told her not to. “We want that element of surprise,” she said. Anju recalled Jilu Auntie’s gifts from years prior, of Tang and cake mix, so Mrs. Solanki bought ten boxes of yellow, marble, and chocolate cake mix, five canisters of Tang, and two jars of Ovaltine.

Wearing saucer-sized sunglasses that attract more attention than they are meant to repel, Mrs. Solanki pulls a mud-brown suitcase senselessly covered in gold initials that are not her own. Rohit and the rest of the camera crew keep their lives in their backpacks, having to carry their own equipment as well. The first camera operator’s name is Petra. She wears a black tank top and cargo pants; her arms are sleeved in green tattoos. At first, her mere presence seemed to inspire a sense of competition in Rohit, which gave way to intimidation, then absolute deference. At the airport, Anju overhears her directing Rohit to “stay out of her way” and to “look for the other angle.” He seems to fail both directives quite often, leading Petra to give him one of her many grim lessons.

“Don’t jump the line!” she yells at him. He keeps his head bowed. “Do you know what I mean by that? Didn’t you learn it in school?”

“I didn’t finish out the year,” he says, for the first time, without pride.

Anju feels sorry for him, especially after all that transpired, though it quickly becomes clear that Rohit not only benefits from Petra’s teachings but that he is also beginning to adore Petra of the green tattoos. He seems to delight in the way she muscles him around, the way she snaps her fingers at him, how she depends on him for extra batteries which he obediently keeps charged, one per pocket, and feeds to her like an animal trainer in full thrall of his shark.