Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

It goes on like this, “please” and “no,” until it is clear that the woman has no intention of leaving. With a face like that, desperate and imploring, she might even follow the Kapyar home, and he is not the sort of man who would appreciate that. Nor would his wife.

“Please,” she says.

Days come in unforeseen shapes. The Kapyar thinks of his childhood, a string of pretty days until the one with the landlord and a blouse hook undone. It was not the worst of his memories but the beginning of knowledge that he did not want. And yet he never hated his mother for it. He treated her gently, aware that she deserved much more than what little this life had given her. So it is the thought of his mother as much as the plea of this woman that leads the Kapyar to nod in assent.

“Parraya,” he says. “Tell me.”

IT BEGINS WITH GRACIE, holding out a pair of white knickers, into which Linno steps while gripping her mother’s shoulder. One foot, then two.

Linno is seven and old enough to dress herself, she believes, but her mother is anxious about the choice of outfit. Linno’s navy sailor dress with white piping matches Anju’s smaller, superior version, a matching-ness that renders the smaller girl cute and the bigger girl juvenile. But Gracie could dress them in twin rice sacks for all Linno cares. Her entire being cries out for their destination: To the beach! To the beach!

Kovalam Beach. Linno’s father has told stories of sand so fine it can be sifted through a piece of silk, water as bright as the aqueous eyes of a porcelain doll. No real place can adhere to such standards, but with her father back in Bombay, Linno will forgive him his fairy tales. Her mother says he will return by the end of the month and then they will go to Kovalam Beach as a family. Until then, Linno loves the beach before she sees it because he loves it too.

“BE NICE TO ABRAHAM SAAR and Mercy Auntie,” her mother says, while waiting for the van that will deliver them to the beach. She is wearing a rose-colored sari of a slippery material that will not suffer from the saltwater. In her arms is Anju, sucking on her white piping, showing off her muffiny diaper. “This trip was his idea. He is paying for the van as well. So make sure to thank him.”

But a grown, bearded man like Abraham Saar roams above the world of puerile pleases and thank-yous. The other day, he and his wife visited Ammachi and Gracie to invite them for a day trip to Kovalam Beach. Gracie was as stiff as the chair in which she sat, but Mercy Auntie seemed warm and at ease, explaining how her father and Gracie’s father had been classmates long ago. “Just come,” she said. “Another couple is joining us. It will be a nice welcome home, don’t you think?” At first Gracie began to protest, but Ammachi encouraged her to take the children, and Linno nearly sprang out of her seat when her mother said, “All right.”

But now, the imminence of Linno’s thank-you slightly tarnishes the day to come.

When the van arrives, they squeeze into the farthest back seat. In the first row is the other couple, a dour man and his wife whose bun hangs like an overripe fruit on the verge of falling, pinned with a garland of jasmine. Behind the couple are Mercy Auntie and her broom-thin boys, who seem to believe that Linno and Anju are where girls should be — out of sight. She wants to ask if Shine feels pain when Sheen falls down, and vice versa, but Shine and Sheen glance at Linno with their round, froggy eyes and at once commit themselves to never look upon her again.

As the van rumbles to a start, Gracie nudges Linno in the arm. Gracie raises her eyebrows at the front seat, where Abraham Saar is seated next to the driver. When Linno looks away, her mother taps her elbow. “Say thank you,” she whispers.

From the back, Abraham Saar’s head looks large and hairy and indestructible. To squeak out a thank-you, to cause not only his head to turn but also those of his driver and his wife, Shine and Sheen, the dour man and the jasmine wife, seems suddenly a gargantuan task to ask of a seven-year-old.

Her mother pinches her arm. Linno jerks away.

“I thought you were a good girl,” her mother whispers, rocking Anju to sleep.

“NO,” Linno says. She is quiet, not good. These are not the same things.

Shine/Sheen glances at her, then whispers into his replica’s ear behind a cupped palm. Linno sticks her tongue out at the both of them.

“Eddi.” Her mother’s voice is knife-sharp. “Do it again and I’ll drag you back home by that tongue.”

“Everything okay?” Abraham Saar bellows over his shoulder. “Comfortable?”

“Yes, very much!” Linno’s mother says. “My daughter, she wants to say thank you, but she feels embarrassed. She’s shy.”

Linno stares at her knees, heat crawling up her throat. Every child knows that this exact sentence— She’s shy —inspires a litany of shaming responses related to Oh and Aw and Why so shy? On cue, Mercy Auntie emits an artificial awww , as if Linno belongs in a muffiny diaper of her own.

And here, her mother says the kind of thing that can destroy a postcard-perfect day. “Just like her father.”

Abraham Saar gives an awkward laugh.

Linno stares at her window, where a moth’s wing is stuck to the outside of the glass. Into the hollow of Melvin’s absence, Linno’s mother has tossed a careless joke. She has laughed at him, at Linno, at herself and her life. Last week, Linno saw how her father had grown so sickly and sad around her mother, who only recently relented over the issue of moving to America. Linno hates the idea of America. She hates that country for casting such a spell over her mother, who for so long could imagine no other life than one lived there. She remembers waking in the middle of the night, searching for her mother’s shape on the charpoy. Gracie’s voice cut clear through the dark. “Go to sleep, Linno Mol. I am here, aren’t I?” And though it was a question not meant to be answered, still it seemed open to more than one possibility.

N THE VAN, Anju takes a window seat in the back, next to Mrs. Solanki, while Petra swivels around in her row to continue filming. The sound man wedges his fuzzy microphone by Anju’s knees, while Rohit checks the batteries. Roy sits up front, gripping the window frame to steel himself against the oncoming buses, which seem to swerve around them at the last possible minute. “They really come out of nowhere, don’t they?” he remarks.

The driver smiles with his paan-stained teeth and youthfully whips the steering wheel around a charging auto-rickshaw. “This is old road,” the driver says. “No lanes, like in National Highway.”

The National Highway. The Golden Colon. Ammachi’s voice drifts back to Anju like a sweet, stale smell.

“How do you feel?” Mrs. Solanki asks, the same question she has been asking all along the way. If Anju possessed the proper words, she would say that the whole thing is strangely ordinary. The sunbright paddies and their healing greens, the buses panting plumes of smoke, the berms, the bridges, the Kalyan Silks billboard, the thickets of yellow bamboo, the coconuts and mangroves and the pile of burning trash, the rise and fall of her stomach mapping the hills and hollows of the road, the sweat and the dung, the rippling heat, the convulsed reflection of the sun in a puddle, and the ginger-colored road.

But it is exhilarating, too, to feel so ordinary in these surroundings. It is a sign of coming home.