Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

For the sake of Petra’s camera, Anju resorts to her high school vocabulary list. “I am nauseated?” She looks to Mrs. Solanki for approval of this word.

Mrs. Solanki looks deeply interested, yet perplexed by the answer. “Nauseated? Do you want to stop?”

“Not bad nauseated. Good nauseated,” Anju specifies. Complex words for complex emotions. “I am inebriated with joy.”

Y THE TIME they arrive at Kovalam Beach, Linno’s mouth is a fixed line and her lips hurt from the effort. She has privately decreed that a smile will not cross her face for the rest of the day, at least not for her mother. She imagines her smilelessness plaguing everyone in the van, a pox of guilt spreading over them until they beg her to cure them with kindness and smiles. To which, after taking a seat in the front, she does.

Her father was right, of course, about Kovalam Beach. She sifts the white dust of sand through her fingers; she tastes the brackish air. The tide slowly sticks out its tongue at the coast, then politely recedes, leaving opalescent shards of shells in its wake.

Abraham Saar spreads a large blue sheet over the sand and stakes the corners with stones. The boys run off to build a fort of sand, but seeing that they are too close to the shoreline, their mother walks over to advise them to move a few feet back. She bends over them, her braid swinging in the wind. With a stick, Linno draws her name in the sand, but Anju keeps waddling through her handiwork and finally demands the stick.

Linno moves some distance away to write her name in peace. When she looks back, she picks out her mother from the small throng of adults. Gracie is leaning onto her palm, tilting her face to the sky, while Abraham Saar lies on his side and plays with Anju. Her mother’s eyes are closed, her face relaxing with every breath. It is strange to see this combination of three, a tableau of an alternate family. Stranger still is when Abraham Saar looks up at Linno’s mother without saying a word, mired in thought. Gracie does not notice him. Linno keeps waiting for him to look away but he does not.

Just then, Gracie opens her eyes and sees Linno staring. They blink at each other, as if from across a great distance. Turning, Linno’s mother asks something of Abraham Saar, who shades his eyes and nods quickly. She rises, brushing off her knees, and approaches Linno.

Her mother stands tall and shadowy, silhouetted by the sun behind her. “Shall we go play a game?” she asks.

Quick as that, her mother offers reconciliation, but Linno does not want it yet. The impact of her anger should be more lasting than this. Despondently, she asks what they would play.

“Hide-and-seek,” her mother suggests.

“Where?”

Gracie looks past Linno, at the sickled coast of the beach. “I know a place. I used to go there with my cousins.”

Linno follows her mother down the shore. Of course she wants to play with her mother, fully aware of the precious rarity of such an event, adults agreeing to the rules of play, rules beyond their own making. But Linno deems it equally important to cling to her pouty indignation, at least for the time being, if that is what it took to get her mother’s attention in the first place.

HILDREN, on their way home from school, scuttle along the sides of roads in chatty clusters, backpacks bobbing against their narrow shoulder blades. Anju recognizes the uniform of St. Anne’s Catholic, navy jumpers and light blue blouses like the ones she used to wear, worn by little girls with familiar faces. Every face, though belonging to a stranger, is familiar.

Mrs. Solanki leans forward and taps Roy on the shoulder. “Shall we discuss how we will shoot the reunion? I’d like to make a plan so I’m prepared. Minimal surprises, you know.”

Anju listens as Roy and Petra roughly outline the proceedings, who should stand where and say what. When they are within walking distance of the house, Roy says, the crew will travel on foot so as to better capture the actual moment of embrace between Anju and her sister. That moment is “key” to the reunion itself. Petra tells Rohit to cover Anju’s left side, staying wide and out of the way. “Just look for the open angle,” Petra says. “See where I am. Don’t crowd my shot.”

Rohit says okay several times, clearly worried that he will never be able to satisfy Petra, let alone on this day, on this shoot, an event no less pivotal than a rite of manhood.

Mrs. Solanki turns to Anju. “As for you, Anju, just remember: bigger is better. You know what I mean? Don’t be embarrassed in front of the cameras. Feel free to cry if you want to.”

Anju nods and shifts her gaze out the window at the passing green. Bigger is better: she has heard this phrase before, in a sandwich place where the XL cup of soda had been replaced by an XXL tub. She wishes once again that she had called Linno ahead of time, at least to warn her of the camera carnival around the corner. Might Linno be frightened? Furious? It seems unfair to creep up on her with a lens or two, capturing her before she has assented. Anju said as much to Mrs. Solanki, days before, to which she replied, “Do you think Rohit ever asked me before he started shooting? With family, these sorts of courtesies can be ignored a bit.”

But “courtesy” is too small a word in Anju’s mind. To take a person’s photograph without her permission or awareness seems akin to stealing. And hasn’t she stolen enough?

HE SUN is slowly tucking itself into a lavender cloud as Gracie leads Linno to a solitary spot on the beach. It is a long walk away, over a small bluff, but well worth it, Linno decides, as the piles of slate gray rocks provide ample room for hiding. The water whips the rocks in great flares of foamy white. Storks perch on the higher peaks, and everywhere is the pleasant reek offish.

Gracie names four rocks to delineate the boundaries, making it impossibly easy for the seeker to find her prey. “The ocean is out of bounds,” she says.

“But why?”

“No.”

“Amma, I can hold my breath for a full minute. I was practicing.”

Her mother is unyielding on the issue of dry land. “Want to count first?”

Linno accepts with limited interest. In a drab tone, she counts from one to twenty, her hands pressed to a rock, her eyes pressed against her hands. She can hear her mother rustling off to her left. When Linno is finished counting, she turns around only to spy her mother’s toe peeking out from behind a rock not three feet away. She stares at the toe, irritated, her intelligence insulted. Here is her mother, trying to make up for betraying her in the van, but unwilling to play to the game’s fullest potential. Presuming, as always, that Linno is younger than she really is.

When it is Gracie’s turn to count, Linno prowls about with feline silence and wedges herself into the crevasse beneath a giant boulder. She must keep her body flat and her head turned to the side in order to fit. The stone smells damp and mineral, possibly the home of various wriggly things, but in true hide-and-seek, hiders make such sacrifices.

At first, Gracie searches in silence and then begins to tease Linno aloud. “Whoever wants ice cream after the game, raise your hand! Just me? I guess I’ll eat ice cream all by myself.”

After roaming around for a few more minutes, Gracie calls out: “You know you have to stay in the boundaries, don’t you?”