ATLAS of UNKNOWNS Read online

  For the sake of Linno’s rehabilitation, Melvin fashions himself into a general of optimism. Everything, he announces, is mental. If Anju, tugging at her sweat-stained blouse, complains about the weather, Melvin replies, “All in your head. Think positive. Think cool.” He once catches Ammachi weeping while praying in her room, asking God about fate and suffering and other not-positive topics. The next day, when Ammachi opens her prayer book, she finds a magazine clipping inserted between the Psalms. “Today Is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life!” She uses it to line the floor of the chicken coop.

  For Linno, Melvin buys a new writing tablet whose cover displays a cartoon elephant in a tiny pink skirt. The pages are thin and gray, with faint blue lines. Using a ruler, he draws dashed lines across the page, like fences, and sample letters at the beginning of each fence.

  While her classmates are reducing fractions, Linno is struggling with the alphabet. Until lunch, she sits with her right wrist fixed to the top of the page, the book drastically slanted, her left hand gripping the pencil so hard that the lead breaks. Trying to muscle a steady grace into her left hand—this is not unlike an elephant squirming itself into a skirt.

  For months, Melvin makes her begin each day with penciling while he watches and offers bouquets of positive wisdoms loosely translated from the English: “Every cloud has silver in it.” Or: “If someone gives you lemons, make a glass half full of juice.” The quotations were imported straight from America, via a faded self-help booklet written by Dr. Roy Fontainelle that Melvin found in a book stall. The booklet inspires nothing in Linno but irritation. She hates Dr. Roy Fontainelle, with his fishbowl glasses and salesman smile, for using her father as a puppet of positive talk. Hers is a misguided hatred, she will later understand, but it is hate that steers her around the wallow of self-pity. It is resentment that pushes her pencil up and down her father’s fences while he sharpens her pencils with a kitchen knife. It takes months for her hand to fully relax around the pencil, but gradually her letters grow less wobbly. Full sentences begin to walk smoothly across the page with a measured calm, hardly a stutter.

  Apologies and gratitude would embarrass Melvin, who, likewise, is not given to dispensing praise. There comes a day when he simply stops glancing over her shoulder and speaking on behalf of Dr. Roy Fontainelle. This is also the day he opens her elephant notebook and tears her new signature from the corner of a page. That scrap seems to him like a picture of her, more truthful than any on film.

  · · ·

  LINNO NEVER NOTICED how quickly the days were rushing by so long as she was swept up in them. But having spent the last two months of school homebound, she returns to find the classroom an altered ecosystem. Her peers have not only surpassed her in studies, but new inside jokes are leaving her on the outside. Girls are wearing jasmine bracelets around their left wrists. There are stories and memories to which she can only listen, popular film songs to which she does not know the words. Her classmates have grown at accelerated speeds, in ways imperceptible to the common adult eye. Linno, in the meantime, has changed only for the worse.

  She trudges between classes, her wrist tucked into the pocket of her gray school skirt. She catches other children staring, if only to glimpse what is within her knotted sleeve. Linno is the only student allowed to wear long sleeves among the dozens of bare brown arms and ashy elbows.

  One morning, during the earthworm dissection in science class, Linno excuses herself to the bathroom. Opening the door, she is welcomed by the dull stench of bat droppings collected along the sinks; her eyes go to the eaves, where the culprits are roosting. Asleep, the bats are a ceiling of fuzzy heads tucked within leathery wings, but startled by her noise, they ripple into a cloud and escape out the window.

  Dank as it is, she takes shelter in the sludgy drains and slimy walls that she remembers, the white nub of soap whose cleansing properties are questionable. She tries to forget how her teacher has just impaled a long pink worm to the tray of tar, between two pins, its shiny ends still writhing. Soon she will have to return; every comfort has its limit. But she continues to rinse her hand beneath the faucet’s drizzle for longer than necessary.

  Two girls enter the bathroom and, upon seeing Linno, lower their voices. Linno turns off the water. She has seen these girls and knows them to be older from their single braids.

  Linno is about to move past them when the tall one addresses her: “Eddi. Don’t you have to wash your other hand?”

  Linno’s feet feel stuck to the floor. She has no idea what to answer, except that she does not have an other hand.

  “What does it look like?” the second girl asks, flicking her chin at Linno’s knotted sleeve. Her smile is almost kind, almost. “You can’t show us?”

  “She can,” the other one says.

  As Linno moves past them, her eyes on their blue chappals, she notices that the tall one has two wiry hairs on her big toe. In science class, they learned that having hair on the toes is the result of a dominant gene, and some girls curled their toes under, ashamed.

  The tall girl grabs Linno’s right arm, a gesture that could seem playful, but Linno pushes her away with undue force, sending her staggering back a few steps.

  Dominant, recessive. Tiny struggles turned large. Linno steels herself.

  And then the girls are upon her. The back of Linno’s head hits the wall. She squirms, but there are two of them, laughing at the ease of it all, one with a hand over Linno’s mouth, the other clawing at the knot. The tall one squeals at the other to look at it, look at it!

  It is here that Linno stops struggling and wilts under their weight. She looks at her wrist, a bump smooth as stone, the bone jutting sharply beneath, and a dark, shiny welt seaming the skin back together. For the first time, Linno sees it as they do, freakish in its simplicity.

  The girls release her wrist and step back. They exaggerate their disgust with wrinkled noses and frowns. “Tie it back up,” the tall one orders, as if Linno forced them to see it. But Linno remains pinned to the wall, hardly noticing the sound of their soles peeling from the ground, the door swinging shut behind them.

  By the time Linno goes to the sink, she does not know how many minutes have passed. Using her teeth and her left hand, she reties her knot. She smooths her hair. With her fingertips, she drops water into her eyes, to flush the red from the white, and returns to class.

  ON THE RARE OCCASION that an assignment requires drawing, Linno excels. Her maps of India and the state of Kerala are scaled and detailed and gaudy as treasure maps, with color pencil legends of sprawling palms and scalloped water waves, tiny symbols of tea leaves and rice sacks to represent the regions where those industries are thriving. While she draws, the classroom falls away. She keeps her chin tucked, her shoulders hunched, as if she might dive into the page.

  But words leave her when she is called upon to read or answer a question. “Speak up, SPEAK UP,” her teachers demand. With every order, she shrinks.

  Another year goes by like this, with Linno forced to repeat the same grade and Anju surging ahead. Family friends ply Ammachi for hints to Anju’s academic success: What does the girl eat? How much does she sleep? When and to which saint does she pray? Ammachi refers to a stockpile of “brain foods,” the tried-and-true diet of intellectual warriors, which includes raw almonds and spinach and Tang over ice. Yet no snack or prayer can account for the fact that Anju can rattle off multiplication tables and African capitals as one might recite her own birthday. No rival can jostle the edifice of her accomplishments, top rank in all her exams and champion of the statewide Kerala Bible Bowl three years in a row, from age nine to eleven. After retiring from the Bowl, Anju skips a grade and Linno again falls back, resulting in their side-by-side seating in Math.

  At twelve and sixteen, the Vallara sisters are known as the bookends of the class, both in age and intelligence. On the first day of school, Anju pretends not to notice the general classroom murmur and busies herself by selecting pencils from her National Geogra
phic pencil tin, unaware that her new peers refrain from childish pencil tins. Linno, meanwhile, can feel herself petrifying, growing solid as the bench on which she sits, trapped by the table in front of her. She stares out the window, at a tree thick with birds. Without warning, the birds leap from the tree in one gray conflagration.

  Sister Savio takes roll call. When she arrives at Linno’s name, she looks up from the spectacles that she wears on a chain around her neck. There is Linno, a head taller than Anju.

  “And Linno Vallara,” Sister Savio says. “Next time sit in the middle of the bench. You’ve gotten so big you might tip the whole thing over.”

  Anju goes still, but Linno can sense a quivering within her sister, from rage or maybe sadness, almost imperceptible, a silent tremor as laughter travels around the room. Linno smiles at the surface of the desk, one long crack forking into two like the lines that frame Sister Savio’s lips. One must smile at the ridicule, or be consumed.

  LINNO NEVER RETURNS to school. To Melvin, she argues that Ammachi is growing older and slower, and help is needed around the house. “Why pay for a servant …,” she begins to say, before realizing the logical end to this sentence: when I could be the servant?

  Her father hardly fights her on the topic, as he has just lost his chauffeur job with a wealthy couple, the Uthups, who are moving to California. It is a common sight these days, so many beautiful white houses, all empty, undwelled, like moneyed monuments to the pursuit of wealth made elsewhere. Jobs are scarce so men and now women, bearing degrees and suitcases, are pouring into other countries or going north.

  Melvin was once one of those men, peering hopefully through the barred window of a train bound for Bombay, a journey he would later count among his greatest mistakes. Those were optimistic times, but now, for Melvin, optimism does not seem to apply.

  “Money leaving my pocket faster than it’s coming in,” he sighs.

  FOR LINNO, a day spent at school yawns endlessly. A day spent at home is a constant race with the sun.

  Linno cooks, sweeps, scrubs, pickles, washes, whisks, dries, irons, and answers the door and the phone. Within the walls she knows, she quickly learns her way. The failure of chewy papadam is brief, excusable, and the very next day, she seals the papadam into an old biscuit tin so that they retain their crisp. Ammachi is happily relieved from most of her duties, so when the traveling handicrafts salesman asks for the woman of the house, Linno answers to that title. He hesitates only a moment before calling her Auntie, which seems to Linno, at sixteen, something of a compliment.

  Melvin finds a job with a tea estate, driving a lorry that ships crates of tea to purchasing agents in Kochi. The cab of the lorry is a carnival of blues and pinks and greens, flourishes and florals painted along its sides and below the name: Erumathana Tea Estate, though he would have preferred a girl’s name to join the ranks of Priya Mol and Annakutty and all the other lovingly named lorries on the roads. Each evening, Melvin shines his lorry’s yolk yellow hood and complains if so much as a small pothole imperils the tires. “If only the Golden Colon came to our house,” he says. The National Highway was all but abandoned in Kerala, after newspapers reported rumors of corruption amid resignations. To Ammachi’s relief, the provincial curves and gullies have remained, but the growing number of cars still bothers her. Wealthy families have two, and the round-eyed Ambassadors of old are slowly being retired for Korean and Japanese models.

  “In town you can hardly breathe the air anymore,” Ammachi complains. “Someday we won’t see the stars.”

  “World is changing,” Melvin says to Ammachi. “Two options: eat or be eaten.”

  This is his attitude on the days when it seems that Melvin is the eater. Then there are other days when he is told to stay home, as there are too many drivers and lorries, not enough crates. During those times, Melvin wonders if he should sell off the land that came with Gracie’s dowry, a small stretch of teak trees that he was planning to divide between his daughters for their own dowries. But he cannot bring himself to carve up their inheritance. He simply watches as his paychecks thin, vanish, and he waits, heart suspended, for his wages to return the following week.

  3.

  Y THE TIME LINNO REACHES NINETEEN, Melvin has collected too many of her drawings to fit into the cigarillo box, which seems a shabby place to put them anyway. So with an absolute faith in the capabilities of his hands intrinsic to many a man his age, he decides to make her a sketchbook.

  This is during a lull in his lorry job, after he has already completed other manlier tasks in order to distract from the most vital of these—bringing home a paycheck. He has patched up the hole in the outhouse wall. He has pulled a whole new batch of ola fronds onto the roof. And now, after running out of tasks: the sketchbook.

  THRESIA PAINT HOUSE is owned by Kochu Thresia, a compact bundle of a woman who has a habit of cracking her knuckles whenever Melvin speaks, smiling all the while, as if his very presence is a question she yearns to answer. Though she has always seemed sweet on Melvin, he hardly thinks of women anymore, having assumed that the libido-centered lobe of his brain has iced over, gone dead, except for those moments when a certain lady reporter’s sweltering alto comes over the BBC radio. He is soothed by the thought that there may yet be some life beneath the ice, but Kochu Thresia would not be able to restore it. She has so many moles on her face that he has a hard time looking at her without trying to mentally connect them.

  As smitten as she is, Kochu Thresia readily agrees to teach him how to make a book. He buys twine, reams of drawing paper, and two thick pieces of cardboard. She shows him how to line up the holes along the spine, how to fold the pages into valleys. She gives him a leftover can of paint, a regal red, with which to paint the covers. Happily bemoaning the ineffectuality of men, she takes over the task and stitches the pages together herself.

  After dinner the next day, Melvin presents the book to Linno. He has never made anything for anyone, as far as he can remember, at least not since he was drawing pictures for his mother at age six. The whole ceremony of it all suddenly seems childish. A simple bracelet or necklace would have been more appropriate, black beads on a gold chain.

  Linno lifts the book into her lap and stares at the cover. She thanks him quietly, her fingers gliding over the blank pages as if she can see sketches yet to come. Ammachi asks how he crafted such a sturdy, handsome thing, and Melvin admits a tiny bit of guidance, though he prefers not to specify from whom.

  “Look what he made,” Linno says, offering Anju the book. “Kando?”

  Anju reaches out and strokes the cover, then rubs her fingers against each other. With a vague smile, she says it is nice.

  AROUND THIS TIME, Melvin receives a used television from Mr. Uthup, who has returned to sell his property. “For your faithful service,” Mr. Uthup declares, waving to the small, surprisingly heavy television behind him. Melvin hefts it onto a borrowed wheelbarrow which he pulls all the way home, picking up a pain in his shoulder along the way. The family gathers in the sitting room, patting the thing, dusting it off, fiddling with its antennae, ogling its backside, waiting for something besides snow to show up on the screen. Melvin’s cousin Joby, who works for the cable company, gives him a discount on the monthly package, whose installation introduces the family to a selection of semi-clear, colorful channels. Immediately Ammachi befriends the television, enjoying its company to a greater degree than she did the radio’s. Mostly she watches the news.

  But Melvin grows to dislike the very gift he brought home. He does not enjoy the fact that the news is now ever present in his sitting room, a guest that brings unfamiliar faces to dinner (one of whom, the BBC lady reporter, has turned out to be a high-pitched man). Melvin tries to watch as little as possible until an evening in September, when he cannot bring himself to turn the television off.

  Family and neighbors gather in the sitting room to watch a plane stabbing an American building through its middle. Another clip shows the building fall while its sister bu
ilding remains standing, and then another clip in which the sister, too, gives out in a swarm of dust. Over and over, the buildings are folding. Melvin remembers watching the Windsor Castle Hotel rising up in Kottayam over the course of a year, but to watch an even taller building fall in a matter of seconds is like watching rain in reverse, flying back up into the clouds.

  Violence seems a global contagion. Later that year, Melvin finds himself sleepless in front of the television again, as India and Pakistan toe the Kashmiri Line of Control. Political pundits foresee nuclear fates. India points a finger at Pakistan. America warns against pointing fingers; the following year, it points its own at Iraq. The television shrinks the world and drops it in Melvin’s lap, a Pandora’s box of terrors that seems to show how these days every country is stepping up to some line or another, lines that have grown filament thin and are easily crossed, lines that lead nowhere but form a web that make it impossibly unclear who is on whose side anymore.

  4.

  T TWENTY-ONE, Linno goes in search of a job at the Princess Tailor Shoppe, something small to pad the family income. She has been coming to this tailor for years, a stout, laugh-less woman who grows incensed if a customer’s opinion conflicts with her own. “You want to be a seamstress?” the tailor asks Linno, eyebrows raised behind her spectacles, implying what the other seamstresses think. They are Linno’s age, perhaps younger, one waifish and one chubby, both with oiled braids and chalky hands. The waif darts looks from behind her Usha sewing machine, a blue sari blouse passing beneath the needle. The chubby seamstress is sitting down to her lunch, a steel tiffin of rice with a pocket of vegetable curry. The whole shop is a room no larger than the sitting room back home, with a back doorway that opens onto a dusty patch of yard beneath the bare blue sky.