Habitations, page 1
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For my parents
And in memory of Nana Periappa, the family storyteller
Part 1
1
Vega had been prone to bouts of car sickness as a child, but she hadn’t felt anything like this since then, when her well-being had been somebody else’s responsibility and she could bend over and everything would be set into motion—her mother rubbing her back, her father plying her with sips of fizzy water. She rarely missed her parents these days. Her mother called too often to allow Vega the chance. But now, she wanted them next to her. She wanted her mother’s cool hand on her forehead, the delicious shh of her father’s Schweppes bottle. The train slowed and screeched. She burped into her lap and was relieved that nothing came up.
Suresh was waiting at the Morris Plains station. He had changed from his work clothes and was dressed in one of his standard evening outfits: a maroon Oxford University sweatshirt and black track pants. His copy of The 125 Best Brain Teasers of All Time was lying on the passenger seat. Vega had bought the book for him at a newsstand next to CUNY and she was both touched and a little depressed by how much he seemed to appreciate it, how little it took to make her husband happy. Sometimes, she wished she could be so simple.
“You had a good day?” he asked.
“Yes. You?”
“Yes. Quite fine.”
It was nearly freezing outside, but she cracked open the window. “Did you solve any interesting brain teasers?”
He came to a complete stop at the parking lot exit and waited for what felt like a full minute until the next car passed. “Actually, one particularly good one. The name of what nine-letter animal can be spelled from the letters of ‘inauguration’?”
She tapped the word with her fingers. “ ‘Inauguration’ has more than nine letters.”
“But the name of the animal does not need to use all the letters. It needs only to be composed of letters found in ‘inauguration.’ If you think about it for even a minute, it will come to you.”
She wished he would stop talking. Her nausea was resurfacing, and the mere thought of letters—shuffling them, reading them, puzzling through them—made her want to throw up. But she was aware, too, that her reticence was the primary reason Suresh always tried so hard. “I give up,” she said. “Tell me.”
“ ‘Orangutan.’ ”
“I see. I thought of a few three- or four-letter words, but I would never have come up with ‘orangutan.’ ”
“You would if you used pen and paper,” Suresh said. “That’s the best strategy.”
Inside the apartment, Vega was comforted by the smell of onions. Suresh had cooked dinner, as he always did on Tuesday and Thursday nights, and they ate quietly. Afterwards, she joined him on the couch and watched NBC Nightly News. They had bought the couch a few months back, to replace two temporary lawn chairs unloaded by an acquaintance—another Indian software engineer who had moved to Houston. Vega still didn’t know how to arrange herself comfortably on it. Leaning against its arm, her feet eventually drifted over to Suresh’s side, sometimes brushing his thigh, and then she would begin the awkward shuffle of pulling them back.
They sat rigidly and stared at the clip that had played the previous two nights: Elián González, lying in a stretcher, his head tilted to the side and eyes wide open, his body draped in a brown blanket. “Madness,” Suresh said. “Such a small boy.”
Vega, too, found it all quite mad. She was disturbed by the wretchedness of the situation, but also by the national obsession, the use of a small child for political sport. In India, even floods and train derailments that killed hundreds held national attention for only a day or two before being demoted to small boxes on the third or fourth pages of the Hindu. She still wasn’t used to this style of American coverage, this persistence of a single, terrible story. Four years earlier, when she arrived in the States for the first time as an adult, it had bothered her to see O. J. Simpson’s face emblazoned at every Manhattan newsstand. Even her mother had been following the trial on BBC. “What kind of country is this?” Rukmini had asked. “Where men kill their wives?”
“It’s sensationalist coverage, Amma,” Vega had said. At the time, the call had irritated her. Her mother always shouted over the phone but held the receiver too far from her mouth, making her voice both deafening and barely audible. “There’s plenty of crime in India,” Vega told her. “Much of it unreported.” She reminded her that Hindu fundamentalists had rioted three years prior, killing nearly a thousand.
Rukmini, to whom a singular crime was more terrifying than a sweeping disaster, was unconvinced. “That is different,” she said. “Lock your doors and windows always. Don’t go any place on your own. Ever.”
* * *
The next afternoon, Vega sat in the office of her graduate advisor, Margo Fink. In all of CUNY—in all of New York, maybe—this was Vega’s favorite place. It was tucked into a far, quiet end of the sociology wing. The floor was covered in a worn Persian rug, and it had a distinct smell Vega loved—some combination of dust, old books, and wood polish. A framed photograph hung next to the doorway, taken on one of Margo’s annual research trips to Poland. It was the exterior of a synagogue in Kraków, an old woman resting her palm against the building’s metal gate. Vega had stared at the image for what amounted to hours, and it always stirred something inside her.
That morning, Vega had gagged while brushing her teeth. Her saliva tasted salty, then metallic. Hours later, she purchased the pregnancy test at the CVS next to Penn Station and crouched over the stick in the sociology department bathroom. As she waited for the results, she stared at a photograph on the insert of the box. A white couple was smiling, staring down lovingly, the man’s hands wrapped around the woman’s shoulders. She had found the image ridiculous and held on to it with the intention of showing it to Margo, who had laughed and said, “Maybe it’s not what you think. Maybe they were smiling because the test was negative.” Now, Margo asked, “Have you told your husband?”
To Margo, Suresh was an abstraction. Vega had only spoken about him once, in the context of her green card application, and she wasn’t sure if Margo even knew his name. “I don’t plan on telling him just yet. Once he knows, then I’ve rather made the decision.”
“I’m only asking because I want to make sure that you aren’t navigating this alone. I know you have a lot of people in your life. I hope you lean on them. Me included.”
The only person Vega could imagine confiding in was her childhood friend, Gayatri, but she was in Ahmedabad for the year on a research fellowship, sharing a flat and telephone with three other graduate students. If Vega had great or terrible news—a travel grant or a grim health diagnosis—she would have called her immediately. But this was news she did not know how to share. Her gynecologist had prescribed her birth control a year ago, shortly after she was married, and the disk sat, still unopened, in her underwear drawer. She and Suresh had sex so infrequently, she reasoned, that contraception wasn’t necessary, but occasionally she would touch the plastic container and try to make sense of these dueling emotions: she did not want a child with Suresh, but she couldn’t bear to remove the possibility of having one altogether.
That night, after Suresh went to sleep promptly at nine thirty, she retreated to her study, closed the door, and dialed her parents. Her mother picked up on the first ring, sounding, as she always did, as though she knew that it was Vega on the other end of the line. Vega didn’t plan to tell her parents the news—certainly not in its tentative, uncertain state. But hearing her mother’s voice, she wished that she could. She wanted to give them something to be happy about.
“We were thinking of you last evening,” Rukmini said. “We had idiyappam for dinner. You remember that you used to love that.”
“I still like it,” Vega said. “Did you cook or did Vasanti?”
“I supervised. She puts too much clove, sometimes. It isn’t good for Appa’s heartburn.”
Vega wanted to question the science behind this but changed her mind. “How is Appa?”
“Feeling strong. He’s gone for his morning walk. You’re studying late tonight?”
“Not too late. I have to transcribe an interview.” Vega talked for a bit about her research, and she could almost hear Rukmini’s body shifting, settling into place as she listened. Rukmini’s own career had been spotty—she’d worked on and off as a copy editor for a few science publications, always part-time, and had quit fully after Ashwini’s diagnosis—but she delighted in the professional satisfaction of her husband and surviving daughter. Vega was in the second year of her doctoral program, winding down her coursework and beginning her dissertation on unaccompanied child migration. It surprised Vega how invested her mother was in the content of this research. Rukmini had no sociological impulses of her own; she had grown up in an orthodox Brahmin family that was abjectly cruel to their house staff, so she prided herself in being a relatively progressive thinker, an upper-middle-class lawyer’s wife who paid the housekeeper a fair salary, voted consistently for Congress Party candidates, and ventured out of their
“If you ask my brothers their opinion, they will tell you that I’m a card-carrying Communist,” Rukmini had once declared.
“I’m certain nobody would make that mistake, Amma,” Vega had responded. This was when Ashwini was alive, when there was still humor in the house. Vega recalled, distinctly, that her father had laughed.
For years, all she had wanted was to touch her sister again, to braid Ashwini’s damp hair or pull her hand as they walked down the street. Sometimes, for a split second, Vega was certain that she could smell her sister—her blend of coconut oil, sandalwood talc, and adolescent sweat. Then the smell would disappear, and she would remember with miserable clarity that Ashwini was gone. Now, she half listened as Rukmini rambled about the importance of cardiovascular exercise. She wanted to interrupt her, to say, “Amma. I’m having a baby.” Instead, she sat in her dark study, mumbling in agreement.
* * *
Vega’s family had never been religious, but they observed the customary thirteen-day mourning period following Ashwini’s death. Rukmini’s brothers and their families came from Bangalore with their enormous suitcases and booming voices. Vega’s paternal grandmother arrived from Madurai and sat on the daybed, looking catatonic, gesturing to Vega when she needed a glass of water or to be helped to the toilet. A Hindu priest came to their door every day to walk them through another round of prayers. To make room for their relatives, Vega spent nights on a pallet on the floor of her parents’ bedroom. She hardly slept, and neither did they, though none of them spoke a word. In the mornings, she and Rukmini bathed and draped themselves in stiff, white, cotton saris. This was the only time, during those two weeks, when Vega and her mother were alone together. It was when she missed Ashwini most acutely, when she realized how thin their lives had become.
Vega was seventeen years old then, in her final term at Rhodes School, and had been admitted to her two top-choice universities: Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi and University of Hyderabad. She had been leaning towards JNU, but she could no longer imagine leaving Chennai, so she enrolled at Sri Vidya, a women’s college in Mylapore that she had passed countless times throughout her life. Had she attended JNU, she might have retreated more selfishly into student life. But Sri Vidya was all routine and no temptation. The lectures were easy and many of her classmates were girls she had known from primary and secondary school. She spent most nights at her parents’ house, waking up early to have coffee with them before catching the 102P bus back to campus. She avoided anything recreational—sports clubs, rotary club, the weekly co-ed mixer. It occurred to her often, as she passed students clustered in the student center or canteen, how much Ashwini would have loved college.
Throughout the thirteen days of mourning, Vega had barely been able to look at her mother. But over the coming years, as she commuted back and forth from Sri Vidya, she observed that Rukmini—in her own slow and methodical way—seemed to be surviving. She woke up every day at five o’clock for morning walks and continued her volunteer work in Tondiarpet. She cried often, but always openly, sitting on the sofa with her head in her hands and her body rocking gently.
It was Vega’s father who was slipping away. He had returned to his office at Iyer Law College just weeks after Ashwini died, but he no longer came home brimming with stories, repeating debates that had unfolded during his class or announcing which of his students had secured judicial clerkships. One evening, he quietly announced that he had stepped down from his chair as the head of the moot court.
“Let the younger fellows take over,” he’d said. His tone reminded Vega of the way she used to play carom when she was younger, a game she never really cared for, pushing the coins idly across the board, not particularly caring whether or not they struck. Vega expected her mother to reason with him, but she just said, “Whatever you need, Gopal.” Vega hadn’t realized before just how much this quality of her mother’s enraged her: the willingness to feign helplessness, as though every complex matter in the world was the domain of men.
Then a new semester began. Vega’s father went to campus and came home. On Tuesday and Thursday evenings, when he would otherwise be at moot court practice, he sat idly in their living room, watching NDTV at a volume too quiet for Vega to follow, but just loud enough to be distracting. She was relieved when classes began at Sri Vidya.
His former classmate, Naren Uncle, came to stay for a week. Vega and Ashwini had adored Naren when they were small. He was unmarried and childless, had made his money through some dubious investments in the Gulf and seemed to be spending the rest of his years ostentatiously getting rid of it. He used to visit often, and on the nights before he left, would slip a five-hundred rupee note underneath Ashwini’s and Vega’s pillows.
This time, nobody seemed to enjoy his company. His presence made the house feel cramped. One night, he took Vega to dinner at Bay Leaf. They sat at a corner table, and he ordered excessively—saag paneer, malai kofta, some odd appetizer involving fried lotus root. Vega filled her plate and forced herself to eat.
“I wish we could have convinced them to join us,” he said. “They need some joy in their lives. Even a meal in a restaurant would be good for them.”
It was such an absurd notion that it made her laugh. “They’re able to go through the motions of life, Naren Uncle. But joy is another thing entirely.”
“That is my point.”
“I don’t know if I can fully explain this to you. They haven’t been to a restaurant since Ashwini died. If they were here, they would be staring at the menu, thinking of what she would have ordered.”
“It’s painful for us all. I half expected her to open the door when I arrived.”
Vega sliced into a malai kofta with the side of her spoon and mashed it into her rice. She didn’t know how to express what she was thinking; you could miss somebody in a distant, far-off way, or you could miss them viscerally, wake up imagining their smell. But Naren Uncle seemed to move through life alone. He couldn’t possibly understand the difference.
“I need a small favor from you, Vegavahini. Would you be willing to help out your old uncle?”
“I can try, of course.”
“Good. There’s a scholar exchange program with National Law College. I’ve told your father he should apply, but he isn’t in a state of mind to take my advice. He’s more likely, I think, to listen to you.”
Vega stared at him, baffled. How could a child dispense advice to a parent? This was her father, a man whose wisdom she had never doubted, who had famously refused tenure at Iyer Law College and had written an editorial in the Hindu titled, “Returning Academic Inquiry to Indian Institutions.” When she was young, she would sneak into his study just to open his notebooks and stare at his perfect, angled handwriting. She took a bite of kofta and said, “He isn’t in a state of mind to take my advice either, Naren Uncle.”
At Iyer Law College, her father dropped one class and then a second, until he was teaching only a single seminar. He seemed to be sliding towards retirement, though he never talked about it, or made plans for his life beyond the university. And then came the stroke. “It won’t be life-ending,” the doctor had said. “But it will be life-altering.” He recommended hiring a full-time nurse, but Rukmini wouldn’t hear of it. “Bathing him and changing him is a wife’s job. Not the job of a stranger.”
* * *
In the first weeks of her father’s recovery, Vega was embarrassed by her parents’ bare emotional and physical need—the small rise of her father’s skin where the intravenous needle pierced it, and the sag of her mother’s breasts when she stood in the waiting room, crying, wearing no bra underneath her sari blouse. “I can’t bear any more hospitals,” her mother said, her head on Vega’s shoulder, in a role reversal that Vega hated. I’m the child, she wanted to say. She had been alone with her father in the hospital when he gestured that he needed to use his bedpan, and she had simply exited for the hallway, waiting not only for him to finish but for a nurse to come and clear it. A full hour passed by the time she returned. By then he had fallen asleep. The air was thick with the smell of antiseptic soap.
