Habitations, page 16
In the living room, Rakesh was holding up a signed photograph of Al Gore. “We hosted a fundraiser at the house. Just a small thing, but we managed to raise over five thousand dollars. I’m a Clinton guy, so I’m feeling very good about Gore.”
Anjali and Vega slid in and sat beside each other on the couch like schoolgirls, Vega observed, briefly forced to sit with the adults. She glanced around the room. Suresh was nodding intently. Maya was arranging scones on a plate.
“Of course, in a town like White Plains, we have so many like-minded people,” Sudha said. “A very large Jewish community here, very educated. So they gave generously. We host a number of fundraisers in the area. People take turns hosting.”
“The Clinton years were good for all of us,” Rakesh said. He had passed around the photograph. Even Sudha and Anjali took a turn with it, though they had presumably seen it before. Rakesh returned it to the mantel.
“If you hate women, they were great,” Anjali said.
Sudha ignored her. She offered Suresh milk and sugar for his tea, then poured for everyone else.
“People thought highly of Clinton, no?” Suresh asked.
He seemed genuinely curious. It was the extent of the political engagement Vega had heard from her husband. Recently, she had to gently explain that he shouldn’t use the term “Red-Indian.” “Native people?” he had asked, to which she had said, “Fine. That should do.”
“You see, Suresh, what happened over the years is simple.” Rakesh leaned over and blew into his mug. “You had benefits that were so generous that women had babies for the financial support. Clinton implemented work programs. He created incentives to get jobs. It was highly successful.”
Suresh’s nodding was maddening. Vega felt as though she were watching one of his wildlife documentaries, the prey dumbly prancing around, unaware that the predator was lurking. She always wanted to shake the screen, shout “Run!” Now she wanted to shake Suresh, tell him, “Think! Speak!” She saw the way Anjali’s eyes narrowed, assessing Suresh’s blandness, his simplicity. Had they only been with Sudha and Rakesh, Vega probably wouldn’t have registered this feeling, but in Anjali’s presence, she felt painfully embarrassed.
“Boys used to make jokes about cigars and kneepads when I was in high school,” Anjali said.
“Be appropriate,” Sudha said.
Anjali shrugged, spilling a drop of tea on the floor. She wiped it with her sock. “Well, that’s your Clinton. Good for all of us.”
They were quiet for a few moments, then Maya picked up the plate of scones and began passing it around.
After tea, Rakesh offered to let Suresh test-drive his car. “It’s not a station wagon,” he said. “We’re past those days. But it’s an Audi, so it will give you a sense of the make of the car. If that’s what you’re in the market for.”
Vega wasn’t sure if Suresh was being polite when he accepted, or if the offer actually appealed to him. Nonetheless, it was a relief to watch them leave.
“Maybe we girls can take a walk,” Sudha said. “You aren’t too tired?”
“Not at all.” Back when she was a master’s student, living in Sudha and Rakesh’s home, this would have been the moment when she invented an excuse to slip back to Manhattan. But her apartment with Suresh offered no more stimulation than the house in White Plains, so she was in no rush to go anywhere. “I’d love a walk,” she said.
Anjali and Maya joined them for the first round, then went back to the house, Anjali with a bland excuse that she needed to check her email, and Maya to watch an episode of something called That’s So Raven.
“Only one episode,” Sudha said to her sternly. They watched the girls run ahead, then she turned to Vega. “You must be feeling quite anxious.”
“Do I seem anxious?”
“Not at all. But it would be impossible not to be.”
They walked slowly, past the many Al Gore signs, and the sole George W. Bush sign. “Another thing,” Sudha said. “Many people complain about high property taxes, but the way I see it, those are the taxes that fund schools. So, you want a district where you are paying quite a bit. Make sure Suresh is aware.”
Vega had spent entire class sessions at Columbia debating the role of property taxes in school funding. But now, there seemed no point to a theoretical argument. They slowed their pace as they turned the corner onto Sudha and Rakesh’s street. “You know,” Sudha said. “Rakesh and I didn’t know each other very well before we were married. We met a few times, and he seemed nice enough. But we only came to really know each other after we were married. I couldn’t have known his opinions, his tastes. How steady he would be, but also how interesting.”
They approached the house. Suresh and Rakesh stood in the driveway, inspecting the interior of the Audi. Rakesh was explaining some feature of the seat belt, and Suresh stood with his arms crossed, nodding his endless nod. Vega could see their steadiness—husbands who cooked and cleaned, who concerned themselves with car seat installations. But interesting was another matter.
16
Rukmini arrived when Vega was eight months pregnant, and she immediately began rearranging the furniture. Suresh had finally replaced the lawn chairs with a couch and had purchased a bookshelf so that Vega’s textbooks and novels were no longer stacked against the walls. But to Rukmini, it was all wrong.
“I believe in the principals of Vastu Shastra,” she explained to Suresh. “Everything needs to be organized to facilitate light and wisdom. A proper home life.”
Rukmini had never expressed any interest in home decoration during Vega’s childhood, but perhaps Vastu Shastra was an extension of her new homeopathic lifestyle, like the elimination of rice and milk from her diet. Years back, it would all have aggravated Vega. She would have moved everything to its original place and laughed at Rukmini’s pseudo-spiritualism. As it was, she was so relieved to see her mother that she wanted to cling to her, to cry. When Vega told Gayatri about the pregnancy, Gayatri’s response was as tender as it was impractical. “Come home,” she had said. “If you want this baby, come home and let us all help you.” Now this was all Vega wanted. She wanted Rukmini to take her back home.
Suresh, as always, seemed nonplussed by the redecorating. “Thank you, Amma,” he said, and went into the kitchen to warm dinner.
* * *
Vega hadn’t taken any summer courses. With Margo’s urging, she was exploring coursework options closer to home for the upcoming semester. “You can knock a few classes out at a local university while remaining enrolled in CUNY,” Margo said. “It won’t affect the trajectory of your doctorate, and it’ll make your life a hell of a lot easier in the fall.”
Rukmini believed school could wait. “Enroll in the spring. You need to take a semester. You won’t be healed by August.”
“I’ll be fine, Amma.” But by July, the last month of her pregnancy, Vega was beginning to suspect that her mother was right.
“You don’t know how difficult it can be,” Rukmini said. “How much work there is. And who will be with the baby after I leave? How do you trust a stranger to care for a newborn?”
At the grocery store, the dairy products expired days after her due date. On the television, there were trailers for films that would be released when the baby was one month, two months old. Coming soon! Still, the mechanics of giving birth seemed impossible. She stared occasionally at a small ship encased in a glass bottle, resting on their living room mantel. Suresh had bought it before she arrived, on a beach trip with Shoba and Mohan. She had paid only scant attention to it in the past. Now, it terrorized her. The wide mast of the ship. The thin neck of the bottle. She had fantasies of cracking it open, of somehow pulling the ship loose.
* * *
Suresh was at the office when Vega’s contractions started, and even in the throes of her pain, she was grateful for his absence. What would he have done? Nodded excessively. Perhaps paced the room, practicing his backhand.
Rukmini was a task master. She boiled a pot of kashayam to speed up the labor. She rolled a tennis ball against Vega’s lower back, kneading out the pain. “One at a time,” she said. “Like you’re moving up a mountain.” She called Suresh at the office and told him to be on notice, then left a message with Vega’s obstetrician. Vega had no idea where she found these phone numbers. Were they posted on the fridge? Had Rukmini and Suresh planned these details without her notice?
Suresh came home in the early evening, said something she couldn’t follow, then went into the kitchen to rinse his Tupperware. It seemed such a mundane thing. She couldn’t imagine doing anything mundane ever again. She watched Rukmini on the couch, the laundry basket at her knees, pairing socks. The obstetrician called. Suresh answered, spoke with her briefly, then tried to give the phone to Vega. She shook her head, walked into the bathroom, and vomited.
Rukmini brought a glass of ginger ale and tucked Vega in as though she were a child. She dozed off for indeterminate lengths of time. Minutes, possibly, or maybe even an hour or two. Then the pain shot through her and she sat up, jolting Suresh awake. She wanted him to do something, anything, to move the process forward. Instead, he sat up and stared, looking small and confused. Finally, Rukmini opened the door, tennis ball in hand and said, “I think it’s time we go.”
On account of her scoliosis, a childhood condition she thought she had outgrown, Vega’s obstetrician had advised against an epidural. But her obstetrician wasn’t there when they arrived at the hospital. Instead, there was a petite nurse who strapped her to a bed and called for the anesthesiologist. Rukmini and Suresh were in the waiting room. Vega couldn’t speak through the pain, but she tried to shake her head. The nurse gave her a bowl of ice. She was wearing pink lipstick. Candy-colored. When she bent over to adjust the IV, she left a smudge of it on Vega’s gown.
Somehow, though, the shot never materialized. Another obstetrician—a woman Vega didn’t recognize—arrived in a wordless flurry. She crouched between Vega’s knees and said, “You can push now!” But the command was unnecessary. Vega could already feel the baby tearing through her. She put her hand between her legs and felt its head. There was the strange sensation of touching what should have been her body, but was, in fact, not hers. She pushed again, and the baby came out, fast and slick. There was a round of applause, as though she had safely landed a plane. She closed her eyes. Someone placed the baby on her chest. Seconds ago, the being had been inside of her. Now it was soft and sentient. It was breathing. And there was Rukmini, standing over Vega, her voice shaking. “She looks just like our Ashwini. You’ve brought her back to us.”
* * *
Suresh’s affection for Asha was startling. He swaddled and held her whenever she wasn’t nursing. He sang her old Tamil film songs, and occasionally American ones in which he bungled the words: Twinkle, twinkle, little stars.
Rukmini said, “At least he’s a natural father. Your appa was the same way, from day one. With both of you.” The comment was meant to soothe Vega, but instead it made her anxious. When she looked at Suresh, she saw the endless stretch of shared life ahead. In twenty years, in fifty years, this child would still be theirs. She would still bind them. Shoba visited, carrying Tara with one hand and a bag of aloo parathas with the other. Sudha sent a set of pink onesies, and a card on which she had written, Sending all our love! Gift receipt enclosed! Rukmini brought a green blanket, crocheted by Gayatri, using impossibly soft yarn. Vega’s father called every morning and night, his voice shaking with emotion. “Don’t forget to eat. Make sure she’s warm. Go for daily walks.”
“Of course, Appa.” Vega was eating well enough, thanks to Shoba and Rukmini, and Asha was certainly warm, having been cocooned in a blanket since her birth. But walking was another matter. Vega’s body was still torn, and the stitches felt inflamed. “It’s all perfectly normal,” the nurse said. “You’re healing just fine.” Vega doubted that, but she thanked her anyway. It was a different nurse now, with orange-hued lipstick, a powdery-looking woman who smelled appropriately like talc.
“Mine are teenagers,” the nurse said. “But I tell all our patients, I remember it like it was yesterday. You never forget it. Especially the first one.”
Vega winced as the nurse pulled up her mesh underwear. She watched her refill the ice bucket and supply of sanitary napkins, then, as an afterthought, refold the fleece blanket at the foot of Vega’s bed. She was so petite, it seemed impossible that she could ever have pushed out a child. Now she walked quickly, her sneakers squeaking on the linoleum floor. “Remember,” she told Vega. “Fluids and rest. Fluids and rest.”
But at night, when it was quiet and Asha lay, half dozing on Vega’s chest, all of these people—their advice, their gifts, their noise—were utterly inconsequential, running through her mind like meaningless song lyrics: gift receipt daily walks perfectly normal. She examined Asha’s palms and the perfect curl of her ear, kissed her mouth, wrapped her hands around the entirety of her back. She marveled over her breath, the impossible fact of her breath. She touched the scab around her belly, the remnants of umbilical cord. For the first time, the arc of her life seemed to be shaped by a peculiar and perfect logic: This was the reason behind every loss, every wayward step. This was why she had been born to begin with. So that she could make Asha. So that Asha could exist.
* * *
One month after they brought Asha home, Rukmini instructed Suresh to drive her to the mall. “You stay here!” she told Vega. “I’ll shop for you. You need more practical clothes. You can’t breastfeed in these idiot kurtas.”
Were Vega planning to go with them, she would have found the outing unbearable. As a child, she and her mother spent hours in Naidu Hall, where Rukmini pointed to every sari that caught her eye and the salesmen unfurled them for her, one by one. Rukmini would examine the fabric and haggle over the prices. In the end, she would buy nothing. They were all too plain, she would say. Or too busy. Too synthetic. Then there was the frenzied set change, the men refolding the saris and preparing for the next customer. It all made Vega cringe—the obsequiousness of the salesmen, the pile of clothes left behind in her mother’s wake. But Rukmini would be oblivious to the damage, sighing loudly, complaining that it was impossible to find good quality anymore. Even Ashwini, a devoted shopper, avoided these trips.
“You really don’t mind?” Vega asked Suresh at breakfast. He was standing next to the stove, eating his toast. The counter was scattered with crumbs. Normally, the sight would have irritated her, but now her reaction was mellowed by sympathy. She imagined Rukmini, sorting through the aisles of Macy’s and JCPenney, examining the sturdiness of each button, asking to see every sweater in a different size, accepting every sample of perfume. Then there would be Suresh, waiting on the bench in the middle of the mall, working his way through The 125 Best Brain Teasers of All Time, maybe pausing to buy a cookie from Mrs. Fields.
Suresh opened his mouth, but Rukmini spoke first.
“Of course he doesn’t,” she said. “How else will I get there? You need clothes and an afternoon alone with the baby.”
The offer of clothing didn’t much appeal to Vega. She had worn a small rotation of leggings and T-shirts over the past month. The most reliable item in her wardrobe was the old cardigan she had left behind at Shoba’s house years back that had made its way to Chennai, via Suresh. But the prospect of an afternoon alone, with only Asha, was wonderful.
Asha fell asleep shortly after Rukmini and Suresh left. Vega sat in the kitchen for a few minutes, taking in the small noises of an empty apartment—the buzz of the window unit, a neighbor opening and closing a door, a passing car. She made a messy sandwich—a fried egg with chili pickle, rolled up in an aloo paratha—and settled in front of the television. Sleepless in Seattle was just starting. Vega thought she might watch for a few minutes, long enough to finish her sandwich, but it drew her in. She had seen the movie before, with Halima, but it seemed sweeter this time, the characters more charming and the love story more plausible.
She made a cup of tea and went to her computer. There was a list of emails she needed to respond to: old notes of congratulations from her cohort, another from a professor offering her a gently used Pack ’N Play, and PDFs of articles sent by Margo. Instead, she looked up Naomi’s photograph once again on the UPenn graduate student page. She was looking to the side, her curly hair cut shorter. Vega clicked on her school email address and let her mouse hover over the name. Then she shut the computer down.
It was starting to drizzle just as Asha woke, and Vega picked her up and held her next to the window, staring at the gray of New Jersey. Then she carried her to the bed and lay beside her. The milk from one breast dripped onto Asha’s cheek as she nursed from the other, and Vega wiped it away, then ran her finger along the baby’s chin. After some time, Asha fell asleep again, the nipple still in her mouth. Vega kissed her forehead and stroked her belly. She dozed off beside her, waking only to the sound of Suresh and Rukmini coming home.
“Everything made in China,” Rukmini said, when Vega came into the living room. “But I bought you some decent wrap-dresses. That will be easy enough to use for nursing.”
Suresh had dropped onto the couch. As predicted, he was holding a wax paper bag from Mrs. Fields with half a cookie remaining. When they left the room—he to check on Asha and Rukmini to hang the clothes—Vega broke off a piece. It was macadamia nut. She let it fall apart on her tongue.
* * *
Margo visited on a Tuesday in October, carrying a box of galleys from Columbia University Press, and a copy of The Lorax for Asha. Suresh was at the office and Rukmini out for a walk when Margo arrived. Rukmini had made something of a friend, a retired gallery owner who lived on the next block, who had visited India twice, and who Rukmini described as “very cultured.” The fact of this woman was hard to believe. Vega hadn’t met any of her neighbors, beyond a passing hello. It hadn’t occurred to her that she would live in New Jersey long enough to make the effort worthwhile.
