Habitations, page 19
He bought a bag of miniature donuts, and they sat in the waiting area of one of the gates, breaking off bits of sugary crust and plying Asha as she played at their feet. “There is talk that eventually they’ll discontinue the three-engine planes,” he said. “They aren’t fuel-efficient. They’ll use them for cargo only.”
“Is that so?” Vega asked. On a few occasions, back when Suresh was more of a mystery to her, she had been touched by his affection for planes, as though it might give way to other interests and concerns, revealing a man she could spend her life with.
“Takeoff is when the engine matters,” Suresh said.
“You’ve told me,” Vega said.
Suresh continued anyway. “Landing is a different matter. That depends on the skill of the pilot. It isn’t so automatic.” They sat for another twenty minutes or so. “That was the part I most looked forward to, when I went to England. The flight.”
He had told her a little about the summer he had spent in Birmingham, but always in small bursts, and at unexpected times. Shortly after they married, he had poured a bottle of beer into two glasses and after draining his half, sat back on the lawn chair in their living room. “It was so cold there,” he had said. “Everybody was so angry with us. All the time.” One evening, in a convenience store, a security guard had accused him of stealing a pack of cigarettes and upturned his briefcase. He had stepped on Suresh’s pen, breaking the tip and smearing ink onto the floor. “They call the stores Pakis,” Suresh had said. “They call people Pakis too. Sri Lankans, Indians, doesn’t matter. They call everybody Pakis.” Most of her conversations with Suresh, until that moment, had revolved around logistical matters and cultural observations, and she had been embarrassed by his willingness to bare himself, this husband she hardly knew.
In the car, he removed Asha’s coat and buckled her into her seat, kissing her cheeks noisily, then joining Vega at the front. “We should take her back to India before her second birthday,” Suresh said. “While it won’t cost for her ticket.”
“We should.”
“Not India, only. I want to visit Houston. See Vikas. Get all the guys together.”
“Suresh,” Vega said. His name sounded strange, too pointed, given that she could not have been speaking to anybody else. She turned around and distracted herself with the rim of Asha’s car seat.
He asked if she wanted to stop at Chand Palace for dosa, but Asha snored softly from the back seat. “No need to wake her,” Vega said, and they drove home.
* * *
In bed, Winston said her name, rhythmically and desperately and sometimes, towards the end, as though it were a question. Afterwards he asked if she was cold, if he needed to adjust the heat or bring her another blanket. Once, her stomach growled as they lay beside each other, and he walked quickly into the kitchen, returning with a plate of cheese and sliced apples. He stared at her as she ate. She was not as self-conscious of her stretch marks, her body less slack and dimpled when she was lying down.
“What’s next for you?” he asked.
“In what sense?”
“I mean, after you finish your doctorate. You have to go somewhere from there. Don’t make the same mistake I did. Being so grateful that you forget to fight for the next thing. As though these institutions are doing you some favor.”
“I don’t feel they’re doing me a favor. I’ll find a position close to here, eventually.” What she considered telling him, because maybe he would understand, was how often she looked up academic jobs in impossible, far-flung towns and cities, places that were exotic to her simply because she had never before considered them: Auckland, Toronto, San Diego. Sometimes, she imagined life in Chennai. A job at Presidency or Sri Vidya. A house close to her parents.
“Why here?” he asked. “You could go elsewhere. Start over.”
“My husband’s work is here. What do you expect me to do?”
“I expect you to think bigger than your husband,” Winston said. “Bigger than your life right now.”
“We can’t all be free to think big,” she said. “At least, not in a geographic sense.” It was too narrow a response, she knew, but it was also the fullest and most encompassing truth she could manage. She didn’t want to grow old with Suresh. She didn’t want to wipe bits of his chewed dinner from the table. She didn’t want to spend her life in the confines of her marriage, but it was one thing to imagine a different future, and another to begin the process—the awful, mechanical process—of remaking it.
* * *
In the spring, Winston was invited to present at a panel discussion at Princeton, as a replacement for a reproductive health specialist who had canceled at the last minute. For two weeks he corresponded with the event’s organizer, Paul Eastman, asking Vega to review each of his messages before sending them, to ensure they contained the right balance: measured, and not too eager. He wanted her to join him for his preliminary meeting with Eastman, if only for her company on the drive to Princeton and back. “It really is our research,” he said. “It would be absurd for you not to join.”
In the car he rested his hand on her leg. He removed his jacket at a red light, pulling his left sleeve free, then extending his right arm towards Vega, a move so breezy and expectant that she knew he had done it before. She held the jacket on her lap.
She spent the early part of the morning in the library during Winston’s meeting, reading first in a dimly lit nook and later, when her eyes were strained, at a desk set among the stacks. She walked outside shortly before she was supposed to meet him and followed a circular path around the campus, sitting eventually on a bench across from the building he had entered earlier. Once she saw a man and woman who appeared to be colleagues, but as they approached, Vega noticed the intimacy with which they leaned towards each other, their shoulders grazing as they walked. She saw only one other brown face—a man in a green uniform squatting beside a rosebush and spreading mulch onto the bed.
Winston arrived thirty minutes later than expected. “No longer tentative,” he said. “Officially confirmed.”
She touched his hand, but he pulled it away and suggested they walk a bit. They found a coffee shop on a narrow street across from campus, marked by a chalkboard and single sidewalk table. Vega sat outside and watched him through the door, speaking with another customer, smiling as he placed the order and pulled a bill from his wallet for the tip jar. He returned with two paper cups. The table teetered from the unevenness of the sidewalk, and he steadied it, then folded a napkin and tucked it under one leg.
“You talk so easily with people,” she said.
“People like speaking with me,” he said. “I think it’s the accent. They find it nonthreatening.”
Vega realized a moment too late that she was supposed to have laughed. She considered sharing one of the milder observations she had made of Princeton: How unhurried the students were. How quiet and pristine it was, compared to Montclair State, even CUNY, where the sound of construction cut through classrooms. But for the first time his buoyancy annoyed her. She told him about the gardener, the only other dark-skinned man she had seen on campus. “It feels rather skewed, doesn’t it? In terms of demographics. I mean, this is what I would have expected of a university like this twenty years ago. But not today.”
“Work is work,” he said.
“You don’t actually believe that. Not fully.”
“So, what should a Black man do?” he asked. “Turn down blue-collar work because it makes white people sad? Wait until nighttime so nobody can see him?”
“I’m not white, Winston.”
“You’re not Black, either.”
“What does this have to do with your meeting? Why are you starting a fight with me?”
“I get tired of being jovial. You ever get tired of things?”
She laughed. “Yes. I do. On occasion, I get tired of things.” In her mind, she went over the things she was tired of. She was tired from the relentlessness of milk—pumping it, storing it, providing it. She was tired of Suresh’s chewing, the way he hummed softly when he read. Tired, too, of the times she was happy to see him, grateful when he drew Asha’s bath or made dinner or wordlessly folded the basket of laundry. And there were other offenses she might have talked about, if there was anyone with whom she could talk about them. At the hospital, she had come so close to an epidural. Later, the lactation consultant had shown her pictures of white infants latched to their mother’s nipples, and said, “Now, we encourage breastfeeding. Is that something you plan to do?”
“How else will she eat?” Vega had asked, to which the woman had responded: “Now, now. We ask all the new moms their preference.”
These moments had upset her, but she wasn’t sure which were prompted by skin color, and which were simply American practices. And in Chennai, when she had stomped around with the women from Mukti, she may as well have been white. She was a Brahmin woman with a clipboard, going from house to house with unsolicited advice. She had wondered, over the past months, how she would have responded had she been in the position of any of those women. Had somebody appeared at her door, handed her a bag of dhal, and questioned Asha’s protein intake.
Winston was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “People from the developing world will always be accused of being too simple and sentimental. No hard numbers to back up our research. Of course, if we are too clinical, they will call us dry and unfeeling. I need to strike a balance.”
“That’s quite a generalization, Winston. The developing world is large. I don’t imagine anybody makes the same assumptions of me as they would a villager from Bihar.”
Winston seemed to be barely listening. “Eastman never showed. He sent his researcher and another assistant professor. A guy junior to me who has to approve my talking points.”
“Did he offer any explanation?”
“You know what you said earlier? That point about nobody comparing you to a villager.”
“Yes. I stand by it. Nobody would make the same assumptions about me as they would a villager from Bihar.”
“That’s the difference. When someone follows me around a store or walks past me to shake hands with one of my white colleagues, it doesn’t matter if I’m from Kingston or Addis or Newark. Or if I grew up in a nice little bungalow or a shanty town. They don’t see a difference. When somebody does that to you, you can have an opinion on this shit.”
“I’m not from the first world, Winston.”
“That is unrelated to my point.”
“Don’t confuse me with your wife. I didn’t grow up with her socialized medicine. Do you know where good doctors in India go? They go to the States.” She was rambling now, and it felt good. She was tired of Winston. Tired of his self-importance, of his false camaraderie with the servers at Café Abyssinia, of his false claim to suffering. What had Winston ever really lost? Battles of ideas. Opportunities, maybe. But what had he ever held and loved and actually lost?
They took a different route home than they had that morning, driving along the street that, had they continued for an additional block, would have passed Asha’s childcare center. Vega turned around to see the edge of the building. “That’s where my daughter is,” she said.
Winston nodded, distracted.
“Winston. I’m sorry.”
“You’re good. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
Vega thought of asking if he wanted to stop at the center and meet Asha. She imagined the moment so clearly it felt inevitable—Winston admiring the baby, all of her fingers gripping one of his. But Winston turned and the street disappeared.
* * *
Asha refused her dinner that night and clung instead to Vega’s nipple. She woke in the middle of the night with a cry that gave, after a few minutes, a hopeful sign of dissipating before rising in volume. By the time Vega was standing over Asha’s crib, Asha’s face and shirt were crusted with regurgitated milk. Her cheeks and palms were hot and her back slick with diarrhea. Vega rinsed her in the bathroom sink, then returned to the nursery and, with Asha in her arms, slowly sank onto the floor. When she woke, Asha’s open mouth gaped around her nipple. Suresh must have slept through all of this. He was in the shower. Through the closed bathroom door Vega could hear him humming, an old Tamil film song her mother used to play. She realized, as she listened, that she still knew the words.
For the following two days, Vega worked as Asha napped on her chest, then alone in the evening in the dim light of the living room. She researched comparative rates of hypertension and dementia, then returned to an old publication of Winston’s, exploring the impact of multigenerational living on adolescent health. She compiled concise tables, sourcing each figure, and fell asleep on the couch.
On the third night, Suresh slipped behind her as she was washing dishes and put his finger on her arm, a gesture that felt warm and familiar. She thought, for a moment, of pulling his body to hers, until she realized he was not Winston. Still, she let her back rest against his shoulder.
“Let me finish this,” he said softly. “You should go and get some sleep.”
* * *
She finished Winston’s talking points the day Asha’s fever subsided, then drove to his apartment the following morning. He answered the door, shirtless and wearing only basketball shorts.
“Strong, virile talking points,” she said. “Nothing qualitative about them. Pure numbers.”
He waved her inside. “You’re funny.”
“Well. Thank you.”
“We haven’t spoken in some days.”
“I, too, noticed.” She had been awake since five o’clock, and it irritated her that Winston was still not dressed.
She sat on the couch and closed her eyes as he reviewed the data, listening to the scratch of his pen on the page. Eventually he tapped her leg.
“Am I waking you?” he asked.
“No,” she said, her eyes still closed.
“Ellie is coming to Princeton for the talk, then staying through Wednesday. I’m always grateful for your help with the course. But if you need to use your time in other ways, I understand.”
She opened her eyes.
“Vega.” He looked so small and pathetic. For a moment, she felt sorry for him.
“What do you think?” she asked. “Do you want me there?”
“I think it would be for the best if I attend on my own.”
The afternoon was bleak and meaningless. She sat briefly at the library but couldn’t focus on anything but the sounds of the other students—the shuffling and whispering and nose blowing. She searched her thoughts for a distraction, a single thing to look forward to, but nothing came to mind.
19
By the end of the semester, the thought of returning to CUNY was a relief. Vega still woke up every day gripped by sadness and boredom. Asha was a delight, but she was no salve for this particular loss. Vega missed the thrill of Winston. She missed the feeling of wanting and being wanted. Sometimes, she fell asleep thinking of him and dreamed of Naomi, waking up in a tangle of grief.
But she couldn’t go back to CUNY until she solved the problem of childcare. As Vega would no longer be a student at Montclair State, she wasn’t eligible for day care services at the university. She found two options for Asha: a dimly lit center in Denville, next to a Dairy Queen, and a bright building in Morristown that cost more than her graduate stipend, and where they boasted their use of the Singapore Math curriculum.
“Maths?” Suresh asked later. “For babies?”
“That’s what she said. And she said they have a very diverse population. She made it a point of telling me there were lots of Indians.”
“Either way will be fine,” Suresh said. “She’s a happy, healthy baby. She will adapt quickly.” He stood up, washed his plate and fork, and set them in the drying rack. It surprised her, still, how fastidious he was. He had grown up like every other Brahmin man she knew, fully removed from the labor of cooking and cleaning. Even her father, who considered himself a feminist, who devoured books by Sarojini Naidu and Ismat Chughtai, had never, in Vega’s memory, washed a single dish.
“It’s a forty-five-minute drive to either center. She hates the car. It’ll be too much for her.” She wasn’t soliciting Suresh’s advice, she realized, as much as trying to extract some sort of miraculous third option. She had known from the moment she stepped into each of the centers that neither would work. One was too grim and the other too cheery, both too far from their apartment and the CUNY campus. “You barely left the house in your first year,” Rukmini had told her, a few months after Asha was born. “I stayed with you all the time, and of course, we had the house girl. Kumari. Do you remember her?” At the time, Vega had been able to ignore her mother’s input. Now she wanted to call her, to scream into the phone, though it was the middle of the night in India. There is nothing like that here! We don’t have house girls in the States! Of course I don’t remember Kumari! She could feel the rage forming inside her. What did Americans do for the first five years of their children’s lives? There had to be some reasonable solution, something in between a building staffed by strangers and the drudgery of spending her entire day with her child.
The answer came in the form of Shoba, now six months pregnant. “You’ll bring her here,” she said. “We’ll watch her at the house. End of story.”
“That’s nonsense, Shoba. You can’t take care of her, and Tara, plus the new baby.”
“As it is, Tara has morning kindergarten,” Shoba said. “The house is too quiet. And my sister is coming to help. I won’t hear of anything else.”
“It won’t be for long. Maybe just a few weeks, until I can find a permanent solution.” That wasn’t entirely honest. Vega was aware that a permanent solution wouldn’t materialize, and she would have less time to look once the semester began. Still, it felt better to say that. It assuaged some of her guilt.
