Habitations, page 2
Vega was in her final term at Sri Vidya and had been admitted to a master’s program in Hyderabad. Ashwini had been gone four years by then, and Vega was both restless to leave Madras and resolved—by her own guilt over leaving—to make herself useful in the intervening months. After graduating, she’d moved her few belongings back into her parents’ house. She set up a radio next to her father’s bed and played BBC News during the day and Carnatic music in the evenings. She fielded phone calls from his colleagues and students. One weekend, Gayatri took the train from Bangalore, and she and Vega spent a full afternoon walking the length of the beach from Adyar to Fort George.
“What are you thinking about, these days?” Gayatri had asked.
“That’s a funny question.”
“It’s a genuine one. Tell me.”
“Hyderabad. My parents. Her, of course. She was fourteen years old, Gayatri. As I get older, I realize how young she was.”
Gayatri put her arm around Vega’s shoulders. She was the only one of Vega’s friends with whom she’d grown closer, not drifted away from, after Ashwini’s death. Gayatri had loved Ashwini like a sister, had been present for all thirteen days of the mourning period, and in their final term at Rhodes School, would come to Vega’s front steps every morning and walk with her to campus, clutching Vega’s elbow, the way they used to when they were little girls.
They stopped at Art Haus and wandered through an exhibit of photographs taken from a Kerala village. The pictures were simple: men hoisting nets from boats, women scrubbing and descaling fish. But one stopped Vega. It was of a young girl, nine or ten years old, holding a baby on her hip and looking directly at the camera, her lips pursed and her head slightly cocked. Vega stared at it until her eyes blurred.
2
Vega quickly fell in love with Hyderabad. She loved the teak-paneled library, the tiny seminar classes in which the students sat in half-moon formations around the professors. She loved the way new words came to roll off her tongue: precarity, alienation, feminist methodologies. Her grief over Ashwini was still lodged inside her like some heavy, unmovable object. Sometimes she woke up in the middle of the night, convinced she was choking. But now, for the first time, it seemed possible to continue living. She called home every week, and every week her father sounded stronger. “You’re happy?” he would ask, over and over again. “Yes,” she said each time. “I’m happy.”
Unlike Sri Vidya, a women’s college governed by a strict nine p.m. curfew, at Hyderabad, male and female students flitted in and out of the hostel at all hours. At night, a crowd gathered in the common room and tore into communal plates of biryani and potato chips. They passed around used books. “Keep it,” her classmate Sanjay had said after giving her a worn copy of The Wretched of the Earth. He was a political science student, and though Vega didn’t initially find him attractive, she liked how easily he laughed. They had a single class together, Quantitative Methods, and he began waiting for her afterwards so they could walk towards the library or canteen, or—once, with a larger group—to the Old City, where they ate massive thalis and wandered around a maze of book stalls.
She couldn’t recall what happened later. Either Sanjay lost interest in her, or she in him. But she guessed that it had all fallen apart in her second term, because that was when she’d enrolled in a course with Sukumar Reddy.
Reddy was among the younger of the social science professors. His book, Colonial Subjects, had won the 1992 Edinburgh Prize for Contemporary South Asian Scholarship. He had been educated in the States, and it was rumored that he’d turned down a position at MIT to teach at Hyderabad. His lectures were oversubscribed, and he often held them outside on the campus green, always dressed in his loose kurta and jute sandals.
“I have a thing for Tamilians,” he’d told her during their first meeting. “So much that I married a Tamil girl years back. I think I fell in love with her because of the language. It’s a beautiful language.”
“Thank you,” she’d said. It was the wrong response, though it had been a strange comment to begin with. But maybe this was how people talked in graduate school.
Reddy nodded. “In any case, tell me about your research interests.”
Vega wished that she had dressed better for the meeting. She was wearing a version of what she always wore in those days: a sleeveless cotton salwar and large, fake gold earrings. Her hair was tied back in a loose braid.
“My field is maternal health,” she’d said. “But I would like to examine the subject through a sociological lens.” Reddy was still staring at her, so she kept talking. She explained that she had grown up surrounded by the ghosts of dead women and children: her father’s brother had died in infancy and her paternal grandmother had lost a sister in childbirth. Vega didn’t register these losses as tragedies—as profound as the death of her own sister—but they surfaced in her mind throughout her years at Sri Vidya, where she’d read obsessively about prenatal nutrition, breastfeeding, poverty, caste. She rarely spoke during class and did not have a close relationship with any of her undergraduate professors, so it surprised her, now, to describe her interests aloud.
Reddy nodded along, and Vega suspected that he wasn’t actually listening, but he’d asked to see her again, and at the conclusion of their second meeting, he’d stared at her for a few heavy seconds, then said, “Forgive me if I’m embarrassing you. But it’s rare to speak with someone who expresses herself with such clarity.”
She was embarrassed, but she was also thrilled by the way he looked at her, then upset with herself for wanting to be looked at. When he’d offered to be her advisor, she’d agreed, even though she had planned on asking Professor Ramnarayan, a brilliant septuagenarian who had taught Vega’s Global Inequalities course. “I accept two, three students per term,” Reddy said. “Maximum. If you don’t accept the spot, somebody else will by the end of day. I assure you.” Looking back, Vega was astonished by the simplicity of this manipulation, how pliantly she had accepted an offer that she knew, even in the moment, she did not really want.
Their time together had become more languid. He’d usually skim her papers and spend the remainder of the meeting talking about himself: his ex-wife, his years in the States, his many funded research trips. One afternoon, in his office, he showed Vega the blueprints for a school he was designing with his daughter, Ambika, in mind. “It will be Telegu-medium,” Reddy said. “Indigenous and land-based. A working coconut farm, so the operation can fully sustain itself. We have a team of investors from Bangalore.” He had pulled Vega’s chair next to his, and his arm brushed against hers as he spoke.
“He’s divorced, no?” Gayatri asked over the phone. She and Vega talked every week, even though the connection from their respective hostels was terrible. Gayatri sounded as though she were speaking into a fan.
“It isn’t a crime to be divorced, Gayatri.”
“Of course it isn’t. But does he spend this much time with all of his advisees?”
“He’s very informal,” Vega said. “It’s his style.”
“Are the teachers volunteers? How will the farm revenue cover the cost of their salaries?”
“I don’t know, Gayatri.” The questions had crossed Vega’s mind too, but it annoyed her to hear Gayatri raise them. “I suppose that’s why they have the investors.”
* * *
Vega knew little about sex, but enough to anticipate a long seduction, a protracted period of looks and intimations and maneuvering. If she and Reddy ended up in bed, she assumed the whole thing would be made to seem like a wonderful accident. But one afternoon, he looked at her directly, then said, “I’d like you to come home with me.”
He lived on a leafy street in Banjara Hills. She knew he lived with his parents and daughter, but she was still surprised to see that his house was scattered with evidence of multigenerational living. A child’s red bicycle was propped next to the steps and a pair of slippers sat beside the door. In the kitchen, he’d fixed Vega what he called a green juice. “I drink it twice each day,” he said. “Spinach, mint, green apple, and sweet lime.” She sipped it—sour, raw tasting, bitter—and distracted herself by staring at a series of colorful drawings hanging on the wall.
“Your daughter drew these?”
“She’s my artist, Ambika. An absolute creative through and through.”
He stared at Vega until she finished her glass, then slid behind her and lifted her kurta just above her waist, running his fingers against her stomach.
Months later, after it was over, Vega mined her memories for the signs that had been so obvious to Gayatri. The way Reddy left his bed, unmade, the sheets stained and rumpled. “I have a house girl who comes,” he’d said.
“Surely she doesn’t need to see this,” Vega said, trying to sound playful. It would have been so easy to strip the bed, to spare the house girl the embarrassment of seeing the mess. But Reddy just shrugged. “It’s the girl’s job. I pay her, don’t I?”
And then there was his insistence on the verandah. “Come outside,” he always said to her after sex. “I want to see you in the sun.” Vega was conscious of the neighboring windows surrounding them. She was conscious, too, of the clothesline that hung across it, draped with his daughter’s uniforms and his mother’s saris. It was not enough to conceal her body, but enough to remind her that she had no business being there. “Nobody can see,” Reddy said. “And if they want to look, let them look.”
He liked when she sat naked on the verandah floor and spread open her knees. He wanted her to touch herself, to tell him her fantasies. By then, Vega always felt drained of fantasies. What she wanted was to get dressed and leave. She wanted to go back to her sparse, dimly lit hostel and return to her thesis.
“Have you ever wanted to be with two men at once?”
“No.”
“How about women? Are you attracted to women?”
“Reddy. Enough.”
“Do you ever want to fuck me outside?”
“The thought has never occurred to me,” she said, but she went along with it anyway, her head pushed against the verandah wall, her lower back pressed between the tile and the weight of Reddy’s body. Back at the hostel, she filled the shower bucket with cold water and scrubbed herself clean, first with sandalwood soap, and then with the Dettol that she normally used only on her hands—the smell of disinfectant taking her back to her father’s hospital room.
By the close of the term, Hyderabad had lost its shine. She didn’t feel a sense of wonder when she stepped into the library or lecture hall. The friends she made had branched off into smaller circles. Sanjay had met somebody else and usually nodded to Vega when he saw her across campus.
In May, she submitted the withdrawal forms to the head of the sociology department—a stern woman named Dr. Das, who had been Vega’s Quantitative Methods professor.
“You have decent marks,” Dr. Das said. “Will you continue your research elsewhere?”
“I hope to.” In some distant way, she did hope to. But what she really wanted was to go backward, not forward, to have another chance. She wanted to be a student at Hyderabad again, enrolling in her fall- term classes, meeting Sanjay for the first time.
“If you’ve made up your mind,” Dr. Das said, “then we can speak about some of the technical details. If you transfer to any other Indian institution, you will have partial credit towards a master’s. And if you choose to reapply to Hyderabad, we will be very happy to have you back with us.”
“Thank you,” Vega said. “I understand that.”
Dr. Das stared at Vega for a moment, then signed the paper and slid it to the corner of her desk.
For the next few days, as she floated through campus, she considered the possibility of staying in Hyderabad. She could speak with Dr. Das and tell her that she had changed her mind. She could pour herself into her thesis. But a few evenings later, she wandered past Nehru Hall and glanced into the lobby. Months earlier, at a post-lecture reception, she had come upon Reddy holding his signature gin and tonic, surrounded by a cluster of adoring graduate students. He was telling a story about his graduate school days in Michigan. “There was a custodian who worked in the social science building. African American man. Very decent man. Once a week or so I would bring him coffee. We would sit and talk about history, philosophy, science. On my final day, he said to me, ‘You know, Professor? Of all the people who work here, you are the only one—the only one—who has ever asked my name. I told him, ‘You and I are brothers.’ I pointed to my skin and I told him, ‘We’ve both been subjugated.’ ”
Reddy had told Vega this story before. Even then, in the haze following sex, it had seemed riddled with improbabilities. Listening to its retelling, she had seen Reddy in a new light: a man who contributed nothing to the world, who peddled false injustices and made his living by crafting false solutions. She thought of the homeopathic doctor Rukmini had visited years ago following some abdominal pain, who had massaged various pressure points on her foot, diagnosed her with something called mood imbalance, then offered to sell her a homemade remedy at a special price.
She sent Gayatri an email later that night. She wanted to avoid the back-and-forth of conversation. I can’t stay here, Gayatri. I’m too damn embarrassed.
A few hours later, Gayatri called her anyway. “I want to make sure that you aren’t sabotaging this because you feel guilty living your life.”
“I said that I was embarrassed. Guilt has nothing to do with it.”
“She would want you to be happy, Vega. If she were alive, she would want you to continue with your life.”
“That is a very untestable theory, Gayatri. How can you know what she would have wanted?”
Gayatri didn’t answer that question. Instead, she said, “One of my hostel mates keeps a cat. It’s against school rules, but she keeps it anyway. And it just reminded me of Ashwini. It’s something she would have done.”
When Ashwini was ten or eleven, she and a group of friends had found a litter of kittens near the campus at Rhodes. There were seven of them, still hairless. Ashwini managed to procure a box from one of the cooks at the Rhodes canteen, and there was some level of fuss and school-level celebrity that she enjoyed on the day of the discovery. This ended as soon as they arrived home. Rukmini—who was terrified of all animals—determined that the kittens were rabid-looking and commanded Vega to take them to the veterinary clinic at the Theosophical Society.
For the next several weeks, Ashwini insisted on going to the clinic every day after school. Vega found these visits miserable. She hated the combined smell of sawdust and animal piss, the sight of the kittens tumbling blindly in their box—it was the same box in which they had transported them, but the clinic volunteers lined it with newspaper that they swapped every few hours and was always streaked with shit. Mainly, she hated the fear that they would approach the box and find that the number had dwindled to five or six, and Vega had wanted to spare Ashwini what seemed like a terminal and useless affection. “Maybe it isn’t a good idea to name them,” Gayatri once told Ashwini when she joined them for one of their clinic visits. “Maybe wait until they’re stronger.”
“I already named them,” Ashwini said. “I can’t un-name them.”
One day, when the kittens were roughly a month old, the box disappeared. From what Vega could gather—the clinic director spoke a fast, colloquial Tamil that Vega sometimes struggled to understand—they had separated the male and female kittens and sent them to the clinic’s outpost in Avadi, where they would be spayed and neutered and generally left to roam. To Vega, it seemed like the best possible outcome. But Ashwini was distraught. “I wanted to adopt one,” she’d cried to Vega. “Amma promised me.”
Years later, after Ashwini was gone, it occurred to Vega that the kittens—at least some of them—had likely outlived her sister. At the time, she’d simply let Ashwini climb into her bed at night and cry herself to sleep. “I liked the orange one best,” Ashwini said. “I named her Limey.”
What sort of name was that? Why would anyone name an orange kitten after a lime? But Vega just said, “I know,” and let her cry.
Now, Vega held the phone and listened to the staticky sound of Gayatri’s breath. She had a stupid hope that Gayatri would offer to come to Hyderabad and help her pack, then usher her onto the train and take her back to Madras. She thought of her final term at Rhodes, when Gayatri came to the house every morning to walk Vega to campus. How impossible it would have been to do it alone.
* * *
Vega told her parents that she withdrew from Hyderabad because she was homesick. It was a weak lie. Gopal’s university connections ran deep, and Vega suspected they knew some version of the truth. But they never spoke of it directly, and for that, she was grateful.
“You need to return to your thesis,” Rukmini had said one evening. They were walking along the beach. Vega was distracted by the sight of a young couple stepping into the waves, the woman laughing and jumping back when the water touched her feet. She found this type of thing intolerable. That female coyness. The pretense of surprise.
“I don’t have a thesis, Amma.”
“Then what have you been doing this past term?”
“It’s only a thesis if you have an advisor. Otherwise it’s nothing. It’s a long essay.”
“Then return to your long essay. If you don’t work today, then you won’t the next day. Or the day after that. Every year is only a culmination of days.”
“I’m not interested in the subject any longer. That’s why I’ve been spending so much time in the library. I’m rethinking my research.”
It was true that she spent most afternoons at the library, either at Iyer Law College, where her father had faculty privileges, or at the British Council, which was beautifully appointed but strangely empty of any books she actually cared to read. “You can place a request, ma’am,” the librarian said. “If the book is in our collection, it will arrive in four, five days maximum.” But by the time the books arrived, Vega’s interests had wandered again, and she’d place another request, knowing she would not bother to read those, either. She had gone to Hyderabad certain of her interest in maternal nutrition, but her repeated afternoons with Reddy had shifted the focus of her thesis. Now it was scattered, a series of arguments about colonialism and land rights that she was not even sure she believed. More immediately, she didn’t know where she wanted to study. She had been back in Madras for a full month at that point and could neither imagine leaving nor staying another day.
