Habitations, page 28
“Very well. He wakes up once at night, only.”
“Rupa offered to let Asha stay with them, but I don’t want them to feel any pressure.” Vega looked through the window again at the girls. Asha had been fixated on Vikram, insistent upon sleeping in Suresh and Rupa’s house so she could see him first thing in the morning, but Vega wondered if her preference had shifted in the past ten minutes. She, Tara, and Veena seemed entirely lost in their private world.
“There’s no pressure,” Shoba said. She adjusted the flame beneath a pan and set to work rolling out balls of chapati dough. “She should sleep where she is comfortable. It’s like one big house, between the two. There’s no difference.”
Vega went to the bathroom to wash up. When she came back, Suresh and Mohan had wandered in from the garage and were standing in the living room, locked in conversation about floor insulation. Vega last saw Mohan nearly four years ago, during Christmas. Since then, he had shaved his mustache and lost a bit of weight. Had they passed each other on the street, Vega might not have recognized him. Now, he gave her a stiff handshake, then patted her on the arm as though she were a grown nephew, home for a visit. “Everybody looks well,” he said.
“We are well. The girls seem so happy to be together.”
He nodded and gave a small, measured laugh. “This is all they’ve talked about this week. Every morning they ask, ‘When does Asha come?’ ”
They joined Shoba in the kitchen. Suresh chopped cilantro. Mohan took over the chapatis while Shoba called the girls in for lunch. Vega, whose reputation for culinary incompetence seemed to have clung to her, was tasked with setting the table. Afterwards, she joined Suresh at the cutting board. Mohan was within earshot, but he seemed, as always, not to be paying attention.
“You must be tired,” she said. “The first month is so difficult.”
He smiled. He had finished with the cilantro but was still staring down at it, almost dreamily. “It’s wonderful. But also, you worry about every small thing. Is he eating? Is she recovering?”
Vega had a memory of him in the days after Asha was born, tucking her swaddling blanket around her, rocking her to sleep. She recalled the way he struggled with the car seat (“the Octopus!” Rukmini used to call it. “So many bloody straps!”), always jostling the baby awake in the process of buckling her. Vega had been so battered by labor, so physically swollen and emotionally lost, so tired of his clumsiness and her mother’s commentary. It had never occurred to her to ask what he was feeling.
The girls tumbled in, then followed Shoba’s instructions to wash their hands. When they were all seated at the table, Vega took them in for the first time. Tara, now ten years old, with a wide smile and glasses that kept slipping adorably down her nose. Veena with two braids and a pink headband, reaching for the chapatis.
“We played ‘running bases,’ ” Tara announced in English.
“You taught your cousin all the rules?” Shoba asked in Tamil. To Vega, she said, “This is a game they love, but they are always complaining that you can’t play with only two people.” She passed the pot of avial to Mohan, who scooped a helping onto each child’s plate. Vega was relieved to see Asha eating with the same enthusiasm and familiarity as Tara and Veena. She didn’t seem to share Vega’s trepidation, her feeling that she was a guest in a life that had, at one point, been hers.
There were some logistical uncertainties to the afternoon. Asha wanted to see the baby, but she also wanted to keep playing with Tara and Veena. In the end, it was decided that Suresh would bring both Asha and Vega to the house for an hour, then drive them back as soon as Vikram had gone down for his next nap. “We’ll have a big sleepover tonight,” Shoba promised. This seemed to settle Asha’s concerns.
“This is a lot of driving for you,” Vega said, when she and Suresh were in the car. In the back seat, Asha was dozing off. She looked soft and babylike, the way she always did when she slept.
“I don’t mind. As long as she has a nice time.” After a few quiet moments, he said, “Shoba is always reminding the girls to speak to her in Tamil. They start school and they forget. Most of their friends are Americans. A few Indian girls, but those are mainly Gujaratis.”
“In all fairness, I’m not sure how to say ‘running bases’ in Tamil.”
He glanced at Asha in the rearview mirror. “She understands well, it seems. When we speak to her, she always follows.”
It was a reprimand dressed as a compliment, and Vega wasn’t sure how to respond. Of course Asha understood Tamil well. But she had not initiated a conversation in anything besides English since their first months in Baton Rouge, when she was a toddler, using what turned out to be the last reserves of Tamil that Suresh had given her.
“I’m trying my best, Suresh,” Vega said. It was a child’s trick, trying to sound mournful enough to elicit sympathy she didn’t necessarily deserve. She remembered Winston, sitting across from her at the cramped corner table at Café Abyssinia. “When she gets older, and starts responding only in English, then what?”
* * *
Vikram had enormous eyes and a catlike yawn. He settled easily onto Asha’s lap and Rupa held them both, guiding Asha’s hand to support his neck. Vega had expected her to look swollen and matronly, similar to Shoba, whose body had taken on a permanent softness after Veena’s birth. But she was trim, almost muscular. Earlier, Vega had noted the new addition of a treadmill in the basement, and next to it a Discman and odd assortment of CDs: Phil Collins, Bollywood Dream Themes, The Phantom of the Opera.
Later, when Suresh was giving Asha a bath, getting her ready for her sleepover with her cousins, Vega and Rupa sat in the living room—Vega holding the baby—on the same couch she and Suresh had owned in their Parsippany apartment.
“Suresh is so impressed with your writing,” Rupa said. “He has been telling everybody.”
“That’s kind of you, Rupa. Thank you.” Suresh had been surprisingly enthusiastic about Vega’s article, subscribing to the Nation, calling Vega the morning it was published and emailing her often to share articles about the original Supreme Court case. “The detail that puzzles me,” he said, “is that the judge who wrote the opinion was himself foreign born. An Englishman. It’s rather fascinating.” He had run off multiple copies and sent them to both her parents and his, through one of his cousins who was flying to Chennai. “You’re quite famous!” Rukmini shouted into the computer. “News has reached us all the way from New Jersey!” Her father’s response was crisp. “I have checked all of your citations. Very thorough research.”
Vega stretched out on the couch. She had forgotten how contagious an infant’s drowsiness was. She wished she could place him on her chest and fall asleep, the way she used to with Asha. “Your mother is coming soon, no?”
“July end. She has a three-month visa.”
“And Suresh says you’re returning to work in August.”
Rupa smiled. “When I first told him this plan, he was upset. He was worried it was too early.”
It surprised Vega, this sliver of insight into their marriage. She did not think of Suresh as a protective husband, or even a particularly opinionated person, nor did she think of Rupa as someone so resolute. Now, she listened as Rupa talked about her commute and her upcoming clinical rotations, her interest in emergency medicine, and Vega was struck by the solidity of it all: Rupa’s plans. The life she and Suresh were building.
Later in the hallway, as they waited for Asha to get dressed, Suresh said to Vega, “I wish we had arranged for her to spend some more time here. I could have flown to Louisiana with her at the end of the summer. Even a few weeks would have been nice.”
“It would have been too much for you this summer, Suresh. You can’t be responsible for her right now, in addition to a baby.”
“Shoba would have helped. It would have been no extra work, really.”
Vega tried to think of a new explanation, but nothing came to mind. There was no reason she couldn’t have arranged her summer so she and Asha could be in New Jersey. Her own teaching load was light—a single graduate seminar. Asha spent most of July and August at the same LSU science camp she had attended for the previous two years, a pleasant but unremarkable place from which she returned every afternoon, clutching ziplock bags of homemade slime or the contents of dissected owl pellets. But every year Vega treated the start date as sacrosanct, a deadline by which they needed to be back home.
Asha came out from the bedroom, dressed in her pajamas, smelling like baby soap. Suresh directed her to the bedroom, where Rupa was nursing Vikram. “Say good night to your brother and Rupamma,” he told her. Vega watched her bend over to kiss the baby, her wet hair falling in his face.
* * *
Vega spent the next day in a satisfying flurry of errand-running. Rupa’s car was low on gas and due for an oil change, she had run out of nursing pads and a particular type of fenugreek tea that could only be found at the Indian grocery store, and she needed to fax a copy of her green card to the student records office. “It will require some driving,” Suresh said. “There are limits to what Shoba can provide.” In Vega’s memory, it was the closest he had come to a joke.
Vega adjusted the seats and mirror in her old car. She avoided the highway, taking the long route to Patel Brothers Grocery. Along with the tea, she bought a box of mangos for the three girls and a bag of the spiced cashews Suresh liked. She initiated the conversation in Hindi at the cash register, and later at the gas station where a man named Yashdev tended to Rupa’s car, explained the importance of engine maintenance, and told her about his son who had received a full scholarship to study accounting at the College of New Jersey.
There was a line at the Office Depot, and she stared at the photograph on Rupa’s green card as she waited in line to fax the forms. Rupa had a steady, determined gaze. She was wearing a white blouse. The green band at the top of the card read United States of America Permanent Resident.
“We get a lot of these,” the man operating the fax machine said.
“I imagine,” Vega said. “There are a lot of us.”
She was in no rush to return to either house. Rupa and the baby would be sleeping, and Suresh and the girls had set off for a day at a petting zoo. She drove towards Montclair. There was no reason to think she would run into Winston, certainly not on a Saturday in the summer. But she was in the mood for a drive, and once she exited the highway the roads became achingly familiar. She drove through downtown, past Mediterranean grills and Latin American grocery stores and brick buildings with red awnings. She found Café Abyssinia and went inside. She remembered it as a dimly lit place, an enormous portrait of Haile Selassie at the entrance, and aside from herself and Winston, occupied only by middle-aged Ethiopian men. The portrait was still there, but now the area was brighter and more spacious. She sat at a table next to the window and ordered a plate of sambusa. There was an East Asian couple next to her, and across from them two women in hijabs. A table of white, professor-looking types. A thin Black man in a white T-shirt who, from a distance, could plausibly have been Winston. She remembered the small jolts she would feel in her first years at Sri Vidya when she was still reeling from Ashwini’s death, still convinced that every person who bore some resemblance to her sister could actually be her sister. Still allowing herself to be crushed, every time, when the girl came closer and revealed herself to be just another stranger.
30
Halima was living in a suburb of Pittsburgh. It was ostensibly a college town, though the college itself, Rampart University, seemed to exist more in signage than in actual campus. A billboard on the highway boasted The Number Five Clinical Electrophysiology Program in the Nation! Gray clusters of apartment buildings offered nine-month leases.
Vega and Asha had flown to Pittsburgh on their way back to Baton Rouge. Initially, Vega worried the trip would be strained. She and Halima had barely spoken in years. But at the airport Halima pulled her close, then wrapped her arms around Asha. “Look at you,” she said, her eyes suddenly wet. “We let too much time pass.”
Halima had lost weight. Her skin was paler, and the subtle makeup she wore in New York had been replaced by a thick foundation and dark kohl that made her look older than her thirty-two years. But she was still beautiful, still regal in the way Vega had found so intimidating years back.
They clutched the children’s hands as they walked across the parking lot, then drove to the small downtown for ice cream—a two-block stretch flanked by maroon university flags. Halima and Vega leaned against the wall, watching the children seated on a bench. Halima’s son and daughter, Karim and Safia, were six and four. Asha sat between them, with a cousin-like familiarity, nodding along to a long and convoluted story Safia was telling about their neighbor’s birthday party. “There was a trampoline,” she said. “You had to take off your shoes. I had lemonade and one cupcake, but I didn’t like the frosting.”
“It wasn’t a trampoline,” Karim corrected. “It was a bounce house.”
Vega squeezed Halima’s hand. “You’re happy here?” she asked. “Cold weather aside?”
Halima tilted her head from side to side. “It’s a good start for Adnan. Next year, insha’Allah, he can find something in a bigger town.” He had spent three years teaching at Faisalbad University in Lahore, but had barely made enough money, according to Halima, to cover the cost of petrol. “We would have stayed if it were possible,” she said, sounding almost apologetic. From Lahore, Adnan had received three tenure-track offers in the States, but his visa application had delayed his arrival for one year. Only Rampart had been willing to hold the job for him. He was now teaching three sections of introductory composition and one poetry course. He had published a slim volume of poetry in both Urdu and English. Later, Vega thumbed through the copy on their bookshelf, struck not only by the lovely sparseness of the language, but by the dedication on the opening page: For Halima, Karim, and Safia. The stars in my sky. Halima’s visa didn’t allow her to work, but she was volunteering at a health clinic three days a week, analyzing data on something called Vivitrol injections. Vega stared at her blankly.
“You’ve never heard of Vivitrol?” Halima asked.
“No.”
“It’s an experimental treatment for drug addiction. Mainly opiates. We use it to prevent relapse.” She said the cases had initially been startling. People in their twenties and thirties, many of whom came for treatment with small children in tow. The clinic had opened a babysitting room, also staffed by volunteers, so patients could drop their children for a bit and quickly receive their shot. “So many who’ve come from good homes,” Halima said. “Then they start to use drugs and it’s all over. Bas. How quickly people can undo everything good in their lives.”
That night they sat on the couch, drinking mint tea. The children had fallen asleep while watching a movie and now lay on the floor in their pajamas, covered in thin, woolen throws. Adnan was washing the dishes. He had cooked dinner—lentil soup, rice, and vegetable kofta—and refused Vega’s offer of help. “You go catch up,” he said. “Halima has been looking forward to your visit for months.” It touched Vega to see how loving he was, how giving of his labor. The kind of husband she imagined Suresh was to Rupa.
“Is it difficult for you?” Halima asked. “Seeing Suresh with another child?”
“It isn’t. I like that Asha has a brother.” She paused. “And it makes me happy to see Suresh and Rupa. They’re well suited. It was difficult to leave. For Asha, in particular.” This was an understatement. On the morning they left New Jersey, Vega had woken up with an ache in her chest, a grief she hadn’t anticipated. Asha was in tears. The stop to Pittsburgh had made it possible to coax her onto the plane. Before taking off, Vega sent a message to Suresh: “My love to Rupa and the baby, and everybody else. Missing you all already.” She stared at it for a few seconds before finally hitting send.
Abruptly, she said to Halima, “You and Adnan are wonderful together.”
Halima laughed. “How so?”
“You care for each other. That’s always been clear, but it’s even more apparent when I see you with the children.” She had long had the sense that there were two types of men: spectacularly bad choices, and interchangeably mediocre ones. She only realized, now, how far she had come from that impression. There was such a thing as a happy marriage. Easy and generous love.
“You haven’t met anybody special in Louisiana?”
“No.”
“You never were a romantic,” Halima said. “I don’t mean that as a criticism. But I never saw you with anybody. At least, you never admitted to feeling anything for anyone.”
“I’ve had a few flings. But they were mainly ill-advised.” She was grateful that Halima didn’t press further. Beyond her happiness for all of them—Halima and Adnan, Suresh and Rupa, even Shoba and Mohan—was the realization that, if given the chance, she actually could love somebody. She could give of herself. The thought both settled and unsettled her. She sipped her tea, then said, “Tell me how it’s been for you here. Honestly. Do you know any other families?” Halima shrugged. “I don’t expect we’ll stay long. It’s best not to make so many friends.” She adjusted the blanket over Safia’s feet. “I’ve accepted that Adnan can’t make a living in Pakistan. So, I’m happy to be in the States. But this place. It’s not good for the kids. Not good for Karim, especially.”
“In what way?”
“The children here tease. They make fun of his accent. One older boy, some time back, called him Osama. And now they use this name constantly. Osama. As though they even know what it is they’re saying.”
“Oh, Halima. I’m sorry.”
“He’s been fighting. He hit a boy in October. A boy teased him, and he punched back. And the teacher says, ‘Oh, he’s angry. Violence is never accepted in our school.’ She won’t understand he is only defending himself. Safia is so small. And she’s a little girl. It’s different for boys.”
