Habitations, page 3
“You had grand ambitions when you were a girl. Do you remember? You wanted to study at Oxford. Your appa was so proud. He would tell Naren, ‘My daughter plans to become a solicitor.’ ”
“Children want all sorts of things, Amma. Ashwini wanted to be a marine biologist.”
“And maybe she would have.”
Vega didn’t respond.
“It happens quickly, Vegavahini. You don’t realize now. You’ll see this only in retrospect. Just how quickly time passes.”
* * *
The Gifford Fellowship closed the distance between Vega and her father. One day, she received a package from Gayatri with a worn brochure and a note included: Two-year funded master’s at Columbia University. Coordinated through the Department of State, so the visa won’t be a problem. The next day, her father lowered himself, shakily, onto the edge of her bed. When she was a girl, he would perch there in the same way as he read to her chapters from Malgudi Days and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Once, when she and Gayatri were reading Pygmalion in class, he had helped them rehearse for their performance, playing the role of Pickering. Vega could still hear his voice, so much sturdier before the stroke: “Excuse the straight question, Higgins!”
“I perused this Columbia brochure. You left it in my study.”
“I don’t know anything about the program, Appa. Gayatri sent it.”
“If you don’t intend to return to Hyderabad, perhaps it is an opportunity to consider.”
“I can’t imagine going so far.”
“Can’t you? You’ve lived in the States before.”
“That was different.”
Gopal slid the brochure towards her. His hand was so frail, so bony. An old man’s hand. After a few moments, he said, “I have one suggestion. You come with me to the bank right now. They can fax the application request. It’s early morning in the States. If the office is efficient, as I suspect that it is, they will send you the forms in two, three hours.”
She didn’t expect her father’s suggestion to work. It seemed impossible, almost supernatural, to hand her fax to the mustachioed man at the Bank of India and return the next morning to a stack of papers from Columbia University Graduate Admissions. At first glance, the application overwhelmed her. Describe challenges you have faced. Identify a question in your field of study that you would like to further explore. How have the politics of your region influenced your academic interests? She spent her days in her father’s empty study, drafting pages that, in the evenings, she would tear from her notebook and toss into the garbage. She began taking long walks. She went, once, to Rhodes School. It was between terms, and the campus was empty except for a single groundskeeper in the distance. She remembered her earlier years at Rhodes, walking Ashwini to her primary school classroom. Every day it was the same routine: they would arrive late because Ashwini refused to wake up in the mornings and then ate her breakfast at a maddeningly slow pace. Still, when they arrived on campus, she would insist that Vega walk her to her classroom.
“I always fussed with her,” she later told Gayatri. “She only asked for small things. Why couldn’t I walk her to her bloody classroom?”
“You did walk her. Every day.”
“Yes. But I always made it seem as though I didn’t want to.”
“Do you think at the end of her life, Vega, that she remembered any of that? Do you think she held this against you?”
That wasn’t the point, Vega thought. The point was that she hadn’t really understood what Ashwini’s death would mean until she was gone. She had not anticipated that it would hit her over and over. That she would be haunted by small apologies, things she wanted to tell her sister and never would. But buried within that finality was a hard and unambiguous truth: there was nothing Vega could do, no amount of waiting and hoping that would bring Ashwini back. It made no difference whether she stayed in Madras or left.
She rewrote her essays. This time, her language felt looser, more honest. In the administrative office at Iyer Law College, she printed the full application, checked it over, and made a backup copy. As she waited for the admissions decision, she began a tutoring position at Madras School of Social Work that she had seen advertised at the British Council Library. The pay was negligible, barely enough to cover her rickshaw fare, but she came to love the students—young women from Salem and Erode and Pollachi, who had excelled in their small, government schools but were overwhelmed by the demands of university life. Vega loved how earnestly they followed her advice, read every article that she suggested, and meticulously revised their sentences. She worried that she would be short-tempered with them, or that she would find the job easy and dull. But the three-hour sessions passed quickly. Afterwards, the students would often linger in the tiny, windowless classroom and pry into the details of Vega’s life: Was she married? Did she ever want to get married? Did she give her parents her earnings, or was she allowed to keep the money for herself? After the envelope arrived from Columbia, Vega waited a few days before telling them. There was something cruel and dismissive in sharing her news, she thought, as though they were merely an interlude on her way towards something bigger. On her final Saturday morning, a student named Sumitra slid a small package, wrapped in brown paper, across the desk. Inside was a thin notebook. “A gift from all of us,” she said. “For your term papers.”
* * *
Vega had been to the American consulate years earlier, with her parents and Ashwini, just before their move to Cleveland, but it hadn’t registered to her as a significant event. They had been given a special early-morning appointment, and their visas were granted swiftly. But she later pieced together that it was the urgency of Ashwini’s medical condition that made this possible. Now, the consulate was swarming with people.
The man in line before her was patting his neck with a handkerchief and muttering to himself. When she stepped closer, she could hear that it was a rehearsal of the interview ahead. My name is Sendhil Kumar. I am studying for master’s. I have been granted admission in Nebraska. Just before they entered the building, the man bent over and rested his head against the doorway. Vega had an irrational hope that the door would close just before she could step inside. Instead, she walked behind him and stood at the taped line in front of the window. The officer, an American woman a few years older than Vega, pulled out the contents of the man’s envelope without looking up.
“There’s a spelling discrepancy in your name,” she said.
“It’s a typical thing, madam. Problem with alphabets, only. Names, they are sometimes spelled two different manners. Three different manners, sometimes.”
“Don’t tell me what’s typical.”
“Madam?”
“You need a new VFS Appointment letter. Make sure they spell your name just like it is on your birth certificate.”
“That will take weeks, madam.”
“Then I’ll see you in weeks.” She looked up before the man could walk away. “Next.”
It seemed cruel to step forward, but Vega did anyway, holding her gaze as the officer scanned her admissions letter. After a long silence, she assumed that her application had been rejected. She felt relieved. She would return to the tight but familiar walls of her parents’ house. But after a few minutes, the officer stamped the form and said, “You can arrive one week prior to the program, but the visa ends on the final day. One more day and you’re in violation.”
Though Vega was vaguely aware of this policy, the word violation was startling. “I don’t intend to stay longer,” she’d said. But the woman was already looking past her, nodding to the next applicant.
There was a flurry of packing and paperwork. Rukmini filled a notebook with the phone numbers of everybody she knew in New York and New Jersey. Naren sent a gauzy pashmina from Delhi and two crisp one-hundred-dollar bills. Gopal lectured Vega on the value of interdisciplinary coursework. “You must study philosophy,” he’d said. “It undergirds all other scholarship.” He looked happier than she had seen him in years, but there was something evangelical about his happiness. Something she didn’t fully trust.
When Vega imagined her life in the States, she thought of her old house in Cleveland, the snap of cool air on the day they arrived, the driveway lined with smooth, oval rocks that Ashwini—eleven years old then—used to call dinosaur eggs. The house itself had an ethereal quality. There were carpeted floors that she and Ashwini loved to sink their toes into.
But outside the house, Vega had been miserable. She was fifteen years old, no longer cute but not yet pretty, and it seemed impossible to find one’s way in suburban America without the currency of looks. She hated the cramped hallways of her school. She hated the cold. She hated the winter mornings when she waited alone for the school bus, the sky still pitch-black.
Ashwini, on the other hand, had loved Cleveland. She adopted American fashion and was adept at making friends. The house was littered with the detritus of those friendships: fortune tellers, plastic woven bracelets, cassette tapes. At the corner of her bedroom mirror, she had tucked a ticket stub from a roller-skating birthday party she’d attended. Vega often tried to rationalize their different experiences in the States. Was it because Ashwini was younger, or fairer skinned, that she was able to wedge her way into American life? But the reason, Vega had come to understand—a reason that was clearer after her withdrawal from Hyderabad—was more encompassing. Ashwini had a confidence that Vega never would. She forced the world to accommodate her. It seemed, now, like a cruel twist that Vega was the one going back to the States, that she was going anywhere at all, when it was Ashwini who, given this chance, was the one who would have thrived.
3
Rukmini had arranged for a former classmate’s nephew and his wife to meet Vega at Newark International Airport. The couple was young, close to Vega’s age. At the baggage claim, the husband shook Vega’s hand as though it were a business deal. “Mohan,” he said, with a formality that made her want to laugh. His wife, Shoba, wore a billowy pink kurta, a style that had been in fashion when Vega was in secondary school. One of the mirrorwork pieces at the neck was loose. As Mohan pulled the suitcase from the conveyor belt, Shoba held her hands protectively over her belly, and Vega saw that she was pregnant.
They lived in a tidy, single-level house, identical to all the houses surrounding it. Mohan dragged Vega’s suitcase inside, and Shoba pointed her towards the guest bathroom where a spare towel had been folded and placed at the edge of the sink. Vega washed her hands and face. When she came out, Shoba was standing in the kitchen, pouring cups of mango juice. “The room is nice, Akka?”
The word akka was jarring. Aside from a few young cousins with whom she rarely spoke, nobody had called her that since Ashwini’s death. “It’s very nice. Thank you.”
“You’re studying to be a doctor?”
Vega laughed. “I’m not. Should I be?”
Shoba smiled shyly. “I’m asking, only. My sister wants to come to the States and study medicine.”
There was a time when Vega thought she might become a doctor. She liked the idea of something so heroic. But she came to see that she had none of what it required—neither the heroism nor the acumen—to care for another person’s body. Some years back, on a trip to Bangalore, a woman seated beside Vega struck up a conversation about her first months of motherhood. “I couldn’t nurse,” she said. “Inverted nipples.” She had pulled down her sari and lifted a breast from her blouse. The woman’s daughter had been sitting next to her, maybe seven or eight years old, reading a comic book and ignoring her mother, apparently having witnessed this very conversation before. It wasn’t just that Vega found the interaction bizarre. She found it painfully depressing, and for years, the memory tugged at her—the little girl glued to the page, the woman seeking some comfort or solution for a problem that was no longer even relevant. Once, in Cleveland, she came upon one of Ashwini’s CT scans on her parents’ bedside table and she left the room quickly, closing the door behind her, feeling as though she had been punched in the chest.
After dinner, Shoba curled up on the bed next to Vega and showed her pictures of her old life, most taken outside her childhood home in Coimbatore—a small white villa with orange shingles on what looked like the outskirts of town. The album was endless and repetitive, grainy shots of the same building at different angles, all featuring Shoba, her two sisters, and her unsmiling parents. Midway through, Vega ran out of responses. “This one is of Marudhamalai Temple,” Shoba whispered, and though Vega had never heard of the place, and could hardly see it in the hazy image, she’d said, “How lovely.”
In the morning, Shoba made a pot of upma, three types of chutney, and mugs of sweet, milky coffee—the breakfast foods of Vega’s childhood that she had long given up in favor of toast or a piece of fruit—packing the leftovers into a tiffin box for Mohan. After he left for the office, she rinsed and chopped the day’s vegetables and soaked a pot of lentils for dinner. Then she led Vega into a small laundry room at the back of the house. “Separate washer and dryer,” she said, opening a drawer at the top of one of the machines and turning a small knob to demonstrate the various settings. Vega had been awake since two o’clock that morning, and the rumble of the machine soothed her. She closed her eyes. She needed to be in New York in three days, and it had occurred to her only that morning that Mohan and Shoba were no more oriented in the States than she was. She had assumed they would transport her to campus. Now, that expectation seemed absurd.
“Perhaps I can ask Mohan about the train schedule,” she said. “I can go easily from here. I only have one suitcase.”
Shoba didn’t respond. Instead, she filled a wicker basket with the clothes, walked to the living room and sat on the couch, watching a Tamil soap opera as she folded Mohan’s slacks and smoothed the sleeves of his shirt. “We have Sun TV,” she said. “We can get all the channels. You had Sun TV in Cleveland?”
“No.” Vega didn’t know how to continue the conversation. There seemed no kind way to explain that she didn’t watch Tamil soap operas in India and would have no use for them in the States.
“That woman used to be very bad,” Shoba said, nodding to the screen. “Now, she is good. But she is trying to advise her younger brother not to take a very dangerous job and he won’t listen. He wants the money.”
Vega fell asleep on the couch. When she woke, the laundry had been neatly stacked.
Mohan’s return from the office set Shoba into motion. She changed into a sari, then warmed the dhal and vegetables. She poured small stainless steel cups of rasam and served it, ceremonially, on a tray. The food was ordinary, but Mohan’s silence was heavy, so Vega complimented everything repeatedly. The most noteworthy addition to the table were the potato chips that Shoba and Mohan crumpled onto their rice. Vega did the same, then ate them by the handful until the bag was empty.
After dinner, Mohan took them to Marshall’s. He sat on a bench outside, reading a newspaper as Shoba led Vega through the aisles of cosmetics, sampling hand lotions and examining bottles of nail polish. She wandered through clothing racks marked Clearance! and then to rows of shoes, studying the heels, once trying on a pair of loafers and staring at herself in the full-length mirror. With girlish secrecy, she led Vega to the lingerie section, where they looked at lace-fringed bras and egg-shaped containers of pantyhose. In the end, Shoba bought only a jar of night cream. “I just love to look at everything,” she said. “And to see all the people.”
They stopped for ice cream on the way home, Shoba and Vega sharing a banana split, dividing it onto two separate plates, as Mohan quietly ate a bowl of vanilla. Shoba told the story of a cousin’s wedding they had attended in Houston.
“Do you know her?” Shoba asked. “Her name is Malathi. She’s from Madras, only.”
“It’s a big city,” Vega said. “Likely not.”
“Oh.” Shoba looked briefly disappointed, then sliced into her banana with the side of her spoon.
* * *
“What do you read all the time?” Shoba asked. She had finished cooking and was settling on the couch with her laundry basket.
“Books related to my studies.” Vega wondered how to bridge her world with Shoba’s. In her three days at Shoba and Mohan’s house, she had seen only two books: a copy of The Bhagavad Gita and Hindu Names for Girls. Shoba often sat with the latter in the evenings, running down the alphabetical list and reading names and meanings aloud to Mohan.
“Are they novels?” Shoba asked.
“Not novels, quite,” Vega said. “They’re books about ideas.”
Though Vega often initiated their conversations in English, Shoba continued them in Tamil. English she seemed to reserve for words that were foreign or untranslatable: car, mall, doctor. In the mornings after Mohan left, and in the evenings just as he was about to return, she always mentioned his office, saying the word with a wide-eyed awe. He called the house once each afternoon, the only time the phone rang during the day, and Shoba jumped to answer, coiling the cord around her finger like a teenager, flush with an almost sexual excitement.
The morning Vega was to move to campus, Shoba came into her room with a stack of tinfoil packets tucked into a plastic grocery bag.
