Habitations, page 4
“You shouldn’t go hungry,” she said. “Who knows what they’ll feed you there? Even Indian restaurants here, they don’t serve our type of food. It’s North Indian, only. Punjabi food.”
Vega tied the bag’s handles and rested it at the top of her closed suitcase. “This is all very kind, Shoba. Thank you.”
“You can come on weekends, maybe? When you have no program? Or any classes?”
The English words made Vega smile. “Of course. And I’ll call you from New York.” But later, sitting beside Mohan as he wordlessly drove her to the train station, the promise felt hollow. She pictured Shoba in her empty home, watching Sun TV and waiting for the telephone to ring. “She’ll be okay, you think?” she asked Mohan.
He nodded, as blankly as he had the previous evening when Shoba asked his opinion of the name Meghna, telling him that it meant cloud.
“Her mother is coming for the birth,” he said. “They’ll manage.”
* * *
She sat through a week of orientation meetings with other international students—strangers who seemed somehow to already know each other, who huddled together speaking either their common language or their overlapping, accented English. The orientation topics were useful: how to open a checking account, where to purchase used textbooks, protocols for campus safety. But the air conditioner blasted, the students around her rustled and scraped their chairs and blew their noses, and Vega found it difficult to pay attention. She exhausted Shoba’s leftovers on the first day and wandered the aisles of Key Food, staring at the multitude of yogurts and waxy apples and boxed cereals.
The Gifford Fellowship had provided her with two weeks of temporary housing in an undergraduate dormitory. “If you don’t have access to funds,” one of her orientation leaders said, “you want to look for a situation in which a couple of roommates are looking to fill an empty room. That way it will be furnished, and you can move right in.” So, Vega scoured listings in the Student Services building. Most of the available bedrooms she found were in Harlem, which she discovered was a quicker trip on foot than on subway, so she began walking the city, using a street map that had been included in the new student welcome folder.
By the end of the first week, the apartments were indistinguishable in her mind. The sinks were cluttered with dirty dishes. They were occupied only by white roommates, though the neighborhood itself was Black, and always, these roommates were polite and noncommittal. She often sensed that the room had already been rented to somebody else or—more plausibly—that they simply didn’t like her. Sometimes, there was a detail that struck her as particularly odd or repulsive: a sticky mouse trap lying in plain sight next to the refrigerator; a toilet seat propped up, the rim splattered with shit; a pair of sneakers on top of a coffee table. Once, there was a plate of cookies on the kitchen counter, and Vega glanced at them as she walked past the entryway. She didn’t expect to be offered one, but they caught her eye, and the woman—a brusque-sounding graduate student named Kate—asked her in a halting manner, “Would you like one?” Something about the interaction made Vega sad. Of course she’d wanted a cookie. Anybody would want a cookie. But the desire now seemed pitiful.
But Harlem itself thrilled her. On days she wasn’t going to see an apartment, or sometimes after yet another failed visit, she would return to her room and change into something that made her feel edgy—one of the three tank tops she had brought with her (which she always handwashed afterwards in the bathroom sink); a wraparound skirt; or the denim shorts she had cut from one of Gayatri’s old pairs of jeans—and wander the neighborhood, always via one of the more crowded throughfares. In suburban Cleveland, she had hated the conspicuousness of her skin color and clothing, how tainted she felt as a foreigner. On Frederick Douglass Boulevard or Lenox Avenue, surrounded by the commerce and accents and rush of urban life, she marveled over the realization that nobody seemed to notice her at all.
One afternoon, as she made her way from an apartment on 137th Street, she passed a cluster of Black men standing outside a corner store. One was dressed in a tissue-thin, white sleeveless shirt—a style she associated with manual laborers in India. As she passed by, he lifted the edge of his shirt and wiped the sweat from his temple, and she felt something inside her lurch. It had never occurred to her to find this look attractive in India. Even with Gayatri, to whom she told everything, she could not imagine passing a construction site and commenting on a man’s body. But here, taut arms and dark skin against white cotton seemed like the perfect masculine combination—not deliberate or attention-seeking, but simple and unabashedly sexual.
She went back to the corner store the next afternoon, and the next, but the man wasn’t there. She considered following up on the apartment on 137th Street, though it had been impractical—small and overpriced, smelling faintly of urine. But at least if she lived there, she might run into him from time to time. She thought again about Sanjay, as she had on and off since leaving Hyderabad. Had she stayed, maybe they would eventually have gotten together. It still clawed at her, all those versions of her life that may or may not have been.
Sometimes in the evenings she’d wander the streets surrounding Columbia, trying to memorize the landmarks. Occasionally, she would see somebody she recognized from campus, and the fog would clear just a bit. She discovered a small deli run by a Bangladeshi family that sold sweet, milky tea for a dollar. One afternoon, as she slid her money across the counter, the young man—little older than a teenager—put up his hand. “You take. First day of Eid. Gift from us.”
Vega stared at him, his uneven patches of facial hair, his T-shirt too big for his skinny frame. Maybe he assumed she was Muslim. Or maybe it was enough that they both came from the same general corner of the world. “Eid Mubarak,” she’d said.
* * *
An acquaintance from Rhodes School, Aparna, was living in Chelsea, and she invited Vega for a cocktail party in her flat. “I leave for Bombay at the end of the month,” she’d told Vega over the phone. “But we’ll overlap until then, at least.”
Vega agonized over what to wear, settling finally on a black V-neck dress that, in Madras and Hyderabad, made her feel so sexy and provocative that she’d only worn it twice, both times covered with a dupatta. In New York, she wondered if it was too simple. But the party turned out to be a relaxed affair. Aparna hugged Vega, then led her around the room, introducing her to a scattering of people, all standing in a circle so that Vega wasn’t sure which name belonged specifically to whom.
“How are you finding it so far?” a man asked. He looked Middle Eastern. His arms were wrapped tightly around the woman next to him in what, to Vega, seemed to be a preemptive signal: We are a couple. We are unavailable.
“I’ll like it as soon as I find a place to live,” Vega said. “As of now, I’ve toured every available bedroom priced beneath eight hundred dollars a month, so my knowledge of the city is very niche.”
“I’ve been on that tour,” the man said. “Ask me later about my first apartment. It was next to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The place was huge, though. I paid four hundred a month.”
“Please don’t ask him about it,” the woman said. She was impossibly thin, with bangs that were cut so that they fell repeatedly in her eyes. Her appearance reminded Vega of the girls she knew from a distance when she lived in Cleveland. Girls with athletic bodies, and hair that seemed immune to tangles and knots. “I still have nightmares about that place.”
There was some discussion of the old apartment, then the woman turned to Vega and asked, “Have you been to the States before?” It was a direct enough question, but Vega paused.
“Vega lived in Cleveland for two years,” Aparna said.
Vega looked at her, surprised that she’d remembered this detail about her. Vega hadn’t thought much about Aparna since they’d graduated from Rhodes. She had some vague memory that she had moved to New York to attend art school, but it wouldn’t have occurred to her to get in touch had Gayatri not sent an email connecting them.
The woman looked up suddenly and tapped her fingers together. “Oh! This is the friend you were telling me about. The future recipient of all your fabulous winter clothing.”
“She is,” Aparna said. “I was telling Sarah that I have a few things I don’t want to take back with me to Bombay. I have to put the bag together, but I’ll show you them soon. I’m still disorganized.”
Vega wasn’t sure how to respond to this. It bothered her to be a charity case, but she was thrilled by the prospect of something attractive to wear. The couple wandered off and Aparna led Vega to the table. “Come eat something,” she said. “Then I’ll show you the rest of the flat. By the way, the food in New York is lovely. There’s a place in the village called Café Orlin where a small group of us like to meet on Thursday evenings. It’s excellent, but not fussy. We’ll go next week, maybe. I’d love to show you some of my favorite haunts.”
Vega felt suddenly light-headed, a lag between Aparna’s words and her own processing of them. She piled a paper plate with cubes of cheese and fruit, then followed Aparna into a tiny bedroom.
“You live alone?” Vega asked.
“I do. I lived in Gramercy until last year, with a few roommates. But it became a bit too much, just with our different schedules.”
At Rhodes, Aparna had been one of the wealthier students. She wasn’t showy like some others, like their classmate Jaganath with his bloated references to Dubai and London, to all the real estate holdings he would someday inherit. Aparna’s wealth was more subdued. She wore edgy clothes—skinny black jeans, pointy flats, bright-colored tunics that she belted at the waist with mismatched fabric—and always shrugged away compliments. “It’s old money versus new money,” Gayatri once said. “Aparna knows she’s rich. It’s in her blood. Even if she lost all of her money, she would still be rich.”
“It’s nice to see someone from home,” Aparna said. “Tell me what you’re studying.”
“I have a fellowship at Columbia. It’s a two-year master’s in sociology.”
“I always knew you would do something impressive.”
“Well. I hardly have yet.”
“Nonsense. Just being admitted is impressive.” In a quiet voice she said, “You know, we sent you a letter when you were in Cleveland. We wrote it together. We used different color pens, each of us, so you could tell our messages apart.”
“I know. You did, and I’m sorry.”
“I don’t care that you didn’t write back. I just want to know that you received it. We thought about you when you were gone.”
Just thinking about Cleveland made Vega recoil. The other students terrified her. She couldn’t understand their accents, the way they hugged and slapped hands in the hallway, their world of laughter and sports and sexual innuendo. They were all perfectly nice to her, in the charitable manner in which people cared for the dispossessed, in the way they would have been nice to an orphan or refugee. Teachers praised her penmanship and work ethic. They paused and glanced at her during class discussions, hoping she would speak and knowing that she wouldn’t.
Meanwhile, Ashwini joined the school choir, begged Rukmini for trips to the mall, and acquired a best friend named Julia. “Everything here is nice,” she’d once told Vega. And in some ways, Vega’s own experiences notwithstanding, Ashwini was right. They spent weekends in a nice hospital with a gleaming white waiting room where she and Ashwini discovered the bounty of American vending machines. They had nice doctors—Dr. Oakley and Dr. Glick—whose faces were seared in Vega’s memory, who greeted Ashwini with beaming enthusiasm each time, and sent them back to India with an optimistic prognosis. “You can let yourselves plan for her future,” Dr. Glick had told Vega’s parents. “Start thinking about college and life beyond.” But in the end, for all their niceness, they had also been wrong.
“I did read the letter,” Vega said to Aparna. “I should have written back.”
“No. That isn’t what I mean. I want you to know that we were thinking of you. We wanted to see you as soon as you came back.”
“I don’t doubt that you tried, Aparna. Thank you.”
“Enough of all this. Know that I’m here, at least for the time being. And if you need a place to stay while you’re looking, my lease extends until the end of September. No cost, of course.”
The offer was so generous, and it made practical sense. But when Vega thought about it, she could not imagine waking up in Aparna’s apartment, waiting her turn for the toilet, going for dinner together to Café Orlin, and trying to revive an old friendship.
As Vega left that evening, Aparna said, “Come back in a week, tops, to take the clothes. They’ll all fit you well. You’ve always had a nice waistline. And I would hate to give them away to someone with no fashion sense.”
“I will,” Vega said, though she knew she wouldn’t.
She sent Aparna a brief note of thanks the next morning, telling her that she was busy with orientation, and promising to follow up at some point over the next few weeks. Some days later, there was a call for Vega on the dormitory phone, and she’d assumed that it was Aparna. But it was Sarah, the woman she had met at the party. “I hope it isn’t weird that I’m calling,” she said. “Aparna gave me your information. A friend of a friend is looking for a roommate. It’s near Columbia. Super tiny converted two-bedroom. It’s seven-fifty a month, and she hasn’t listed it yet. I would call her in the next few minutes.”
On a drizzling August afternoon, Vega walked along 121st Street, east of campus, until she reached Manhattan Avenue. The building was squat and gray, resembling what she imagined a Soviet housing block to look like. She was beginning to wonder if she would have to settle for one of the options she had already seen, if she would end up living in the Upper West Side apartment she had looked at the previous afternoon, where one of the roommates ended the tour by explaining to Vega the idiosyncrasies of the toilet. “You kind of have to jiggle the handle,” she explained. “When that doesn’t work, you just lift the lid to the tank and pull on this little flapper. It’s not really an issue. You get used to it.” Vega found herself thinking more and more about Aparna and resenting the ease of her life: her pristine Chelsea apartment, her unpaid gallery internship, and all her frivolous talk of textiles. “I’ve become particularly interested in vegetable dyes,” she had told Vega. “Using native plants. I want to work with smaller batches and highly skilled artisans.” Vega had nodded along, finding the conversation inoffensive and a little bit charming. Now, she wished she could go back and deflate some of Aparna’s optimism. What would these small-batch textiles cost? Could the average Indian afford them?
She had no right to this resentment, she knew. Practically every day, during the dry months of October and November, she had watched their housekeeper, Vasanti, fill her jug with boiled water before leaving in the evenings, lugging it to the end of the road, from which she would take a rickshaw to the Adyar Depot, then the city bus to its final stop on the outskirts of Madras. Sometimes, Vasanti’s son would come from his job as a driver for a family in Mylapore, hoisting the jug onto his shoulder. Vega had thought it was absurd, even implausible, that a man who worked by day as a driver could not simply borrow the car to transport his water jug. “They’d sack him on the spot if he even asked,” Vega’s father said.
“There must be an alternative,” she’d said.
“What is this alternative, then?” Vega’s father asked. “The public taps are dry as a bone.”
Now, as Vega wandered down the dank hallway, looking for apartment 3L and staring at the takeout menus partly shoved under each door, she felt herself floating through a world that made no sense, a world of unnecessary suffering and arbitrary prices. The public tap water that should be free. The graduate students who couldn’t bother cleaning the shit from their toilet seat, but who charged the entirety of the Gifford housing stipend to live among them: seven hundred dollars a month, which, if multiplied by twelve, was roughly one third of what her father earned per year in his position at Iyer Law College.
4
A woman with curly brown hair answered the door and introduced herself as Naomi. She was striking—not girlishly pretty, but with a lovely face and firm handshake and a style that Rukmini would have described as boyish. She wore cutoff shorts and a plaid button-down shirt rolled up to her elbows. “I’ll show you the place,” she said. “Sarah mentioned it’s small?”
“She did. That’s fine with me.”
The apartment was sparse and, aside from an upturned table at the center of the living room, impeccably clean. “Don’t mind this,” Naomi said. “I’m trying to fix it up. One of our neighbors was unloading this coffee table, so I thought I’d put it together.”
“I admire your acumen,” Vega said. “I don’t think I’ve ever put anything together in my life.” She followed Naomi into the kitchen. It had the same look of the other apartments Vega had seen—cheap appliances, linoleum floor. But the sink was empty of crusted dishes. There was a rickety-looking table, on top of which was a bowl of oranges and bananas.
“So, what are you studying?” Naomi asked.
“I’m a sociologist. I’m interested in maternal health. Poverty, more broadly. You?”
“Anthropology.”
“As in, archaeology? Digs and whatnot?”
“More the cultural side. My thesis is on Indigenous political identities and activism. I might be heading to Austin for a fellowship next fall.”
They walked to the bedroom. It contained little more than a bed, a desk, a window, and a rod with wire hangers running along one wall. But it was quiet and brightly lit. Vega imagined herself sitting at the desk, her books splayed out, the glow of a tiny lamp like the one she had in Hyderabad.
When they made their way back to the living room, Naomi said, “If you’re not in a rush, I want to put together this desk. I would love your help just holding it still so I can screw the leg in. Is that a weird thing to ask you to do?”
