Habitations, page 9
Halima didn’t say anything for a moment, and Vega assumed that she was quietly conceding the point. Then she said, “But I’m not alone. Loneliness is when you don’t have anybody. Why don’t you? There must be plenty of interested men.”
“I don’t quite know what to do with men.” She felt drunk, though certainly there was no reason she would be. The last thing she had consumed was a cup of green tea at Nur Chachi and Faisal Chacha’s table.
“Vega. Really. It isn’t complicated.”
“Not in that sense. I know what to do in bed. You climb on top. Or they climb on top. A few minutes, then everybody moves on.”
Halima laughed. “I don’t know about that.”
“Perhaps you wouldn’t. You, of the long-sleeved bridal wear.”
“Enough,” Halima said, still laughing. Then she tugged the end of Vega’s braid. “You’ll find somebody. Insha’Allah.”
* * *
In February, Vega’s advisor, Dr. Lipman, learned of a work-study opportunity at an alternative high school in Brooklyn called the Hope Center. “Any internship is coveted,” Dr. Lipman said, in a tone that suggested that this particular one was not. “This is a way for you to contribute to the university’s community engagement, while also developing the social context for your research interests.”
Two mornings each week, Vega rode the subway one hour into East Williamsburg, where, standing in front of a windowless classroom, she taught from a prescribed curriculum called Workplace Communication. Most of her students fidgeted throughout class, but a few simply put their heads on their desks and slept. As she wrote on the blackboard to demonstrate the use of commas and the capitalization of proper nouns, she was reminded of the inane sentences she used to copy from her Wren and Martin composition book in primary school. Horatio Nelson was a man of might. Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. Once, she tried to jostle a sleeping student, and the girl swatted Vega’s arm and said, “Leave me the fuck alone.”
Over the phone, Rukmini said, “Such a noble pursuit. Being a teacher.”
“It isn’t quite what you’re imagining,” Vega said. “We aren’t sitting under a banyan tree, discussing philosophy.”
“Even grammar is noble. You remember those girls at the British Council? How much they loved you?”
“They loved me because I was an upper-caste girl and I spoke fluent English, so they felt they had to be deferential.” Shamefully, she missed this deference. This was something she was learning about America: nobody seemed to defer to anybody.
“My belief has always been,” Rukmini said, “that it is good to analyze. But when we analyze to the extent that we become unhappy, then we should force ourselves to think a little bit less.”
In her fourth week at the Hope Center, Vega received a new assignment. She was given a small classroom of her own, composed of three teenagers, one from Haiti and the other two so inseparable that Vega assumed they were sisters, until she learned that one was from Mexico and the other Honduras. There, her childhood history with Wren and Martin composition books proved useful. Every morning, they diagramed new sentences, slowly making them longer and more elaborate. I drink coffee. I drink hot coffee. I drink hot coffee with my mother. One afternoon, the Haitian student, Angeline, uttered the group’s first spontaneous English statement: “My mother no here.”
“My mother is not here,” Vega corrected, trying not to look too eager. It was astonishing. Like watching a child take its first steps.
“My mother is not here.”
“Where is your mother?”
“My mother in Gonaives.” The room went quiet, then Angeline said, “I drink coffee with my grandmother.”
* * *
One March afternoon, Halima’s fiancé called. “Adnan here,” he said.
“Halima isn’t home,” Vega said. “At the library, I think.” She switched to Hindi—a language she stumbled through under any circumstances, made more clunky by the disconnect with Urdu. Still, with Adnan, the exchange made her nostalgic.
“Is the semester going well?” he asked.
“It is. You?”
“Well enough. Halima and I must be out of step. I just came from the library.”
“Not the twenty-eighth floor, I hope.”
He laughed. “Halima told you the story? These Americans. I tell you.” He told her he was working at a coffee shop in Amherst. “Kuch bakhshish mil jati hai,” he said. Paid only in tips. “When I go back to Karachi, I’ll never be rude to another server again.”
Vega hadn’t thought much about Adnan until moving into Halima’s apartment. The whole arrangement had seemed so typical—two people entering marriage with all the contractual obligations of religion and family. But she was surprised by Halima’s tenderness whenever they spoke, her concern when he told her about the weather in New England or his literary rejections. “You’re brilliant. Art takes time. The cold won’t last forever.” Listening to these conversations, Vega always felt as though she were intruding.
Now, Adnan said, “Please tell her I called. Tell her not to work so hard. To take breaks.”
The apartment felt emptier after they hung up, and Vega was too distracted to return to her books. She grabbed her coat and walked outside. She assumed Naomi was still staying at her mother’s place, but it seemed illogical that they hadn’t yet run into each other on campus.
She walked up Amsterdam Avenue, ducking briefly into a falafel shop before deciding she wasn’t hungry. She walked to Erick’s apartment and then, in the vestibule, changed her mind. She bought a tea from the Bangladeshi corner store, then found a bench on 122nd Street, a block from the building she and Naomi had shared. She watched people pass until she drained her cup.
8
On a cold Tuesday in April, Vega received a call from the Financial Aid office. She was walking into the apartment just as the voice on the answering machine cut off. When she called back, a woman named Candace spoke to her slowly, in the tone of a medical professional delivering a grave prognosis. “You better come in,” she said.
The next morning, she sat across from Candace, a glass bowl of peppermints between them. Candace took a deep breath. “I guess we should just get into it, then. We received an update from your university. You earned sixteen transferrable credits at University of Hyderabad.” She pronounced the name slowly, with a dramatic roll of the r.
Vega had been expecting something far worse. An announcement that the scholarship was canceled, or that she had fallen short of some academic requirement. “Is that all? I attended university in Hyderabad for one semester.”
“Here’s the issue. The Gifford covers your tuition through forty-two credits. According to your transcript, you have a full semester already completed.”
“I was told those weren’t relevant to the scholarship, that only select universities qualified,” Vega said.
Candace smiled grimly. “The only exceptions we make are for students from conflict zones. Which, unfortunately, your records indicate you are not.”
Only later, when recounting the conversation to Halima and Zemadi, did Vega appreciate the absurdity of that line. Now, she sat across the table and stared at the stack of Post-its between them, where Candace was writing down numbers. “What exactly does this mean?”
“Well, the good news is you can finish a semester early. We had you on track for next spring or summer, but you can be finished by Christmas. At the close of the fall semester.”
“My visa is valid as long as I’m enrolled as a full-time student.”
“Precisely.”
“This means I am effectively asked to leave after the fall. In six months.”
“Well, your scholarship ends then. As with all of our graduate students, you can certainly exceed credits, but you will have to pay the tuition directly.”
There was a flash of relief, until Candace showed her the numbers, divided into three columns. “We’re looking at $10,700 for tuition,” she said. “Then on top of that, the scholarship covers room and board, which would cost you $7,000. There’s the health insurance fee, at $400. So, we should plan for $18,100.”
Vega had never thought about the cost of schooling in such stark terms. She had grown up watching her mother haggle at markets, and occasionally would do so herself. Yet tuition at the Rhodes School, and later Sri Vidya and Hyderabad, was a set expense. Growing up, all of the families she knew sent their children to the same rotation of schools: Sishya, Bishop Cotton School for Boys, St. Agnes. There was only one person, a distant cousin, whose family had registered him for government school. “Tamil-medium school!” her mother had said. “They’re crippling the boy.”
It was a particularly jarring comment, given that the boy’s father had survived polio as a child and walked with a limp. Nonetheless, nobody disagreed. Her mother had announced this at a family gathering, and another aunt, unrelated to the boy in question, said, “Might as well cut off his arms and legs.”
Vega held the Post-it. “Where is this money supposed to come from?” She immediately regretted the question. That was not Candace’s problem. Her job was only to deliver the news.
“Well, if you have an American guarantor, you might be eligible for private loans. And then we can offset with some work-study hours.” Candace said something about borrowing money from family and friends, describing a Kuwaiti student who had contacted his former high school. “You won’t believe the generosity of your family and social networks. People are often surprised.” But Vega was only half listening. Candace had circled the number. Eighteen thousand dollars. In her head, Vega converted the figure to rupees. Then she folded the Post-it, tucked it into her pocket, and walked outside.
“Always, there is a solution,” her father had said that night. “We’ll find the money. You concentrate on your studies.”
His voice was comforting. But it was her mother, who took the phone from him midsentence and shouted, “This is disastrous! You’ve lost your funds!” who seemed to be addressing the truth of the matter.
“You need a job,” Halima said after Vega had hung up.
“I’m on a student visa. I can’t have a job. Not a substantial one, at least.”
“There are ways around that. I’ll talk to some people I know.”
She and Zemadi met for coffee the next day. “You might earn dollars here and there,” Zemadi said. “But nothing to cover the entire cost. Not without private loans. The high-interest ones available to international students.” A friend of hers had spent the previous summer working as a nanny for a family on the Upper West Side. “Forty hours a week, and they paid her well. Under the table and all. But still, it was enough only to cover her rent. Tuition, that’s an entirely different matter.”
They normally split the bill evenly. This time, Zemadi paid. “We’ll find a solution. If nothing else, there are always people you can rely on.”
* * *
She was supposed to visit Shoba the next morning and was happy when the rain gave her an excuse to cancel. She had wasted hours staring at Candace’s Post-it, trying to make sense of the numbers, and couldn’t imagine spending a full day in the stasis of Shoba’s house. “I’ll come next week,” she said. “Hundred percent promise.”
She had last been to New Jersey months earlier, shortly after Shoba had given birth, and had spent the day offering meaningless words of comfort as Shoba tried to coax her nipple into the baby’s mouth. Shoba’s mother hovered in the distance, a rail-thin, taciturn woman who occupied herself by grinding spices and boiling vats of kashayam that she claimed would help Shoba’s milk supply. She intended to stay for the first six months, and her presence assuaged Vega’s guilt over not visiting more often. At least Shoba wasn’t alone.
“Maybe the weather will be nice next week,” she said to Shoba. “We can take the baby for a walk.” She wished she could explain her financial aid situation, but she knew Shoba would respond with the only solution she could ever think to offer: Come to the house. We’ll cook for you. Months ago, Shoba and Mohan’s spare room might have been an option—an inconvenient one, but an option nonetheless. Now, Shoba’s mother was sleeping on the bed, and the rest of the room was occupied by a bassinet, a humidifier, and the rocking chair where Shoba spent most of her days, either lulling the baby to sleep or rousing her to eat.
“Amma says I shouldn’t take her outside until June. Her immune system isn’t strong yet.”
“Then we’ll stay inside,” Vega said. “I don’t mind.” She hung up too abruptly, accidentally cutting off Shoba as she was saying, “I miss you, Akka.”
* * *
A week after Vega’s meeting with Candace from Financial Aid, her father came through with an offer: three thousand dollars that, with the help of ICICI Bank, he would deposit directly into her student account.
“That’s too much,” she said to him. To Halima, she told the truth. “It’s a sixth of what I need.”
“A sixth is better than nothing.”
They were eating grilled cheese sandwiches slathered with chili pickle. Halima had arranged slices of pre-made cookie dough onto a baking sheet. The smells mingled—garlicky and sweet in the same inhalation.
“It will help with tuition,” Vega said. “But then there’s everything else.”
The remaining challenge was housing. They both knew this, though neither had openly acknowledged it. Now, Halima broke the silence with an offer. “You can squat in my room,” she said. “We’ll bring in another roommate. She can pay half, and you and I can each pay a quarter.”
Vega laughed. “You would really want to share a bedroom with me?”
“If it allows you to stay here.”
“Something will work out,” Vega said. They finished their sandwiches, then the cookies, and retreated to their separate rooms.
* * *
“How do you afford your apartment?” she asked Erick. It was a rare departure from their typical exchanges—brief, one-sided discussion of sports or foreign policy, followed quickly by sex.
“What do you mean, how do I afford it? We manage.”
“We? But you live alone.”
“Well, my parents help, as long as I’m in school. And by the way, that’s a pretty typical arrangement.”
“How generous of them.” She hadn’t meant to sound bitter, but it came out that way, and now she had no interest in making amends. Of all the Americans she had met, Naomi was the only one who talked openly about money, who was preoccupied by scholarships and teaching stipends and fellowships. She wished she could call her for advice. She disliked Erick for being unable to provide this, for being such a cheap substitute for Naomi.
“Look, I’m not apologizing for having some wealth. My parents are both lawyers. My mother made partner before my father did. And if you think it’s easy for a woman to climb the ranks at a firm, you’re crazy. They worked their asses off.”
“I’m not asking you to apologize.” She had said something similar to Zemadi once: “It isn’t my choice, to be Brahmin. It’s a thing you’re given, that you can’t give back. Even if you want to.”
“Plus,” Erick said, “I’m not sitting on generations of wealth here. My parents were working class. My grandparents survived the Depression. They pulled themselves up from nothing.”
9
At the close of the summer, Vega’s mother sent her an email, using an abundance of capital letters. Call SUDHA. She Lives in NEW YORK. White Plains.
Vega ignored the email. Rukmini called later that week.
“We saw Sudha’s mother at Kalyani’s wedding—you remember Kalyani? She was very upset that you haven’t contacted them. Sudha’s husband is a gastroenterologist. They have a large house just near Manhattan. You can stay beginning immediately.”
Vega knew she had to accept the offer, but the thought of it was miserable. “I love living with you,” she told Halima.
“You can love staying with me on the weekends,” Halima said. “Free housing is free housing. This way, you can afford to finish the next two semesters. Go.”
Sudha was one in a pair of sisters Vega had known growing up: Sudha and Ramya. They were distant family friends, notably pretty, about a decade older than Vega. She could not remember a single conversation she had ever had with either of them, but at the White Plains Amtrak train station, Sudha pulled her close. When she stepped back, she had a mournful expression—an attempt, Vega knew, to offer condolences without talking directly about Ashwini. “How is your family? You’ve all been so very much on my mind.”
“We’re all well,” Vega said.
Sudha seemed content with Vega’s answer, or eager to move on to an easier conversation. “You should have called on the first day. I was furious when I learned you were here. Living in some drab student housing. I called Ramya immediately when I heard.”
She led Vega through the parking lot. “You’ll find White Plains has a more cosmopolitan feel than most suburbs,” she said. She was still pretty, Vega noted, but in a way that reflected some effort—henna-tinted hair, eyeliner, a gauzy kurta over black leggings. “There is a better quality of life. More of a small-town demographic, but an urban feel.” She spoke with a hint of a British accent, though Vega was certain that Sudha, like she, had spent her childhood in Adyar.
Her Christmas Day taxi aside, Vega hadn’t been in a car since riding beside Mohan in New Jersey. Sudha’s was plusher, with leather seats and a seat belt that extended itself with the push of a button. Mohan’s car, she recalled, had only two doors, so that she would have to wait until Shoba got out and folded her seat forward, then climb out through the narrow space, as though exiting a cave. “Soon we have to sell it,” Shoba had told her. “For a minivan.” It was another English word that seemed to thrill her with its promise.
“Our girls will be so happy to meet you,” Sudha said. “The youngest, especially. She loves guests.”
