Habitations, page 14
Charanya appeared the next morning. She wore a large gold-hoop nose ring and handloom sari, and carried a jute bag with the word Mukti emblazoned across it. “Have you engaged in fieldwork before?” she asked. Vega had been sitting at her desk when Charanya came in. There was another chair, but Charanya instead sat cross-legged on the floor, as though making a point.
“I haven’t,” Vega said, looking down at her.
“Tomorrow we’ll make our first visit. We have a clear protocol for our interactions with our target population. We explain our mission, that we are not a Christian organization, and we are not an orphanage. We offer our nutrition information, and for women who accept it, we provide them with a small bag of dhal. For those who are not interested, we flag them for being disinterested, and we follow up on a previous visit. As you are new to fieldwork, you will shadow me for the first few months. You can introduce yourself, of course. But beyond that, I will lead the conversation. You’re a Columbia graduate?”
“For my master’s. I did my undergraduate here. At Sri Vidya.”
The conversation drifted back to the topic of fieldwork, but minutes later, on her way out, Charanya said, “I was admitted to Barnard, for undergraduate. I declined the offer. I don’t believe you need to go abroad for a good opportunity.”
The comment tugged at her for the rest of the day. Privately, she seethed over Charanya’s impression of her. Publicly, she tried to correct it. She took her lunch break with the rest of the staff, addressed them in Tamil, and nodded attentively when Kumari, the office grant writer, discussed her son’s preparation for the Joint Entry Exam. She even made a point of using the Eastern commode. By afternoon, though, she learned this last effort was pointless. Only the German girls seemed willing to squat over a pit toilet. The others lined up outside Kumari’s office, waiting for the Western commode.
* * *
The next morning there was a black car parked outside the gate. The interns were already waiting in the back seat, with the windows rolled down. The driver was leaning against the door. He nodded to Charanya and Vega.
“Ganga is our most valuable staff member,” Charanya said in Tamil, as Ganga opened the door for them. “He knows every street in Madras.”
If there was a form of condescension that Vega found most curdling, it was this, the type that masqueraded as respect. She squeezed into the back—four across, without seat belts. “Namaskar,” she said to Ganga.
“Good morning, madam,” Ganga said.
In the car, Vega learned that the German girls, Annie and Katrin, were from Stuttgart and taking a gap year before beginning university. They had chosen to come to South India after reading The God of Small Things. She learned that Sandhya had grown up in Houston and graduated from Rice and planned to spend a year at Mukti before attending law school. She also learned that Ganga’s daughter had graduated with a bachelor’s in commerce from Sri Meenakshi Government College for Women. Though Vega hadn’t heard of the university, and knew nothing of commerce, she said, “Excellent.”
“She’s very bright,” Charanya said. “So hardworking.” She turned to Ganga. “Ille, Ganga?”
Ganga kept his eyes on the road. “Yes, madam,” he said.
Olcott Kuppam was no more than ten kilometers from Vega’s childhood house, just blocks from a juice shop where she and Gayatri used to stop after school, but she had only ever seen it from a distance. “This is one of our neediest slums,” Charanya said somberly, leading them through a maze of narrow streets. “It has an eighty-seven percent malnutrition rate.” Two women sat on the roof of a house, patching a hole. Another was wringing wet clothes into a plastic bucket. A few children stood in their doorways and stared, but scattered when Vega, Charanya, and the interns approached. “We’re combating nearly impossible statistics,” Charanya continued. “Forty-seven percent of children under age three are malnourished. Fifty percent of our target mothers are anemic.”
Charanya did most of the talking. She greeted the mothers in their doorways, explained the importance of protein-rich diets, took notes on their food intake, and presented them with a bag of dhal and a single onion in exchange for their time. The women’s responses were mostly indistinguishable—flat and disinterested. “Persistence is key,” Charanya said. “And follow-up. Our follow-up initiatives are written into the grant. We have to remember that seventy percent of women here have only basic literacy. There is significant distrust in education.”
At their seventh or eighth house, a woman came to the door, holding an infant daughter. The baby was naked, except for a frayed kodi tied around her waist.
“You should put a cloth on her,” Charanya advised the mother. “For sanitation.” Behind them, Sandhya whispered her translation to the Germans.
The woman nodded, took in the lecture on nutrition, and timidly responded to Charanya’s questions. Yes, she still nursed the baby. Yes, she boiled her water before drinking it. For lunch, typically she ate tamarind rice.
“You need some dhal or yogurt along with it,” Charanya said. “And some vegetable at least once each day.”
“Yes, ma.”
“Physical stimulation is also important. You must talk and play with her.”
Sandhya translated. The woman nodded pliantly. She was younger than Vega. Maybe the age of the German interns. Before they walked away, she turned the baby around to reveal a rash spreading across her back. “What do you think, Akka?” she asked. “My mother-in-law says she needs medicine.”
Charanya glanced briefly at her notebook. “It could be heat.”
“How much will the medicine cost?”
Vega looked past the mother, into her dark, narrow house. She wanted to say something comforting. The rash looked mild enough, and whatever medicine it required was likely cheap. But before she could speak, Charanya tucked her notebook into her tote and took a step back. “We aren’t doctors, ma. We are nutrition specialists.” She gave her the dhal and onion, and they walked to the next house.
By the afternoon, Vega was tired of Mukti. She was tired of the eagerness of the interns, of Sandhya’s halting Tamil, the way they all murmured hmm in agreement when anybody spoke. More than anything, she was tired of Charanya—of her excessive use of the word “slum,” of her barrage of statistics. She hated that, though she had to use the bathroom, she had bristled at Charanya’s suggestion that they find a public toilet. “It won’t be so bad,” Charanya said. “What do you think the people in the slum use? Only some five percent have indoor plumbing.”
“I’ll wait,” Vega said.
* * *
Gayatri thought Vega was overreacting. “I don’t understand why everything is so theoretical with you,” she said. “It may be condescending, but if you’re giving dhal to people, and they need dhal, who gives a damn what the tone is?”
“It’s not the work I want to do with my life,” Vega said. “These smug women, all the lecturing about tamarind rice. There are people in the world engaging in radical, important work. That is the experience I want.”
“And where are these people?”
“I don’t know. But they are not at Mukti.”
They were eating at a new restaurant in Besant Nagar called “Salaam, Bombay,” named after a film Vega had seen in the theater with her parents some years back, a gripping portrait of slum life after which she had cried and entered several weeks of purposeless self-flagellation, thanking Vasanti to excessive levels, and volunteering at an orphanage called Banyan Tree, where she spent her shifts inventorying donations of rice and enriched wheat biscuits. Vega had been horrified when Gayatri told her the name of the restaurant and suggested they meet there. “Who names a restaurant after a film about human suffering?” she asked.
Now, Gayatri speared a cube of paneer tikka and said, “What about the Microsoft initiative? That must be somewhat useful.”
Vega had visited the computer center only once. It was a dimly lit room a few blocks from the Mukti office, on the other side of the Indian Overseas Bank. The German interns floated between two boys in government school uniforms who were idly manipulating cells on an Excel spreadsheet. But she didn’t have the energy to argue with Gayatri.
She avoided field visits for the next several weeks, occupying herself with administrative tasks, grateful for the thick folder of donations and expenses that had yet to be updated. She offered to help Kumari draft a Soros Foundation grant and began carrying a pair of headphones to the office, taken from her Lufthansa flight, ignoring the din of Charanya and the interns in the background. They held debriefing meetings following each field visit, but as she had not accompanied them to the field, there was no point in attending. “Vega works on the programmatic side of things,” she once overheard Charanya explain.
One Saturday, she ran into Sandhya at the Biotique in T. Nagar, holding a jar of saffron dew cream. “I love this shop,” she said. “It’s all so natural.”
She and Sandhya had only spoken a few times, and the conversation was always stilted. Still, she had no plans until evening, so when Sandhya asked if she wanted to join her for a coffee, there was no reason to decline. They found a table at a Coffee Day. She and Sandhya ordered mango juices that arrived swirled with pink syrup and topped with a maraschino cherry. After the first few sips, it was sickeningly sweet.
“Is most of your family in Chennai?” Sandhya said.
Vega paused. The city had announced the name change when she was still in the States, and Chennai still sounded foreign to her. “My parents are.” She recalled the phrase she had used when talking with Nur Chachi. Only child. But she couldn’t bring herself to say it again. “How are your law school applications coming along?” she asked.
“I’m thinking of deferring for a year, even if I get into my top choice. I think I can do better work in India than in the States. Like, the fieldwork here is meaningful. Programs in India don’t have these crippling overhead costs. Everything can be direct and impactful. You get a twenty-thousand-dollar grant, and you can get basic nutritional access for an entire village. You can fund direct aid and capacity building. What would twenty thousand give you in the States? You have corporations and law firms blowing that on a single weekend retreat. Money is nothing there. Nobody cares about affecting change.”
“But there is meaningful work to be done in the States. I’m not an expert on America, but my impression is that not all of its issues have been resolved.”
“Possibly.” Sandhya paused, then took a long sip. “But here people care about addressing poverty. Charanya is always collecting books and money for Ganga’s kids. It’s part of the culture.”
Vega laughed. “I think if anybody had a choice between an adequate salary, and the occasional act of charity, they would choose the former.”
“It isn’t charity, exactly. Anyway, one issue in the States is the white savior culture of the nonprofit field.”
“But there is a Brahmin savior culture here, no? Most of us have Brahmin names. We attended English-medium schools. And now we walk through villages, lecturing poor women on nutrition.”
“But it’s different. We’re all Indian. There’s a shared foundation.” Sandhya fidgeted with her straw. “I had this argument with this roommate of mine before I came here. She’s super Texan. White girl. Republican. The kind of person who says things like, ‘I don’t dislike immigrants. I just think they need to come here legally.’ In any case, she pierced her nose over the summer. She has this big, gold hoop. And I asked her, point-blank, ‘When have you ever had an interest in the East? Or, frankly, brown people at all?’ ”
“There’s nothing sacred about a nose ring, is there? I feel full license to wear pants whenever I want, without worrying that I’m offending Westerners by dressing in their traditional garb.”
“But that’s like saying, ‘If there’s a Black student association, why can’t there be a white student association?’ It’s not the same thing.”
“I suppose the difference is this: Some fifteen percent of India’s population can’t afford dhal. Ganga’s family is in Madurai, and he lives apart from them so he can work at Mukti and send his daughter to Sri Meenakshi Government College. Nose ring arguments seem trivial in comparison.”
Sandhya stared at her. “Have you traveled much in the States? Outside of New York?”
“A bit.”
“Come south. Come to Texas. Then tell me what you think.”
Vega was tempted to argue but changed her mind. They finished their juices and made idle conversation about Sandhya’s upcoming trip to Kerala. She asked for the check, insisted on paying, and took a long route home, past the turnoff for Olcott Kuppam.
14
She ran into Murthy at Higginbothams bookstore days later. They lingered in the literature section, browsing novels by Bapsi Sidhwa and Rohinton Mistry that they both deemed too depressing to bother with. Child brides shipped off to remote villages. Young men forcibly sterilized. “When did Indians become so Dickensian?” Murthy asked.
“It’s the dilemma of the postcolonial novel, no? Do we show the tragedy of daily life, or are we supposed to portray ourselves as healed and ready for self-governance?”
“So, either way, the writing is for a Western audience? We have to show ourselves as we want them to see us? Not tell the stories we want to tell?”
“I suppose so.” Vega picked up The God of Small Things. “I feel a cultural pressure to read this,” she said. “But I really have no desire to.”
“How did you avoid it? It was splashed all over the papers when it came out. She won the Booker.”
Vega shrugged. “I was in the States when it was published. Catching up on my James Baldwin.” She hadn’t mentioned Baldwin as a nod to Murthy’s sexuality, but she regretted the slip a moment later. She could have chosen any number of writers. Why Baldwin? But Murthy seemed not to notice.
“I wouldn’t recommend the book, if you’re tired of tragedy,” he said.
Vega imagined making a life with somebody like Murthy. She hadn’t allowed herself to feel any real attraction to him. She was not one to enjoy far-fetched fantasies—actors, cricket players, and other impossibilities. But it was nice to think about someone besides Naomi. And she pictured meeting a man with Murthy’s gentle intellectualism, his Gandhian look. A man so aloof his affection was surprising.
She left empty-handed, and he with a book of crossword puzzles for his mother. “She has an obsession with these,” he said. “She’ll spend hours on them.” Vega hoped he would keep talking, maybe suggest they go for a coffee or a juice. But he nodded to her, then walked in the opposite direction.
* * *
She began sending her résumé to other NGOs, mostly in Madras, but one in Bangalore and two others in Bombay. All advertised similar work to Mukti. Through our rural toilet project, funded by UNICEF, we teach basic sanitation to villagers. Using theatre as a medium, we teach reproductive health to underprivileged girls. Still, she told herself that any interest from another organization would give her permission to quit her job at Mukti and start something fresh. A few friends from Rhodes School had moved to Bombay after college, and she knew of others in Bangalore. Maybe a new city, some new roommates, would provide a welcome change.
She had drafted multiple emails to Naomi, none of which she ever sent. Still, she felt a touch of anticipation, days later, when she saw she had a new message. But it was only from Shoba, written with the formality of a turn-of-the-century telegram.
Dearest Vega: I wonder if you remember our friend Suresh. He is a very good and nice man. He will come to Madras at August end to visit his parents. If you give consent, I will send some items from the States.
The email had been sent from mohan.engineer@aol.com.
Weeks later, when she returned from work, her mother said, “A man came to see you. He said he would try tomorrow morning.” For a moment, she hoped it had been Murthy. But Rukmini kept looking at her, then said, “He is somebody you met in the States, apparently.”
* * *
Suresh came to her house on a Sunday afternoon. He was more pleasant-looking than Vega remembered. Even a bit attractive. They took a walk towards the beach, then ended up in a tea shop where, he said, he used to come during his IIT days. He had studied engineering, he said, but his best memories of college came from his time in the theater. “We performed Beckett,” he said. “You’ve seen Waiting for Godot?”
“I haven’t. I read some of his poems in undergrad.”
“Godot is a lovely play.”
He walked her back to her porch and, before leaving, said, “I would be very happy to see you again.”
“What was it he dropped off?” Rukmini asked, later that evening.
“Just miscellaneous stuff.”
“Don’t say stuff.”
“Items, then. Miscellaneous items.” Suresh had brought a ShopRite tote carrying a few things Vega had left behind at Shoba’s house and wouldn’t have missed: an unopened jar of night cream that Shoba had coaxed her into buying, a hair clip, the cardigan she had worn on her flight from Frankfurt to Newark when she’d first arrived. Had Shoba asked, she would have told her simply to throw it all away.
“Give the things to Vasanti,” her mother said. “She’s very resourceful.”
* * *
Suresh’s version of the States was different from anything Vega had ever known. It was sequestered and suburban. He had been living in New Jersey for the past seven years, working for the same software company. He loved his colleagues—men from Kentucky and Queens and China. Once a month, they went out to eat together, usually for Szechuan food. He loved Newark Airport and spent weekend afternoons at the windows overlooking the tarmac. He loved playing tennis, something he had never done during his years in India, where all the tennis courts were attached to private clubs. In the States, in New Jersey specifically, they were open to everybody. There was one close to his flat. He went often and would spend hours there. Mohan was his doubles partner.
