Habitations, page 17
“So, this is home?” Margo asked. She set the box down and bent over Asha, who was stirring on Vega’s lap.
“For now, at least.”
She expected Margo to ask a follow-up question, but she just said, “Let’s trade. I’ll hold the baby, and you go through the books.” She went to the bathroom and washed her hands, then joined Vega on the couch and eased Asha onto her lap.
Margo had a son, but she rarely talked about him except to say that he had moved to Colorado for college and stayed after graduating. There was a small photograph of him on her desk, dressed for a hike and staring past the camera. “He has his own life,” Margo once said. “We talk once a month or so.” It was a passing comment Vega hadn’t thought much of at the time. Now, looking at Asha, it was unimaginable that she would ever grow up, wander off to another corner of the world, need nothing more from Vega than an occasional phone call. She had wondered, since those hazy nights after Asha’s birth, if it was normal to love one’s child so much. To crave her skin, the folds of her palm. It couldn’t be normal, she reasoned. If it were, how did Rukmini seem to be so blithely surviving? Why didn’t she choose to die after Ashwini died?
There was an odd assortment of books. Legal Pluralism in Ethiopia; The Subculture of Skateboarding; Perspectives on Death and Dying. “Nothing on your specific research questions,” Margo said. “But some of these are younger researchers, and their writing is engaging. I’m supposed to bring them to the department next week, but I thought you should take a look first.”
Vega picked up Legal Pluralism in Ethiopia. “I know this author’s name,” she said.
“Mengistu,” Margo said. “She’s from Berkeley. She’s been publishing some non-academic papers too. She had a piece in the Atlantic last month. Without putting too much pressure on you, this is where I see you in a few years. Once you really sharpen your research questions.”
Vega ran her finger along the binding of Legal Pluralism in Ethiopia and opened to the table of contents. She felt the same mix of excitement and envy that had surfaced a few months earlier, sitting in Anjali’s bedroom and leafing through her course reader. Only this feeling was infused with an arrogance she had never before experienced. She could do this, too. She could write a book.
Rukmini came home, greeted Margo effusively, and went into the kitchen to set out lunch. “It must be hard for them, to have you so far away,” Margo said.
“I think it is, in some ways.” Asha was making small, fussy noises in Margo’s arms. It had been two hours since she’d nursed, and Vega’s breasts were starting to fill. “But I don’t know how I could have moved forward in academia if I had stayed in Chennai.”
Rukmini stepped out of the kitchen, holding a dish towel. “Of course you have to do something here. Something you couldn’t have done at home. Then, only, is the sacrifice worthwhile. That’s my opinion.”
Vega went into her bedroom to nurse Asha. When she came back to the living room, Margo and Rukmini were seated at the table over plates of idlis and chutney.
“The intellectual minds tend to stay put,” Rukmini was saying. “The doers come to the States. The engineers and the doctors. Not the scientists, the artists, the poets. So it isn’t a brain drain, really. We keep our best.”
Rukmini had delivered a similar speech, weeks ago, at Shoba and Mohan’s house, when she discovered one of the guests had never read Jane Austen. “Is that typical of people in your field?” she had asked. “To not read books?” The woman, a pulmonologist living in Chester, hadn’t said much in response, had simply stood up and refilled her plate. Later, in the car, Rukmini said, “These people really are of a different intellectual class entirely. Good riddance to them, I say.”
“I think I’ve cautioned you about this before, Amma. If the Communist Party ever rose to power in India, you wouldn’t fare well. You’d be hanged on the spot.”
“At least I wouldn’t die an idiot,” Rukmini said.
It may have been the delirium of new motherhood, or Rukmini’s characteristic lack of self-awareness—Vega imagined that Suresh, who was driving the car and well within earshot, was not well-versed in Jane Austen—but the comment had made her laugh, quietly at first, then uncontrollably. A few days later, as though he had been mulling over this conversation the entire time, Suresh said to Rukmini, “I read Sense and Sensibility during my B. Tech.”
“Is the baby asleep?” Margo asked Vega.
“She always falls asleep when she nurses. It’s her only pattern of behavior that I seem to have cracked.”
“Well, they change, of course. The moment you figure something out, it goes away.”
After lunch, as Rukmini was clearing the plates, Margo said, “Listen, I wanted to add one more thing. I want you to keep your eye on every conference you can get to. There’s the annual social science conference in Chicago, but that might be a bit ambitious this year, in terms of the baby. There’s a smaller working group that convenes at NYU, and another hosted by the UPenn Press.”
Vega paused, feigning interest in the skateboarding book. “Tell me about the ones at NYU and Penn.”
“There’s nothing much to tell. Just register with your CUNY code and it will be free.”
“The UPenn Press conference is at Penn itself?”
“I’d imagine. I can’t think why it wouldn’t be.”
She and Naomi hadn’t seen each other in three years. Had Vega known, at the time, that three years would pass without any contact between them, she would have found it unbearable. But, looking back, it was the perfect window of time—brief enough that Naomi might still feel something, but distant enough that they wouldn’t have to untangle all that went wrong. “I’ll plan to attend both,” she said.
“Good.” Margo nodded towards the pile on the floor. “Now tell me which books you want to keep.”
* * *
Rukmini left just before Christmas. “When next I see the baby, she’ll be walking,” she said. “It hurts my heart.”
“It won’t be long, Amma.” They were standing at the gate at Newark Airport. Vega was holding Asha in a carrier—another gift from Sudha and Rakesh. With her hands free, she was arranging Rukmini’s boarding passes in her wallet. In the distance, Suresh was standing at the window, staring at the planes.
“Come to India in the summer. Appa needs to meet his grandchild. You can manage the flight on your own. I know you can.”
“I know.”
“Keep her safe. Manage your studies and keep her safe.” Rukmini pressed her cheek against Vega’s, kissed Asha’s head, and boarded her flight.
In the weeks after Rukmini’s departure, Vega ping-ponged between thrilling freedom and desperate loneliness. She delighted in her ability to snack again without her mother constantly prodding her to eat properly, and to doze off while nursing Asha without the sounds of footsteps and banging cabinets in the background. She was relieved to no longer facilitate conversation between Rukmini and Suresh, who—once they departed the comfortable terrain of food and Asha—seemed to have no common interests.
But she missed waking up to the smell of frying onions. She missed the small observations Rukmini made of Asha, full of grandmotherly wonder. Look how strong her grip is. She loves when you sing for her. She had cooked Asha her first solid food, dhal and rice pounded with ghee, and coached Vega as she eased the spoon towards Asha’s mouth. One afternoon, Rukmini accidentally called Vega “Ashwini.” This happened so often when Ashwini was alive that they mechanically responded to each other’s names. But now it caught Vega by surprise. She and Rukmini moved through the rest of the day in a stunned silence. As she was packing to return home, Rukmini said, “I have some of her things. Jewelry and whatnot that I planned to leave for her. The coral necklace. You remember.”
Vega remembered, but vaguely. Her mother’s jewelry box had been a thing of fascination when she and Ashwini were younger. There was a time when she would have known exactly which pieces were going to go to her and which would go to Ashwini. It hadn’t crossed her mind in years.
“They’ll all go to Asha, of course. It will mean something to her, eventually.”
She had been shaken by this realization, after Ashwini’s death, that all the private memories they shared no longer held any meaning to anyone besides her. Who else knew how much Ashwini had cried over those damn kittens? Who else had been there when they ogled the contents of the Cleveland Hospital vending machines? When Vega first had her period, Ashwini—gripped by the news—had asked, over and over, “What kind of hurt is it? Does it hurt like a cut?” Had she lived, this may have become a joke between them. But the memory was worthless now. Vega felt something akin to that loss as she watched Rukmini fold her clothes—the kurtas she had worn over and over during the last six months, the saris she hadn’t touched because they had barely left the house. There was nobody in the States who shared Vega’s loss. Aside from Suresh and Sudha, with whom she never talked about her sister, and Naomi, with whom she no longer talked at all, nobody knew that Ashwini had existed.
* * *
February came. She tucked her breast pump into her backpack and boarded the train to Philadelphia. She felt so certain that Naomi would be there, that Vega would breeze into a lecture hall and find her seated near the end of a row with an empty chair beside her. Sometimes she imagined they would meet in the elevator or stairwell, or perhaps walking across campus.
But the conference itself was sparsely attended. She had to ask for directions twice. Nobody, it seemed, had heard of UPenn Press. When she finally found the building, the first session was already underway. A pert undergraduate pointed her to a table covered in blank name tags and black markers, and another with platters of melon and tiny water bottles. The presentation topics were equally uninteresting: Polishing Your Abstract; Copyright Infringement; Finding Your Voice in Science Writing. She sat through a session on women in publishing and listened as the presenter droned on about the problem of gender bias in peer-reviewed articles. A series of graphs was projected onto the wall. The attendees, mainly undergraduates, were bent studiously over their notebooks. Vega’s breasts hurt. She slipped out, found the bathroom, and pumped in a stall. That night, back in New Jersey, she drafted an email to Naomi: I went to Penn, hoping to see you. Maybe I should have written first. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered. I miss you. But she deleted the message before she could allow herself to send it. Then she slid into bed next to Suresh.
Part 4
17
Vega met Winston Kinney at his Thursday afternoon seminar at Montclair State, called Epidemiology of Aging. He wore a wedding band, though he never talked about his wife, and after mentioning Asha once in passing, Vega never said anything about her life beyond the university. There were weeks of flirting, office hour sessions held with the door closed, during which she pulled her chair next to his and they pretended to pore over her papers. At night, she let Suresh touch her, imagining Winston’s hands moving down her breasts and stomach and opening her legs. Throughout the day she replayed the Anglicized lilt of Winston’s Jamaican accent, the way he pronounced the u in ecumenical as a double o, and said “full stop,” to emphasize a point. Physically, she found him thrilling and electrifying and new. But there was also something familiar about him. He had grown up reading P. G. Wodehouse and Sherlock Holmes, spent rural summers with his grandparents in a town called Portmore. When he told Vega about those summers, she imagined him tearing through a house identical to her own grandparents’ home in Mysore. She was curious about him in a way she never had been with Suresh. She wondered what Winston had been like as a little boy.
One afternoon she said to him, “You need a TA. It isn’t possible to teach three courses, including a seventy-person lecture, without a TA.”
“I have a third world work ethic,” he said.
“I don’t know about that,” Vega said. “But you do have third world enrollment numbers.”
He raised his eyebrows. “If you can think of anyone who might be qualified.”
It was a thrilling proposition. It was also feasible. Vega had spent the past semester at home with Asha, then enrolled at Montclair State for the spring—on leave from CUNY until the following fall. In the mornings, she dropped Asha, now six months old, at the campus childcare center. Though she remained a constant force in Vega’s day—missing her, running over to nurse her in the afternoons—this arrangement gave her a freedom she hadn’t felt since Asha’s birth. On top of this, her coursework was effortless. There was Economic Sociology, led by a professor named Dr. Cowen, a man on the very brink of retirement and consumed by material she had covered during her early graduate school days: Adam Smith, Malthus, Amartya Sen. Her seminar, Race and Ethnicity—led by a professor close to her age—was effortless for a different reason. She read through the course packet in a single week and ordered the full texts of the excerpted chapters. She fell asleep while reading Dorothy Roberts’s Killing the Black Body, and when Asha woke up to nurse, she reopened the book. She had taken similar courses at CUNY. But there, she had felt a tenuousness, as though she were merely auditing, as though her job were to be quiet and listen. “It’s the in-between,” one of her CUNY classmates, Kavita, had said. Kavita was one of the few other Indian students she had met, and though they had little in common, occasionally she made a point that lingered with Vega. “Indians are neither here nor there. We’re not white, but for the most part we exist within a white America. So it’s hard to know when we have the right to speak.”
This had been true at CUNY. But at Montclair, the students were younger, largely white suburbanites, and Vega quickly noticed that she was the sharpest person in the room. She was also the darkest skinned. When she made a reference to the third world, the class quieted with a respectful acquiescence. For the first time in her academic life, she didn’t have to work particularly hard to impress her professors. Even with Asha’s relentless demands, she had time on her hands.
She stayed in Winston’s office later than usual, reading student papers. She didn’t know enough about public health to offer any substantive feedback, so she focused on small edits, corrections to grammar and margins and footnotes. Once, she let her eyes linger on him, his lips slightly parted as he stared down at the page. She knew that she could have him. And it felt, from that moment, just a matter of time.
* * *
Suresh was in the bedroom when Vega and Asha walked through the door, and Vega could hear his voice as she moved through the apartment. He was talking with Vikas, a college friend who lived in Houston. It was a weekly phone call that he always recounted to her later, less to share Vikas’s side of the conversation, it seemed, than to replay it for himself.
He joined them a few minutes later in the kitchen. Asha was sitting in her highchair and Suresh pulled gently on her toes, then leaned over and kissed her forehead. Vega expected him to comment on their late arrival. Instead, he said, “Vikas has a new doubles partner. Punjabi guy.” He took the bowl of rice and dhal from Vega, mashed it further, blew on it, and extended the spoon to Asha.
Vega had never met Vikas, nor been remotely curious about him, but he animated Suresh in a way she had never seen, so she felt a sort of distant gratitude.
“We discussed a visit,” he now told Vega. “Sometime in the spring. With Mohan and Shoba, too. We can bring the girls. Make it a proper reunion.”
Vega thought about all the reunions she wished she could have: a trip to Nairobi with Zemadi and Halima. A week in Paris or Rome with Gayatri, walking the length of the city, lingering in cafés. “That would be nice,” she said. Asha lifted her hand and swatted the spoon. It disappeared under a cabinet.
* * *
Vega and Winston first went to his flat together under the pretext of finding a paper, an early piece he had written on the care of patients with dementia in four Jamaican parishes. “It was well regarded at the time, actually. Rather a breakthrough study in the use of qualitative data.”
There was no need to find the paper, which Vega had already read. She knew, also, that Winston had not amassed enough publications to misplace one; all of his articles were compiled in a thin binder on his bookshelf. But she played along as he riffled through the files in his office. “If you don’t mind,” he said, “I must have them back at my place.”
He lived in a tidy, sparse studio, on a commercial strip of Bloomfield Avenue. His sports coat hung on the back of a chair. A single pair of running shoes was lined up next to the door. There were no photographs, no women’s clothes. The wedding band should have been evidence enough, but it struck her—thrilled her a bit—that there were no signs of a shared life.
“You live alone?” she asked.
He gave her a small smile. “You really want to get into all of that right now?”
She didn’t. There was a bed in the far corner of the apartment, and she followed him there. He sat down, pulled her between his knees and looked up. The angle made him seem boyish, almost pleading. He slid his hands to her waist. She was wearing one of the wrap-dresses Rukmini had bought for her for the purposes of breastfeeding, and he looped the strings around his fingers.
“I want to see you,” he said.
She touched his chin with her thumb. “You are seeing me.”
“No. I want to see all of you.”
He untied her dress, unhooked her bra, and slid her underwear down her legs. She had never before known that desire could hurt, that there was a small knot inside her that could wind itself so tightly that it ached. He ran his tongue over her nipples, and she worried she would leak into his mouth, but she didn’t, or if she did, he didn’t notice. When he lay her on the bed, she had an impulse to apologize for her stretch marks, for the excess flesh around her stomach, but she couldn’t find the words. They worked together to undo his clothes. His body was taut, almost sinewy, his skin a shade darker than hers. He opened her legs and played with her so softly she was afraid to move, afraid of knocking his hand away, and when he slid inside her it was easy, not the coarse and rutted entry she had come to know with Suresh. She said his name, and he said hers, his voice muffled by her hair.
