Habitations, page 31
“I have to find something to occupy her,” she told Gayatri. Shoba and Mohan were supposed to arrive in two weeks, which Vega hoped would introduce some order to their lives. In the meantime, Asha had settled into a cossetted existence—only child, only grandchild—that brought to mind a character in a Frances Hodgson Burnett novel, a colonial brat being pampered by her ayah.
“Really?” Gayatri asked. “How do you think most children around the world are raised? Not in marine ecology programs, I assure you.”
If Vega’s work were more structured, if she had an office where she was expected to report every day, she could possibly leave Asha at home with either set of grandparents. Then, at least, whatever chaos unfolded throughout the day would be resolved by the time she returned. But her work consisted mainly of trying to figure out what her work even was. She spent hours in her father’s study aimlessly researching, scheduling meetings with various NGO leaders that would invariably be canceled or postponed. Through it all, she could hear the adults downstairs pleading with Asha to take one more bite, giving into her requests for sliced mango or a bowl of ice cream, consenting to another walk along the beach—a walk that typically resulted in yet another ice cream. Asha, a conscientious kid at home, had started leaving her plate on the kitchen table for Vasanti to clear.
“You’re spoiling her,” Vega told Rukmini. She was particularly irritable that day. Kamala had come by earlier with a set of the Amar Chitra Katha comic books that Vega and her entire generation had been reared on, but that Vega now found cheap and disturbing. Militant re-creations of The Ramayana and The Mahabharata in which the demons were all dark-skinned and the heroes golden-colored, the men grotesquely muscular and the women all demure and large-breasted with impossibly small waists.
“They’re only stories,” Rukmini said.
“Okay, then. Lolita is just a story too. Perhaps she can read that next.”
“The Russians are a different matter,” Rukmini said. “There’s no harm to Amar Chitra Katha. You and Ashwini read the same things.”
“Yes, but they’re crap.”
“You loved them when you were Asha’s age. Let her read them. Then, when she is an adult, she can decide for herself that they are crap.”
When she is an adult. India had revived Vega’s fears of Asha’s mortality. The tragedies reported in the Advocate or the New York Times had terrified her, but reading the Hindu, she could scarcely comprehend the scale of every disaster. A train derailment that killed one hundred and twenty. A storm in West Bengal that decimated a village. She had hired a car for the first week, and on the night the driver, Muthu, picked her up from the airport, she had flown into a rage over the absence of a seat belt.
“I specifically requested!” she said. “I cannot drive fifteen kilometers without a seat belt for my daughter!”
“Madam, I’m sorry.” Muthu pulled the seat forward and rummaged behind it. “It’s here, madam. It’s stuck, only.” He couldn’t have been older than twenty. Vega could feel Asha’s eyes on her. She was tired from the flight but awake enough to be puzzled by this new side of her mother. On the ride home, Vega tried to overcompensate by talking too cheerily with Muthu. When would he finish his B. Comm? How many siblings did he have? How wonderful that he helped to pay his sisters’ tuitions. Throughout the drive, as Muthu mumbled his terse answers, Vega imagined Asha’s body flying from the crashed windshield onto the road.
On her fifth night in Chennai, Rukmini came into Vega’s room. They had finally shaken their jet lag. Asha was already asleep, lying on a pallet on the floor, her damp hair matted around her neck.
“She’s adjusting nicely,” Rukmini said.
“Perhaps.”
Rukmini sat on the edge of the bed. “What do you mean by this? Perhaps?”
“You don’t need to give in to every one of her requests, Amma. Vasanti doesn’t need to make poori and chole every day just because Asha asked for it.”
“What’s the harm? Vasanti doesn’t mind.”
It was a pointless argument, Vega knew, and she was in no position to make it. She had spent the past days being carted around by Muthu, leaving him on congested intersections in Egmore and Nungambakkam so she could take vapid meetings with NGO directors or wait in endless lines at the bank or consular office—errands that accomplished nothing, taking up a full afternoon but requiring her to come back the following day.
Rukmini gestured to the bag on the floor. “You did some shopping today?”
“I went to Kalpa Druma after my meeting.”
“That’s a lovely shop. Show me all you bought.”
“They’re just simple things. One cotton sari and a few skirts.”
“Let me see, then. You used to love to show off your purchases.”
It was Ashwini, actually, who loved to parade around in anything new, but Vega didn’t bother to correct this memory. Rukmini reached into the bag and set the sari on the bed. “Indigo. Lovely color.”
“I like it too.”
“You’re young enough to wear these block prints. It has a blouse piece, no? You can take it to Urmila. She’s expensive, but she does a good job.”
“Gayatri recommended a tailor in T. Nagar. He sews all of her blouses.”
Rukmini refolded the sari and smoothed it with her hand. Then she pointed to the trunk on the floor where Vega and Ashwini used to keep their clothes. It was sealed shut. After Ashwini died, Vasanti had been tasked with organizing it, and Vega assumed it was empty.
“You have to take some time to sort through all of this,” Rukmini said.
“The trunk? I thought Vasanti did that years ago.”
“She washed and folded everything. But I don’t know what to keep and what to donate. I couldn’t do that on my own. And Asha might want some of it someday.” They looked down at Asha. She was so small in her sleep. If there was any sort of a god, Vega thought, this was the gift it gave to mothers. To let them see their children, at night, shrunk back down to their infant state.
Rukmini fingered the edge of the bedsheet. “You’re worrying too much about small things. She’s fine. She’s happy.”
“I’m not worrying, Amma. I only ask that you don’t spoil her. She’s capable of putting her plate in the sink. I don’t want Vasanti cleaning up after her.”
“That is a small thing.”
“No. It’s a big thing.”
“Fine. But what I’m saying now is something different. What she asks for is so small. Some sweets, some silly books. Games your father and P.N. play with her. Let her be. Let us give her these small things.”
* * *
Vega’s former professor at Hyderabad, Dr. Das, was now the chair of the Sociology department at Presidency College. To Vega’s relief, she had a selective memory of Vega’s time there, remembering the quality of her coursework but not her reasons for leaving. They exchanged a few emails and met for coffee at a charming but terrible bakery next to Triplicane Book House where, over dry pieces of chocolate cake, they discussed Vega’s research, the rise of right-wing extremism in Gujarat, Barack Obama’s prospects in the 2008 primaries. Vega assumed that it was a casual reunion, but at the close of the conversation, Dr. Das informed her of a temporary visiting scholar program that, as she put it, “would be going exceptionally well, except we are currently lacking a visiting scholar.” Thus, two weeks after she arrived in Chennai, Vega found herself standing in front of a classroom at Presidency.
The campus delighted her. She loved the brick and terra-cotta buildings with their arched entryways, the manicured lawns, the shocks of bougainvillea and hibiscus. She and her colleagues gathered at lunchtime and shared whatever food they had brought from home. One, a woman named Deepika, had two sons close to Asha’s age. On Saturday mornings, they brought the children to campus and projected a film for them in the department’s lecture hall while they caught up on grading. Afterwards, she and Deepika would sit on a bench with cups of tea from the canteen and watch Asha and the boys tear across the green.
“Students like your lecture style,” Deepika said. “They talk about your class.”
“I like them, too.” She had anticipated a month of easy teaching, students so steeped in rote learning that they were eager for any deviation from droning lectures and high-pressure exams. But they were bolder and more energetic than she had anticipated. They debated anti-corporate activism, collective mobilization. They held internships with grassroots organizations she had never heard of: All India Network of Sex Workers, Intersex Justice Program. A small group of them had spent the previous summer in Pallur, assisting in the development of a rural women’s farming collective.
“Even that has its privileges,” her student Kumaran said. “If this work is based on volunteerism, then it is a privilege to challenge systemic inequity. What of our classmates who cannot afford to work for no wages? Are they not committed activists?”
There was a hum of agreement. The first paper Kumaran submitted had been an examination of the masculinization of Dalit men, and Vega read one of his paragraphs over and over again, presenting it to the class for discussion. There is a classic image we associate with Indian masculinity: working-class, dark-skinned and bare-shirted, sinewy and marked by labor. It is not unlike the hyper-masculine characterizations of Black men in America.
“I’m an anomaly,” Kumaran told her one afternoon. They were sitting in her office, drinking milky tea from the canteen. There was no formal practice of office hours at Presidency, but she had implemented what she called “Open Door Sessions,” and they had become her favorite part of the week. “I’m an upper-class Dalit kid. My parents were both lawyers, so I had all the tangible advantages. Parochial schools. Tennis club. At school, all of my friends were these rich kids. ‘Boat Club Brahmins.’ ”
Vega laughed. “I’ve never heard that phrase.” She had taken swimming lessons at the Boat Club as a child and remembered it as an unremarkable place that served stale potato chips and imported juice boxes, where she sat shivering in her towel after another failed attempt at the backstroke. But it had been renovated since. She and Gayatri had gone at the beginning of the summer, lounging on wicker furniture and sipping mango cocktails and icy bottles of Kingfisher. It had been, she recalled guiltily, the highlight of her first few weeks at home.
Kumaran rapped his fingers on the arm of his chair, then glanced at his watch. He was a wiry kid with over-caffeinated tendencies, who seemed always in a rush to get to his next meeting. “My father used to say, ‘Oh, you’re lucky. When I was a boy, I would never have had access to such a place. Those people would never have sat at the same table as me, invited me to their private clubs.’ I tell him, it’s worse to be a novelty than to not be invited. My classmates love to be seen with me in public. ‘Oh, we have one Dalit friend. Look how far we’ve come.’ ”
“There is an American sociologist I’d like you to read,” Vega said. “Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. He deconstructs this notion of a post-racial society.” She had recently suggested to Kumaran that he consider graduate work in the States. “You can get an excellent fellowship,” she said. “I would be happy to write you a letter of recommendation.” She pictured him at Low Library, surrounded by adoring classmates, with his shaggy hair and dog-eared copy of The Annihilation of Caste, dropping obscure facts they all pretended to know.
“Maybe,” he’d said. “But mainly I’m interested in Hyderabad, or JNU in Delhi. Why leave if my work will all be based here?”
Another thought struck her. Had Sukumar Reddy been alive, had Kumaran wound up studying under him in Hyderabad, he would have fallen under Reddy’s spell, trading in his ideas for words that simply sounded like ideas. For a stinging and shameful moment, she was grateful Reddy was dead. She watched Kumaran gather his papers, then bound towards his next meeting.
* * *
Suresh and Rupa finally arrived, weary from twenty hours on a plane with an infant. Suresh, despite his exhaustion, spun Asha around, then sat on the floor with her and feigned interest in her collection of chipped shells.
P.N. sat on the chair behind them, holding Vikram, staring at the baby’s face as though trying to memorize his features. Three generations of males. Vega had never been moved by that sort of thing, the tenderness of grandfathers and fathers and sons. But maybe, she thought, there was something to it. Just as there was something particular to Rukmini’s love when she rubbed oil into Vega and Ashwini’s hair when they were girls, or when she sat next to Vega on the bed and stared down at Asha’s sleeping body.
Later, Vega helped Kamala bathe Vikram in the kitchen sink. The house had been chaotic moments earlier but was now still and quiet. Asha was asleep on the pallet she shared with Kamala. Suresh and Rupa were getting ready for bed in the tiny guest quarters that doubled as Kamala’s sewing room. Vega remembered the few nights she had spent there shortly after she and Suresh were married, staring at the rows and rows of framed embroidery: marigolds, peacocks, lumpy figures of Ganesha. She remembered the sound of P.N.’s hacking cough through the thin walls, how trapped and lonely she had felt. In the mornings, she would lie under the covers, pretending to be asleep, delaying the moment when she would have to get up and use the small, shared bathroom.
“You take him, kanna,” Kamala said to Vega, wrapping the towel around Vikram. “I’m becoming so old, and he’s so heavy now.”
Kamala was hardly old. She was fifty-eight, four years younger than Rukmini, but her arthritis had aged her. She still embroidered, but she had been asking for Asha’s help to thread her needles. At night, she coated her hands in Tiger Balm. And with this new condition, she seemed to have adopted other habits of the aged and infirm. She blasted Sun TV, glued to a new Tamil soap opera about a reformed gangster turned politician. She complained incessantly about crime and corruption and had recently voiced her support for Lal Krishna Advani.
“He’s a religious zealot, Amma!” Vega said. Asha, sitting on the floor and sorting through her ever-growing pile of shells, looked up, and Vega lowered her voice. “He’s made no apology for his actions in Gujarat. You’ve always been a Congress Party supporter. If Advani wins, how will you explain that to your grandchildren? How will you tell them, ‘I voted BJP. I voted for a political party that was responsible for the murder of thousands of people?’ ”
Kamala had sighed, seemingly exhausted by the depth of this political discourse, and adjusted the plastic fan. “I am considering my options, only.” Now, she made small lentil and rice balls and fed Vikram by hand as Vega held him on her lap. Her eyes were watery. “He eats well.”
“You can tell from his cheeks.” Vega kissed his head. “He’s happy and healthy.”
“I’ve wondered so often how your mother survived. To lose one daughter. And then you and Asha, so far away.”
Vega had never spoken about Ashwini with her mother-in-law. For a ridiculous moment, it surprised her that Kamala even knew. “It’s hard for them still,” she said. “It always will be, I think.”
“And for you, kanna,” Kamala said softly. They were quiet for a while. Vega squeezed Kamala’s hand.
“He wants some milk, you think?” Kamala said. “Do they give him cow’s milk yet?”
“Rupa is still nursing. I don’t know if they’re giving him cow’s milk also.”
“Buffalo milk is very good. Easy for infants to digest.”
“You should tell Suresh and Rupa. We can send for some tomorrow, if they want it.”
Vikram was squirming and kicking his legs, jet-lagged and wide awake. The cloth Kamala had tied around his waist was now wet. Vega rummaged through Rupa’s purse for a diaper, changed him, then set him on the floor. “You go to sleep, Amma. I can watch him.”
“You have class tomorrow.”
“I teach only in the morning. I can rest afterwards.” Kamala lingered for a minute, looking doubtful. Vega recalled how Shoba had insisted on watching Asha when she was an infant, telling Vega, She’s like a daughter to me. Like my own flesh and blood. She wished she had some of Shoba’s emotional candidness, that she could somehow express to Kamala how much she loved Vikram, how good it felt to care for him. Instead, she lifted him so Kamala could give him a kiss. Then she sat up with him until nearly two a.m., when he finally began to doze off. She held him on her chest and lay on the couch, feeling him grow heavier and heavier until they were both asleep.
* * *
Shoba and Mohan arrived with Tara and Veena, and Suresh’s parents’ home acquired a happy but disorderly look—unzipped suitcases, the floor scattered with hair ties and little kid socks, abridged editions of Treasure Island and Little Women. Days later, Shoba and Rupa’s parents, Janaki and Kumar, came from Coimbatore. They were a dull, devout couple who went daily to the Ganesha Temple and seemed overwhelmed by the relatively cosmopolitan buzz of Chennai, complaining about the traffic and clutching each other’s arms as they walked down the street. But they were sweet with Asha, and for this, Vega felt kindly towards them. “I remember her when she was only a baby!” Janaki said. “Now look! Such a big girl!”
Vega was spending less and less time with her parents. At first, they were tolerant of the situation, sensitive to Asha’s need to be with Suresh’s side of the family, but this tolerance quickly faded. “I hardly see you anymore,” Rukmini said. “What kind of divorce is this? It’s as though you’re married to your ex-husband, his current wife, and his in-laws.”
