Coming to America – Part 2

Habitations – a place where one lives, the process of living.

Vega Gopalan thinks she may be pregnant, but she doesn’t want her suspicion confirmed. Confirmation means the decision will be made and Vega is not sure she wants a child or to stay with her husband.

This is our introduction to the protagonist of Sheila Sundar’s Habitations: A Novel. The next 200 or so pages fill in Vega’s life from age 18 to morning sickness, about six years.

Born and raised in (then) Madras, Vega is the eldest of two daughters in a middle-class family. When Vega was 17 her sister died after an illness. This tragedy looms large in early chapters, but is not mentioned much in later chapters.

For years all she had wanted was to touch her sister again, to braid Ashwini’s damp hair or to pull her hand as the walked down the street. Sometimes, for a split second, Vega was certain that she could smell her sister—her blend of coconut oil, sandalwood talc, and adolescent sweat. Then the smell would disappear, and she would remember with miserable clarity that Ashwini was gone.

Vega starts her Masters in India and loves the college, the library and the new vocabulary of her chosen field, sociology. When a young and popular professor shows an interest in her research topic and in her, Vega doesn’t resist. The affair ends and Vega, embarrassed, returns home, abandoning her Master’s. Her father encourages her to apply for a Master’s scholarship at Columbia University – she is accepted and leaves for the US.

At Columbia, Vega shares an apartment with Naomi, a grad student from…Colombia. She enjoys their meals and chats together, and the flirtation, which doesn’t feel too strange. Vega’s social circle expands, mostly international students. There are long discussions about poverty, industrialization and sex. Soon Vega wishes she could live with Naomi in their apartment forever, no gradate program, no going back to India. Naomi’s family, assumes they are already in a relationship. When Naomi asks if that is what Vega wants, Vega says it isn’t “feasible.” By the time Vega feels guilty, Naomi has left.

This cycle will play out a few more times over the years – Vega fantasizes about being with Naomi or running into her somewhere – when it happens, Vega picks a fight, blames Naomi; Naomi leaves and Vega feels guilty.

When the university informs Vega she has enough credits to complete her Master’s early, she’s not ready to go back to India. She hasn’t really missed her parents and has run out of things to say to them. Except to tell them she now has to pay for tuition and housing herself to keep her student visa. Her father sends some money; the daughter of her mother’s friend offers housing. Reluctantly Vega moves to the suburbs where most desis are not the “gas-station types.” After a couple of months, Vega doesn’t mind the comforts of suburbia – like a housekeeper who folds clothes and the cheese, fruits, milk and yogurt which appear “magically.” At the end of her two years, Vega returns to India.

After the joy of home faded, Vega realized she was as annoyed by her parents’ old habits as she was by their new ones. Her father still circled articles in the day’s Hindu he wanted her to read—dry, economics pieces on demonetization, or grisly accounts of drought and farmer suicide…Vega pretended to be engrossed in the articles as they ate. Her father chewed slowly and audibly, and her mother sat beside him, refilling his water glass and wiping the specks of food he spat on the table.

To gain real-world experience, Vega joins an NGO but seems bored at the first training session. After her first day of fieldwork, Vega is done with the group.

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—her excessive use of the word ‘slum,’ or her barrage statistics.

Enter Suresh. Vega had met him at large desi party in New Jersey – when Suresh visits India, they meet a few times. Though he isn’t her type, Vega sees herself “stepping into his life.” “A perch from which to start her PhD.” She (still) fantasizes about sex with Naomi, but a cozy apartment? That’s Suresh.

Looking at him, Vega’s life shifted into focus. A green card. A PhD. A man who was kind, and who asked so little of her, who had no power to hurt her.

In Habitations, transitions from chapter to chapter are often abrupt. One minute Vega is visualizing a secure future with Suresh after post-proposal sex; the next, we’re back to Vega wondering if she’s pregnant. Then, we’re back in Madras for the “dismal and quiet” wedding.

Vega took comfort in the reminder that marriage wasn’t death. She could undo things if necessary. And she wasn’t even sure she would need to.

This might be a good time to mention that at the beginning of the book, before the flashbacks, Vega is kind of tired of her husband, his brainteasers, his Irish Spring soap, his trying too hard. She doesn’t mind that he cooks dinner twice a week and cleans up after. Now that she may be pregnant, she wonders if her baby will look like Suresh, in his “unmemorable” clothes. If the baby had his habits and spoke with his “flat affect”, could she love “it”?

After Asha is born, Vega sees an “endless stretch of shared life” – years from now Asha would still bind her to Suresh. When she’s alone with the baby at night, though, she feels ‘this’ was what her life was leading to, to Asha.

Vega loves her life in academia – the research, the courses and teaching, the affairs with students and professors (ok, that was snarky). Well into her PhD now, she is more confident, even arrogant.

…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.

And then there’s this:

In her New Jersey life…motherhood made her feel small and domestic. With her students, it gave her an aura of sophistication, as though she had crossed the threshold into adulthood. The way, she imagined, her PhD would make her feel.”

On the home front, Vega is tired of Suresh and being tied down in the marriage but the thought of doing something about it is…tiring. A job offer from Louisiana provides an opening for Vega – she tells Suresh he deserves to be happy…she wants him to begin his life (how generous).

This 470-or-so-page book is about 200 pages too long. There are ‘filler’ pages of discussions with friends, students and colleagues, which, for me, didn’t add to the story or characters. In Louisiana when a paper Vega publishes goes ‘viral,’ email messages are included in the book, I’m not sure why. Many pages are spent on Vega’s repetitive behavior with men and Naomi, describing Vega’s visits to New Jersey with Asha after the divorce, desi parties and Suresh’s second marriage. There’s even an odd bit when Vega learns the professor she had slept with years earlier in college had killed himself, accused of having an affair with a student. And…? I also didn’t get why the younger sister’s illness, a heart defect that was not genetic, was kept a mystery – after 300 pages, why reveal it all?

In general, I didn’t care for Vega – her short attention span, that she uses her age as an excuse – she was a child at 18, how could she comfort her mother or advise her father? She was ‘only 22’ with Naomi, what did she know? And yet, Vega isn’t confused about where ‘home’ is, where she belongs. Even at 18, she knows it isn’t Madras. After New York, she knows home isn’t India. In the US, Vega knows home isn’t in the suburbs and when asked if Louisiana is home, she immediately replies, no.

Vega seems to only be interested in world problems if they relate to her interests – farmer suicide isn’t relevant; after the September 11^th attacks, her students and friends are upset; Vega doesn’t know who she should be grieving for, “people whose names she didn’t know?”

For someone supposedly moving forward, Vega spends much of her time looking back.

Brief flashes of self-awareness gave me hope, like when she [begins to] realize she pushes people (Naomi) away. But, as she went back to ex-lovers, wanting to re-hash long-dead relationships, I felt she had not really made much progress. So, when she meets someone new, there’s nothing in her ‘journey’ that convinces me she won’t tire of him/her also.

I do know that I am tired after two months of Vega.

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Reviewer’s Note:

Often in books, even as I remind myself, ‘it’s fiction, made up stuff,’ I fixate on a phrase, a description, something that rankles. In Habitations, it’s the phrase I have italicized in the quote below.

Vega is in labor and panics when a nurse says an epidural is needed – Vega’s obstetrician isn’t in the delivery room.

“On account of her scoliosis, a childhood condition she thought she had outgrown, Vega’s obstetrician had advised against an epidural.”

In general, it grates when, even in fiction, a medical condition is, in my opinion, and experience, misrepresented.

I’ve tried to figure out what purpose the line serves – it’s too vague (and misleading) to create scoliosis awareness. Is it to highlight Vega’s ignorance? Does it add to the author’s point, which I assume is, that Vega felt she was losing control over her own delivery?

Scoliosis is a curvature of the spine, one does not ‘outgrow’ scoliosis. A mild curvature may not need intervention but the curvature usually doesn’t go away after a child stops growing. Which is why an epidural may not be an option – a curve in the spine might inhibit its effect.