Shubha Sunder

I paused outside Porter Square Station, in my wet clothes, to observe what a sign there called a kinetic sculpture—three elevated red objects shaped like tongues, tumbling about their axes and orbiting a tall white pole. My thoughts circled back to Theta’s shocked expression at my rent, which led me to review my predicted costs—food, transportation, utilities—and wonder if I’d overlooked something. After a brief trance, I descended a long escalator to the commuter rail platform and boarded the train to Wilton. Soon I was passing the same backyards and open spaces I’d sped by in March, no longer barren and covered with dirty snow, but green, with that profusion of young spring leaves I associated with Impressionist paintings. A pond slid into view, its edges blurred by clumps of reeds. The rain started again. It drew long diagonal streaks across the windows. Anyone want to get off at Brandeis? the conductor called as she strode up the aisle. That was a question, she added cheerfully. Not a threat.

I was reminded that my own home city on the other side of the world also took its name from boiled beans. There must be many other Beantowns, I thought, if in my limited travels I’d already managed to live in two, one landlocked and one coastal. As our guide continued to tell his stories—of these paths being originally trod by cows, of the gold dome having once been wooden until Paul Revere and his sons plated it with copper, of the theft of the wood-carved Sacred Cod by a group of Harvard students, holding up the deliberations of the state legislature for days—I watched my cousin listening with something like rapture, frequently clapping her hand over her mouth in shock and delight. I, too, was engaged by the anecdotes, some of which were even familiar to me, captivated by our guide’s delivery. Infotainment, I thought: the thing that had been absent from my own education and that my students expected. None of them would have been particularly impressed by the tour; to find this presentation refreshing, one needed to have been exposed to history, as my cousin and I had, as little more than a compendium of facts to be memorized—the precise dimensions of the Taj Mahal, the number of soldiers killed in the Kalinga War.

I apologized for not being able to give her a place to stay. When I was still living at the landlord’s mother’s, she’d asked if she could crash with me, at least until she found accommodations of her own, and I’d said, regretfully, that my place was too small. The house had spare rooms, but I’d shied from the prospect of a family member staying with me, the old lady watching us with her hostile, curious gaze, my cousin’s singsong speech and her accent, much more pronounced than mine—it was the heavy Tamilian accent that even in Bangalore would have been mimicked and mocked—the landlord’s sister scolding me in front of my cousin, implicating us both in the neglect of her mother, and then my cousin reporting to her parents, who’d relay to mine, that I was living in a shabby room in a shabby American house whose owners were scary and rude, prompting my mother to call and chastise me, saying she didn’t understand why I was living like a vagabond in America—was this my long-term plan?