Postcards from Past Homes – Part II

Click here for Part I.

The Ethiopian cab driver dropped me off at East 8th Street. It was dark, past 7 O clock, probably. He pulled out my suitcases from the trunk and tried to wheel them on to the sidewalk. The wheels sputtered and spun and the suitcase went round in circles.

“Is there nothing to caach?”

I looked at him blankly. My mind was reeling from the flying and from the change. The University of Cincinnati had been an intimate campus with beautiful buildings crowding together on a stretch on land navigable by foot in under 20 minutes. The University Palms apartment complex in Tempe, Arizona was a smattering of  gray boxes and painted iron grill on a barren desolate landscape. I looked down and noticed the suitcase had no handles to pull it with. Which is not surprising because these were the same suitcases that we had filled with American goods and taken back from Madison, WI to New Delhi over 10 years ago.

The place was a 2 bedroom 2 bath, even though there were no beds. My three Indian roomies slept on padded mattresses on the floor. I quite liked the arrangement so I did the same except my bed was a folded up comforter that was reinforced by linen. I was taught to carry groceries back on a bicycle. The trick was to buy two gallons of milk, not one, and hang each in a bag from each handlebar. That way you didn’t feel the weight of either one. But if you veered ever so slightly the imbalance would jerk the bike in one direction and people would stare. In the evenings I would come back to 3 guys each bent over a laptop on the floor in a different corner of the house.

My feverish zeal to prove myself academically had waned from my days at Cincinnati. I played tennis on the campus courts in the evenings at times, biked over to see a movie with the roommates and sometimes hit the microbrewery around the corner. They had divinely delicious chicken rolls.  On the weekends I would bike past the reveling undergrads. For some reason my department was co-located in downtown with bars and shopping complexes and shared an elevator with the businesses. At the end of day as I slumped in the elevator resting my backpack on its metallic wall, sometimes confused looking party goers would emerge on my floor. Dressed garishly, they would reek of alcohol and perfume and seem distinctly out of place. In the half minute it would take the elevator to go down to the ground floor, I would stand awkwardly avoiding their gazes. America had already begun to teach me one of those brilliant life skills, how to avoid the gaze of people. I felt short, my jeans being the inexpensive kind didnt quite fit around my skinny legs, my jacket bulged from under my backpack straps. shoes not the right brand, hair too puffy and the spectacles made my cheeks look chubby in contrast to the sleek jawlines of the mostly Caucasian men who frequently got lost on the elevator. Occasionally a gentleman who fancied his wits would try to make a sarcastic remark at my expense, to cut the tension in the elevator or to impress one of the dolled up girls, I couldn’t tell. I mostly hated these people.

Arizona is hot. Dry. Relentlessly dry. There was a pool in our apartment complex that was directly beneath the balcony. Some nights at some wee hour, shrieks of joy would be heard and girls dressed in nothing but flip flops would plonk themselves into the pool. If you peeked there would be a perfect body wading through the water like a shark. The sounds of frolicking would reverberate through the apartment and my roommates and I would look up from our laptop screens and smile at each other. Wry smiles of excited amusement but also of a frustrating realization that there was a life that was unattainable. As I neared the completion of my degree, I had proven myself to myself and was filled with a burning desire to belong. To prove myself to others.

< Part III, IV to follow >

Advertisement