Sheila Sundar's HABITATIONS is the best slice-of-life book with an overarching scope. It is the saga of our protagonist Vegavahini (meaning Fast Medium when translated from Sanskrit) and how she often feels stuck and stagnant in this life. Some choices we make might not yield the same result as we expected, but the choices that were made for us can bring miracles. Migrating to a different country can make you a split person, where you neither belong on this side nor that. Vegavahini, with the nickname of Vega, loses her sister at a very young age. This tragic event shapes her life, leaving her with a sense of impermanence and a fear of attachment. Her journey takes her through various phases, from her master's program in the USA to her Ph.D. thesis, her husband, and even her country. However, she always feels like nothing lasts forever and inevitably finds reasons to end things prematurely before allowing them to run their course. We see Vega switch countries, jobs, master majors, lovers, sexualities, and even her personality. Her restlessness in being stagnant constantly drives her to make impulsive decisions that sometimes put her in trouble, and at other times, she ruins them herself. HABITATIONS is Vega's desperate attempt to find her home and comfort in the world like she had when everything was perfect, her sister was alive, and the whole world seemed lit up. It is beautifully portrayed in the book. Sheila Sunder does an excellent job of showing how a conventionally unlikeable choice can still be the correct path for a person when things are put into perspective. I have never seen a female protagonist more morally gray than Vega is. As a reader, I still rooted for her and wanted good things to happen to her. The novel never lost momentum for me, but it needs to be said that it is not a book one can finish in a single sitting. The concepts presented here are so heavy and profound that I was forced to close the book and contemplate the repercussions. I was tempted to imagine these situations happening to me just to understand how I would react. We grow and find resolve in life alongside our protagonist, and that was an incredible journey for me. I hope you love this as much as I did.
A young academic moves from India to the United States, where she navigates first love, a green card marriage, single motherhood, and more in this “delightful novel, written with immediacy, warmth, and wry humor” (Ha Jin, National Book Award-winning author of Waiting).
Vega Gopalan is adrift. Still reeling from the death of her sister years earlier, she leaves South India to attend graduate school at Columbia University. In New York, Vega straddles many different worlds, eventually moving in and out of a series of relationships that take her through the striving world of academia, the intellectual isolation of the immigrant suburbs, and, ultimately, the loneliness of single motherhood. But it is the birth of Vega’s daughter that forces the novel’s central question: What does it mean to make a home?
Written with dry humor and searing insight, Habitations is an intimate story of identity, immigration, expectation and desire, and of love lost and found. But it is also a universal story of womanhood, and the ways in which women are forced to navigate multiple loyalties: to family, to community, and to themselves.
A profound meditation on the many meanings of home and on the ways love and kinship can be found, even in the most unfamiliar of places, Habitations introduces Sheila Sundar as an electrifying new voice in literary fiction.
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