By Kristin T. Lee

Review of Habitations by Sheila Sundar (United States: Simon & Schuster, 2024)

Over the past century, the nature of Asian American immigrant life has undergone many shifts. Globalization and technology have transformed the ability of immigrants to keep in touch with and visit their families back home more frequently, while growing development and wealth in many Asian countries have created expanding options for stable employment without needing to leave for greener pastures abroad.

In Sheila Sundar’s elegantly considered debut novel, Habitations, the protagonist, Vega Gopalan, contends with this new landscape of migration on the cusp of the 21st century. Raised in a Brahmin family with a lawyer for a father and attending English-medium private schools in Chennai throughout childhood, Vega goes on to graduate school in Hyderabad to study maternal health, only to drop out when an older male professor takes advantage of her vulnerable position. When she secures a scholarship to a master’s program in sociology at Columbia, she takes the leap, landing in Newark into the welcoming albeit provincial arms of family friends Mohan and Shoba before being propelled into the travails of finding affordable housing in Manhattan.

New York is disorienting for all the usual reasons: dingy flats with astronomical rents, professors who reference unfamiliar people and institutions, the juxtaposition of plentitude and excess with distinctly American poverty. Though Vega’s parents are considered upper middle class by Indian standards, this does not translate to the U.S., and financial precarity is a constant, especially under the restraints of her student visa. At school, Vega falls into a cozy camaraderie with two other international students: Zemadi, an Afro Indian woman raised in Kenya, and Halima, a Pakistani public health scholar. “She didn’t feel the need to impress them,” Sundar writes of their friendship.

When Vega eventually finds an apartment, it comes with a roommate, a Colombian American anthropology student named Naomi, who brings Vega home to Stamford on weekends and holidays, where Naomi’s extended family gathers over beans, rice, and cheesy corn stew. Intensely attracted to Naomi, her first queer desire, Vega frantically backpedals when things between them get real.

To understand Vega’s guardedness, we are given a glimpse into her emotional nucleus: the death of her younger sister, Ashwini, from a congenital heart condition at the age of fourteen. The resultant, devastating grief, alongside the knowledge that a loved one can be torn from you at any moment, shapes Vega more than anything else and determines her posture towards relationships. She builds walls. The acute pain of her bereavement comes into and out of focus at various times in the narrative, but the melancholy lingers throughout, perfectly capturing how indelible losses like these are experienced.

Sundar writes, “She could not imagine surrendering herself to a relationship, allowing herself to be happy, when she knew the likelihood—the real and mathematical likelihood—that the relationship would end. She couldn’t bear another loss.”

Closing herself off from love is Vega’s way of protecting herself from having her heart shattered yet again, so it’s not surprising that she ends up marrying Suresh, a dull but devoted friend of Mohan’s, out of a yearning for the stability of a green card more than out of any sense of affection. She soon regrets it, but not before having a daughter, Asha, with him. There are affairs, there’s divorce, and there’s the logistics of co-parenting after Vega and Asha move to Baton Rouge for an assistant professorship at LSU while Suresh stays in New Jersey.

These expedient calculations of immigrant life give Habitations the greater part of its thematic considerations, but it’s not a formulaic portrayal. There is a longing for home, but it’s a complex and nuanced ache, and there is also a questioning of the American Dream.

“It’s an imperfect trade. It’s always an imperfect trade,” Vega’s friend, Halima, laments as she deliberates between staying in the U.S. versus moving back to Pakistan. There’s no right answer—just a continual tugging at the soul no matter what one chooses.

In a conversation with Winston, a first-generation Jamaican American professor, Vega expresses her regret about leaving India: “We can’t get back to things. We seize the best opportunity, but it happens to be on the other side of the world, and we can’t get back.”

Doors close; careers develop their own train tracks; acclimatization to one’s adopted country makes it that much harder to ever return for good. Vega’s nostalgia is complicated by the ambivalence she feels towards her Brahmin heritage and the privileges it confers in India. On visits home, Vega luxuriates in not having to cook or do the dishes—this is the job of her parents’ house helper, Vasanti—but doesn’t want Asha to grow up in such a “cushioned life.” She’s acutely aware of the parallels between Brahmin saviorism and white saviorism, the condescending smugness of the NGO employees with whom she works for a spell in Chennai as they distribute food along with admonishments to women living in slums.

This social consciousness elevates Habitations to what I’ve termed the Immigrant Novel 3.0, the 1.0 version being first-generation stories of daily hardships and racial powerlessness, while the Immigrant Novel 2.0 fixates on intergenerational familial tensions, often told from a second-generation perspective. These numbers represent not hierarchical rankings nor a full accounting of the scope of immigrant narratives, but rather the general evolution of literature in the face of shifting Asian American immigrant life. Habitations decenters the U.S. as the ultimate pinnacle, conveyed by the characters’ attitudes and by the decision to set significant swaths of the book in India. It’s clear-eyed about the flaws of both countries, resisting the Orientalizing gaze and also resisting the Western tendency to paint our home countries with monochromatic brush strokes.

As a protagonist, Vega is a powerful representation of the Immigrant 3.0. She’s an intellectual who breezily cites Maya Angelou, Rohinton Mistry, James Baldwin, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things in casual conversations, more comfortable debating the dilemmas of the postcolonial novel than she is examining her own feelings. Her knowledge of Asian and Asian American history (she publishes an article in The Nation analyzing the legal case of Bhagat Singh Thind) gives her the political awareness with which to critique the racism she faces in the U.S. as well as the caste system back home. She’s brilliant, strong, and erudite. Despite this, she remains an outsider in the U.S. The liminality of immigrant existence is not ameliorated by her academic prowess; the model minority myth has always been a lie.

Vega’s mom, Rukmini, also upends typecasts of Asian women, particularly Asian mothers. Though she exists mostly off the page, when she does make appearances, her self-assertion sparkles. She’s witty, opinionated, and sharp-tongued, asking a pulmonologist who has never read Jane Austen, “Is that typical of people in your field? ... To not read books?” When Vega is ruminating over her relationship with Naomi, she never worries about her parents’ acceptance of a lesbian partner, nor do they disparage her when she and Suresh divorce. In their shared love of Ashwini and grief over her death, after all, Vega and her parents have only one another to keep Ashwini’s memory alive.

In this way, while Habitations is very much an immigrant novel, there is a broad appeal in how it plumbs the unspoken wants of the human heart. Loneliness, the unremitting pain of losing a loved one, the constraints of familial obligation, the yearning towards freedom—these universal themes are explored with tender authenticity.

For example, Sundar realistically captures the logistical complications of motherhood without simplifying motherhood to be either solely emotionally suffocating or solely unmitigated joy. Vega’s delight in Asha is ardent, but Vega retains her personhood, her intellectual roving, and her own pursuit of companionship, all while coordinating babysitters and daycares.

Ultimately, it is the grace of friendship that proves to be a balm to Vega at every stage of her journey. Despite her cageyness, others embrace her with generous warmth, from Shoba and Mohan in New Jersey, who become like family, to distant family friends in White Plains, where Vega lodges for free during a financially tight period, to Ameya, who becomes her roommate and support structure in Baton Rouge post-divorce.

For much of the book, Vega doesn’t believe that happiness is within her grasp. It’s her friends, her mentors, her lovers, and her family who urge her to permit herself the possibility.

Winston counsels, “We’re allowed to change, is all I’m saying. We’re allowed to want different things at different times. We’re allowed to be happy, even if it’s not what we thought happiness would look like.”

In its emphasis on friendship to assuage the fractures of exile, Habitations is reminiscent of Hisham Matar’s My Friends (2024), about a Libyan émigré living in London. It is the people we surround ourselves with that make a home, Habitations asserts, and in this vein, it joins the pantheon of immigrant narratives that examine how we create community, belonging, and meaning when we’ve left all we know behind.

With intelligent social commentary, wise insight into the human heart, and refined prose, Habitations sings a quiet refrain of loss, longing, striving, and devotion—a subtle showstopper of a novel.

Kristin T. Lee writes about identity, culture, and solidarity in her Substack newsletter, The Embers, and highlights the best books you haven't heard of (and some that you have) in her reviews on Instagram (@ktlee.writes). She lives in Cambridge, MA, and is writing a book on Asian American Christianity.