39. Dream School - Lords of Serendipity

Ammi!

Devi?

Yes! Of course!

Where are you? Looks like a bloody sci-fi.

It’s the lab, Ammi. I’m in the lab. This is where we do the work.

What lab? Aren’t you secretary for the American professor? He’s no scientist, is he?

The computers lab, Ammi.

My god. What kind of money do these bloody people have, building hospital rooms for computers?

No, Ammi. It’s not like that. We are a research institute working on—

Working on a different planet than our Sri Lanka, looks like. But never mind. Are you eating?

Just then Devi’s brothers crowded in behind her mother, who sucked her teeth but adjusted so they could look and wave, too.

Posh, sis! First-class! Like a Tom Cruise movie!

Total Tom Cruise, Devi. Total.

Thank you, said Devi.

See you soon!

She had invited them to visit Serendipity the next month, when the famous Professor Martin was coming to campus to give a talk about his major discovery. Devi was helping organize it.

Where’s Thathi?

Not here presently, said Ammi.

Where is he?

Don’t ask questions when you won’t like the answers, child.

Devi sat back in her office chair and fingered its plastic webbing. Was he standing on the walkway of the house next door, the crook of his elbow pressed against his forehead to shield his eyes from the sun while calling up to Menaka Aunty, enthroned on her verandah? Was he off at a business meeting, inspired by another brilliant new idea for Devi’s future? She almost preferred that to where she knew he actually was. Her father was just off camera, in the kitchen, his head down on the table, surrounded by an empty bottle and empty glass and all his useless, important papers.

Before Ammi could ask again if she was eating enough, her face froze on Devi’s phone and then the screen went blank. The Wi-Fi issues were obviously on Ammi’s end. Devi looked over at Professor Jack and the graduate students studying their computer screens, as usual. They were speaking quietly to each other, also as usual. Nodding back and forth and shaking their heads. Waiting their turn to speak. Pointing at the screens, not at each other, not up at heaven and down at hell. Professor Jack didn’t look happy with whatever the graduate students were telling him, but even still, he didn’t deliver any grand speeches, he didn’t yell, he didn’t curse or threaten them. After working for several months as the data institute’s office assistant, Devi had come to understand that this was the way normal people, university people, behaved.

The same was true at Professor Essem’s house, where Devi was boarding. After dinner, when she was asked about her day and eventually learned to ask about Professor Essem’s day, they would sit together in her front room, reading books and listening to jazz music. Now and then, Professor Essem went back to campus for an evening walk. She had asked her a couple of times at the beginning about Johannes, about how Devi was dealing with the death of her fiancé. Devi assured her she was doing okay and that she didn’t like to talk about it, and Professor Essem had looked at her a little funny, but nodded and never brought it up again.

Do you want to meet some students your own age, Devi? I can introduce you, very easily. More fun than living with a spinster like me, don’t you think?

No thank you, Professor Essem. I like reading and speaking with you and having our cups of tea, she said. She added spinster to her list of university-people words to look up and memorize. Words like problematic, probability, theoretically, funding, and interesting. They used this last one so often, Devi was convinced it had to mean more than what it said in the dictionary.

As for the professor’s offer, how, she wondered, would knowing Sri Lankan university students help her get into an American university?

The evenings they were both in the house, Devi and Professor Essem drank green tea that tasted like a lagoon smelled, but she never let on. She just held her breath and swallowed. Whatever it took. The professor’s front room wasn’t that much larger than her family’s, but it seemed so, or at least less crowded with furniture that would never, ever be fixed, replaced, or thrown out. In the professor’s house, there was no Achchi standing in a corner, facing the wall, waiting to see a good-luck face to start her day.

Professor Essem’s mother lived with her, but only part of the year. She spent the rest of her time with the professor’s brother, a lawyer in Edinburgh who was married to a thin white woman with red hair who wore slacks in family pictures. They had twins. Professor Essem’s mother probably didn’t call her daughter-in-law a devil woman because of her bones and hair and twins and men’s pants the way Achchi would have. And, only checking because she’d knelt down to get a dropped earring, Devi confirmed there were no royals magazines under the old woman’s bed, no silver coils of sloughed-off snakeskin.

She performed these comparisons often, in her head, sometimes feeling homesick, but usually feeling strong and young and finally breaking through, leaving behind her own old skins—Devi the Ochpys village girl, Devi the tutored dupe, Devi the brass vulture’s bride.

She could talk about all of that in her next admission essay, which she was hoping Professor Essem would read for her. If necessary, Devi could hold back some of the job money she was sending home and to Menaka Aunty. But she already knew she wouldn’t need to offer Professor Essem money to help her. She wasn’t even charging Devi for room and board. She’d probably read the essay for free. University people were actually kind of weird.

Devi was planning to ask Professor Jack for a reference to whichever university in America he suggested she apply to. That is, whichever one he thought was best and wouldn’t lead to suicide. Because she had agreed she would not apply to Arcadia Tech. How could she, after he’d told her what happened to international students who went there, with Ammi listening? On the way home, Ammi had asked Devi why, after offering Devi a job, Professor Jack had also offered condolences for the death of her fiancé. Devi told her Menaka Aunty made her put something about that in her application letter.

Wishful thinking, Ammi had muttered.

She knew all about Menaka Aunty’s marriage plans for Devi with her grandsons. Which was easier to discuss than anything to do with Johannes.

Devi was going to do better than him, and do it more honestly, too. Her few months of working at Serendipity University only made her want to study in America all the more. And in a way, Professor Jack kind of owed this to her. She didn’t even care which school he recommended, but maybe Haven College, which his daughter attended? From chatting with him when she brought tea and printing, Devi learned that his daughter’s good friend, the other Sri Lankan girl, had recently met with a car accident and had to pause her studies. Devi was going to meet the daughter when she came to Serendipity. Maybe Devi could just sub in for the current Sri Lankan at Haven, like for a cleaning shift or sports team.

But it didn’t have to be Haven. Wherever Professor Jack recommended, as long as it was American, would be as good, and probably better, than what was definitely the best part of Serendipity University, the new part, where she went every day. This was confirmed for Devi every time she got off the bus and walked to the lab, passing the school’s old buildings, where fans in dark rooms blew dirty white curtains out through open windows, where big slick crows and skinny, golden-brown monkeys washed themselves in broken fountains. None of the students ever spoke to Devi. She didn’t care. They were dressed only a little better than she was, like they were hired to walk around a new shopping mall, not wail at a funeral. And this place, the old place, the old Sri Lankan place, was as far as they would go. They weren’t working inside a glass-box building with air-conditioning that made you wear a sweater, on a project to understand the whole universe for a professor who worked at the best university in the whole universe. She didn’t mean Professor Jack.

Devi would in truth be happiest if Professor Jack recommended she apply to Professor Martin’s university. She had already found the perfect program at his school and would definitely introduce herself when he came to Serendipity. This program brought promising, deserving students from around the world to study there. It offered a special first year, just for them, before starting regular studies with the general population of students. It was called Dream School, in African. Ilé Álá. There was a town called Ja-Ela outside Colombo. Almost the same. She could mention that in the interview. To show the connection, the perfect fit, really, after everything she’d done and gone through.

Because through her flight after flight for university, Devi still dreamed. And now Devi deserved.