Notes from a Sink-less Underground
TWO CENTS | SEP 27, 2020
Notes from a Sink-less
Underground
The shitty first new york apartment is meant to be a brief period: lived, outgrown, forgotten and remembered only with shudders, years later in your mid-30s, as you marvel at the low standards of your younger self.
Apartment hunting for the unwealthy and the un-trust-funded in New York, as I discovered in March 2015, is an exercise in contemplating just how far are you willing to go in suspending any basic expectations for standards of living, all for the privilege of paying an ungodly sum to just exist in this city. The thing about first apartments in New York is that they are considered a non-negotiable phase: you don’t commit to the railroad apartment after college that you share with 3 others while doing a fellowship at some digital media startup that has not yet gone bankrupt. The shitty first new york apartment is meant to be a brief period: lived, outgrown, forgotten and remembered only with shudders, years later in your mid-30s, as you marvel at the low standards of your younger self.
By comparison, the place that I had chanced upon, the 9th apartment I had seen in 2 days, while quelling the desperation and panic dancing in my stomach, was an aberration from this norm: it was a large, spacious “studio” that I would have all to myself, with two windows from wherein actual, UV-enriched sunlight that even Ashley Olsen’s millions couldn’t buy, lasered in on that morning as its outgoing inhabitant showed me around.
The drawback: it was not an apartment. It was a hastily converted, cordoned-off room on the ground floor of a brownstone on a charming block of Harlem that gentrification had yet to come for. It was equipped with generous closet space, an attached bathroom, and a mini-fridge, but it lacked a kitchen and a sink. To some, this may have been a dealbreaker, but as a 22-year-old with negligible standards for living, even less of a flair for domesticity, a first full-time job beginning in two weeks, stranded with no place to live, an existence spread across 3 suitcases and a visa application at the mercy of American immigration authorities, the lack of these basic amenities ranked last on my list of concerns.
All I wanted back then was a cheap place in which I could sleep, shower and nurse my several neuroses in peace, and not only did this subterranean box-like space fulfill all three of those requirements, it came with the unbelievable luxury of no forced human interaction with a roommate. Inwardly in disbelief at my luck, I struck a deal for a 3-month lease with the landlord, moved in with my suitcases in tow the very next day, and did my best to get accustomed to going to bed in one area of the apartment and waking up in another, due to the rusty twin-bed on wheels and its tendency to slide across the floor every time I turned over.
By the time those first three months of 2015 were up, US immigration had mercifully greenlit my visa and a steady diet of leathery takeout had destroyed my skin and my will to function. Armed with a pot and the cheapest hot plate I could find, I spent three weeks scraping and throwing out half-cooked rice, that was by turns either gloopy or burned, before I finally learned the ratio of water to grain to make it edible. My absentee landlord texted to ask if I wanted to stick around, and I renewed my lease for two years.
One year in, my parents came to visit from India. My mother took stock of the place, declared it too large for one person, and chided me to stop spending money on fripperies and promptly look into installing a sink in the room to make it complete. I rolled my eyes and reminded her that I hadn’t forgotten that their first big purchase in their first job in 1996, while raising a 4-year-old and still making dinner in an aluminium saucepan, was a 26-inch Videocon color television. The jibe did not work.
It’s not that I was bereft or languishing in dehydration. While my upstairs neighbor and the girl across the hallway had both generously offered me carte blanche use of their kitchens (mine was the only unit that seemed to lack one?), the process of climbing up a flight of stairs to fetch water to boil my rice and daal, and then going back upstairs to do my dishes (or eat on paper plates) was slowly becoming tedious, even as I was loathe to admit that my mother may have been right (please don’t ever tell her that). Paying for a sink, which had seemed an extravagance at 22, had by now become an unignorable necessity. Besnik, a surly Ukrainian contractor who did repairs and odd jobs around the house, came by, scoped my quarters, and said he would gladly put in a solid granite 42-incher for $2000, handing me the excuse to infinitely put it off for an imaginary future in which things would be more settled, more steady.
Each subsequent Whatsapp call with my parents began to end in the detente of my mother exasperatedly asking if I’d finally installed a sink, and a series of sheepish excuses from me to explain my reticence towards taking this step.
“I’ll do it when I start making more than $18 an hour,” as I did back then in my job as an un-benefited junior staffer at The New Yorker. A promotion came along, which bumped up my hourly pay to $23 an hour.
Still, no sink.
“I said I’ll do it when I get paid for a piece of writing I publish.” This check, when it finally came, was merrily exhumed on a pair of heavily discounted shoes that I have never worn.
Three years in, the time to renew my visa had come up, which required an overseas trip out of the States. Avoiding eye contact, my lawyer explained that the increased strictness with which officials were scrutinizing foreign nationals meant that I had to prepare myself for the possibility that I may not be allowed back into the country.
On my way back home from his office, I thought dazedly about how the bare-bones empty room I entered 3 years ago had finally begun to exhibit traces that my life existed within its confines: The three cats I had adopted, who hated each other but somehow had their own fiefdoms divided between the shelves and the bed. The IKEA desk that worked as a makeshift but functional kitchen counter, on which sat an induction stove. The bright teal dresser with a giant mirror and a handsome oak shelf salvaged from the estate sale of a wealthy homeowner on the block. The piss-colored jaundiced yellow walls that I kept meaning to repaint, on which hung a framed print of Felix Valloton’s La Paresse (Laziness), a wry nod to the many hours spent in pantsless languor, mindlessly flipping through Instagram Stories with the vigor of an office-going dad perusing TV channels post the evening news. The wheelie bed, long gone, tossed on the sidewalk in favor of a real one with wooden panels and a memory-foam mattress, purchased with a credit card that took a while to pay off, but was worth it for the peace of not accidentally traversing zones on the hospital-gurney wheels in my sleep.
Much like apartment-hunting in New York with no money, being an immigrant (even one trying to do things the right way) at the mercy of America’s whims is also about learning to what degree are you willing to endure a sliding scale of abasings for the privilege of being allowed to spend your life savings to be here. While furniture is disposable, but to have dared to alter the apartment’s plumbing, to me, somehow seemed like an act of staking my right with a finality to live in this hostile country, an audacity that I dared not claim for myself. Why bother putting down roots towards making a life, when the dread about the impermanence of it all never leaves?
Still sinkless, I booked my flight, entailed a friend to take care of my cats should I not be allowed back into the country, and left.
Other than a comedic mishap with the officer inspecting my passport upon my return, my passage back home was relatively uneventful. The place looked exactly as I’d left it: slippers askew, the cats asleep in their designated corners who seemed to not have registered my absence at all. There was a suitcase to unpack, a litter box to scoop, phone calls to make to concerned people that I was fine, I was back, I was here — at least till the next time, whenever that came around.
But before the glorious mundanity of these apartment-maintenance chores I thought I’d never get to do again, there was one thing that needed to be dealt with.
“Hi Besnik,” I sent a text, “Can you come tomorrow? I am thinking I will just pay for a sink myself.”
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Iva Dixit is an editor at The New York Times Magazine.
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