Hasina

Two plus decades ago, while he was waiting in line at the only place on campus that sold tofu burritos, Stewart stood behind a woman carrying a large vinyl bag emblazoned with the words stop corruption. He'd noticed her before, more than once—she was also a freshman, and how many South Asian students were there in Ithaca who wore combat boots and had cerulean hair and attended rallies against apartheid and corporate greed? The woman's name was Hasina, and she was lactose intolerant, and she often adopted a defiant tone when she told people she was the first person in her family to go to college. Two years later, three months into their junior year, Hasina's mother, Geshna, was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and that summer, when Hasina and Stewart were sharing a room on St. Mark's Place across the street from Boy Bar, Geshna was institutionalized for eight weeks.

Stewart was familiar with crazy. His own mother, Heike, was emotionally unstable. This was one of the things that had initially drawn him to Hasina: the fact that he could confide in her, tell her stories about his mother coming into his room at 4:00 AM, in tears, standing next to his bed telling him no one loved her and she had nothing to live for. "You don't care about me," Heike would say, mascara running down her face. This was back when she was poor and trying to find a husband so she and Stewart could move out of their cramped apartment in a subsidized housing complex in Southern California whose parking lot was littered with broken glass. Once, when Stewart was a senior in high school, after Richard Leibowitz had left her and Stewart had just been accepted to Cornell, Heike came into his room in the middle of the night, telling him she'd decided to move back to Germany where she was born, that she was going to move to Düsseldorf to live with her aunt. Stewart got out of bed and gave her a hug. He told her he loved her and asked when she was moving.

"I knew it," she exclaimed. "You want nothing more than to get rid of your old mother. You wish I didn't exist."

Then, when he denied these accusations, she played her queen of spades, the pity card: "What's going to become of me when you're gone? You're all I have." She said this in reference to his having applied to colleges on the East Coast, and in reference to the fact that she was fifty-three years old and single, and that the woman she played tennis with on Thursdays had just moved to Pismo Beach to open a B&B. In part, Heike was right: Stewart did want his space. He and Hasina had bonded over the fact that their mothers were needy and unstable and, at times, sexually inappropriate.

Stewart and Hasina didn't actually become friends—true friends—until their sophomore year, when they sat next to each other in a class called "Women, Gender and Society," whose reading list included The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde, and the Radical Lesbians' founding manifesto. They did a presentation together on Hélène Cixous and poststructuralist feminist theory, and they participated in rallies against Cornell's investments in South Africa and the rape culture perpetuated by fraternities, and, when they were juniors, they lived in the college's pansexual co-op, Von Cramm, where they made seitan lasagna and vegan pizza with basil grown in the co-op's garden and stayed up until 2:00 am drinking chamomile tea, because a doctor told Hasina that she was developing an ulcer and needed to avoid coffee.

Hasina wanted to be an artist. She spent nearly her entire senior year in the studio making paintings and collages full of meticulous images of women wearing burkas in domestic settings, juxtaposed with images of partially clad women in pornographic poses being straddled by men with scimitars. Often she incorporated photos from magazines of celebrities like...