ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 25

                                               (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


              The Gangulis, apart from the name on their mailbox, apart from the issues of India Abroad and Sangbad Bichitra that were delivered at their home, appeared no different from their neighbors. Their garage, like every other, contained shovels and pruning shears and a sled. They purchased a barbecue for tandoori on the porch in summer. Each step, each acquisition, no matter how small, involved deliberation, consultation with Bengali friends. Was there a difference between a plastic rake and a metal one ? Which was preferable, a live Christmas tree or an artificial one ? They learned to roast turkeys, albeit rubbed with garlic and cumin and cayenne, at Thanks giving, to nail a wreath to their door in December, to wrap woolen scarves around snowmen, to color boiled eggs violet and pink at Easter and hide them around the house. For the sake of Gogol and Sonia they celebrated, with progressively increasing fanfare, the birth of Christ, an event children looked forward to far more than the worship of Durga and Saraswati. During pujos, scheduled for convenience on two Saturdays a year, Gogol and Sonia were dragged off to a high school or a Knights of Columbus hall overtaken by Bengalis, where they were required to throw marigold petals at a cardboard effigy of a goddess and eat bland vegetarian food.It can't compare to Christmas, when they hanged stockings on the fireplace mantel, and set out cookies and milk  for Santa Claus, and received heaps of presents, and stayed home from school.


           There were other ways in which Ashoke and Ashima gave in. Though Ashima continued to  
wear nothing but saris and sandals from Bata, Ashoke, accustomed to wearing tailor-made pants and shirts all his life, learned to buy ready-made. He traded in fountain pens for ballpoints, Wilkinson blades and boar-bristled shaving brush for Bic razors bought six to a pack. Though he was now a tenured full professor, he stopped wearing jackets and ties to the university. Given that there was a clock every where he turned, at the side of his bed, over the stove where he prepared tea, in the car he drove to work, on the wall opposite to his desk, he stopped wearing a wristwatch, resigning his Favre Leuba watch, bought in Calcutta while studying his B.E, to the depths of his stock drawer. In the supermarket they let Gogol fill the cart with items that he and Sonia, but not they, consume : individually wrapped slices of cheese, mayonnaise, tuna fish, hot dogs. For Gogol's lunches they used to stand at the deli to buy cold cuts, and in the mornings Ashima used to make sandwiches with bologna or roast beef. At his insistence, she conceded and made him an American dinner once a week as a treat, Shake 'n Bake chicken or Hamburger Helper prepared with ground lamb.    

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 24

                                              (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


              Two days later, coming back from school Gogol found his mother at home again, wearing a bathrobe instead of a sari, and saw his sister awake for the first time. She was dressed in pink pajamas that concealed her hands and feet, with a pink bonnet tied around her moon-shaped face. His father was home, too. His parents sat Gogol on the living room sofa and placed Sonali in his lap, telling him to hold her against his chest, a hand  cupped under her head, and his father took pictures with a Nikon 35-millimeter camera. The shutter advanced softly, repeatedly ; the room was bathed in rich afternoon light. "Hi,Sonali," Gogol said sitting stiffly, looking down at her face, and then up at the lens. Though Sonali was the name on her birth certificate, the name she would carry officially through life, at home they began to call her Sonu, then Sona, and finally Sonia. Sonia made her a citizen of the world. Eventually it would be the name of Indian prime minister's Italian wife. At first Gogol was disappointed by the fact that he could not play with her, that all she did was sleep and soil her diapers and cry. But eventually she began to respond to him, cackling when he tickled her stomach, or pushed her in a swing operated by a noisy crank, or when he cried out "Peekaboo." He helped his mother to bathe her, fetching the towel and the shampoo. He entertained her in the back seat of the car when they drove on the highway on Saturday evenings, on the way to dinner parties thrown by their parents' friends. For by now all the Cambridge Bengalis had moved to places like Dedham and Framingham and Lexington and Winchester, to houses with backyards and driveways. They had met so many Bengalis that there was rarely a Saturday free, so that for the rest of his life Gogol's childhood memories of Saturday evenings would consist of a single, repeated scene : thirty-odd people in three-bedroom suburban house, the children watching television or playing board games in a basement, the parents eating and conversing in the Bengali their children don't speak among themselves. He would remember eating watered-down curry off paper plates, sometimes pizza or Chinese ordered especially for the kids. There were so many guests invited to Sonia's rice ceremony that Ashoke arranged to rent a building on campus, with twenty folding tables and an industrial stove. Unlike her compliant older brother, Sonia, seven months old, refused all the food. She played with dirt they'd dug up from the yard and threatened to put the dollar bill into her mouth. "This one," one of the guests remarked, "this one is the true American."


          As their lives in New England swelled with fellow Bengali friends, the members of that other, former life, those who knew Ashima and Ashoke not by their good names but as Monu and Mithu, slowly dwindled. Within a decade abroad, they were both orphaned ; Ashoke's parents both dead from cancer, Ashima's mother from kidney disease. Gogol and Sonia were woken up by these deaths in the early mornings, their parents screaming on the other side of thin bedroom walls. They stumbled into their parents' room, uncomprehending, embarrassed at the sight of their parents' tears, feeling only slightly sad. In some senses Ashoke and Ashima lived the lives of the extremely aged, those for whom everyone once they knew and loved was lost, those who survived and were consoled by memory alone. Even those family members who continued to live seemed dead somehow, always invisible, impossible to touch. Voices on the phone, occasionally bearing news of births and weddings, sent chills down their spines. How could it be, still alive, still talking ? The sight of them when they visited Calcutta every few years felt stranger still, six or eight weeks passing like a dream.Once back on Pemberton road, in the modest house that was suddenly mammoth, there was nothing to remind them ; in spite of the hundred or so relatives they'd just seen, they felt as if they were the only Gagulis in the world. The people they had grown up with would never see this life, of this they were certain.

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 23

                                              (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


              Gogol's sister was born in May 1974. This time the labor happened quickly. They were thinking about going to a yard sale in the neighborhood one Saturday morning, playing Bengali songs on the stereo. Gogol was eating frozen waffles for breakfast, wishing his parents would turn off the music so that he could hear the cartoons he was watching, when his mother's water broke. His father switched off the music and called Dilip and Maya Nandi, who now lived in a suburb twenty minutes away and had little boy of their own. Then he called the next-door neighbor, Mrs.Merton, who had offered to look after Gogol until the Nandis arrive. Though his parents had prepared him for the event, when Mrs.Merton showed up with her needlepoint he felt stranded, no longer in the mood for cartoons. He stood on the front step, watching his father help his mother into the car, waving as they pulled away. To pass the time he drew a picture of himself and his parents and his new sibling, standing in a row in front their house. He remembered to put a dot on his mother's forehead, glasses on his father's face, a lamppost by the flagstone path in front of the house. "Well, if that's not the spitting image," Mrs. Merton said, looking over his shoulder.
           That evening Maya Nandi, whom he called Maya Mashi, as if she was his own mother's sister, his own aunt, was heating up the dinner she had brought over, when his father called to say the baby has arrived. The next day Gogol saw his mother sitting in angled bed, a plastic bracelet around her wrist, her stomach no longer as hard and round. Through a big glass window, he saw his sister asleep, in a small glass bed, the only one of the babies in the nursery to have a thick head of black hair. He was introduced to his mother's nurses. He drank the juice and ate the pudding off his mother's tray. Shyly he gave his mother the picture he'd drawn. Underneath the figures he'd written his own name, and Ma, and Baba. Only the space under the baby was blank. "I didn't know the baby's name," Gogol said, which was when his parents tell him. This time, Ashoke and Ashima were ready. They had the names lined up, for a boy or a girl. They'd learned their lesson after Gogol. They'd learned that schools in America would ignore parents' instructions and register a child under his pet name. The only way to avoid such confusion, they had concluded, was to do away with the pet name altogether, as many of their Bengali friends had already done. For their daughter,  good name and pet name were one and the same : Sonali, meaning "she who is golden."

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 22

                                               (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


              When they were alone, Mrs.Lapidus asked, "Are you happy to be entering to elementary school, Gogol ?"
            "My parents want me to have another name in school."
            "And what about you, Gogol ? Do you want to be called by another name ?"
             After a pause he shook his head.
            "Is that a no ?"
           "Yes."
          "Then it's settled. Can you write your name on this piece of paper ?"
         Gogol picked up a pencil, gripped it tightly, and formed the letters of the only word he had learned thus far to write from memory, getting the "L" backward due to nerves. "What beautiful penmanship you have," Mrs.Lapidus said. She tore up the old registration form and asked Mrs.McNab to type up a new one. Then she took Gogol by the hand, down a carpeted hallway with painted cement walls. She opened a door, and Gogol was introduced to his teacher, Miss Watkins, a  woman with hair in two braids, wearing overalls and clogs. Inside the classroom it was a small universe of nicknames ; Andrew was Andy, Alexandra Sandy, William Billy, Elizabeth Lizzy. It was nothing like the schooling Gogol's parents had known, fountain pens and polished black shoes and notebooks and good names and sir or madam at a tender age. Here the only official ritual was pledging allegiance first thing in the morning to the American flag. For the rest of the day, they sit at a communal round table, drinking punch and eating cookies, taking naps on little orange cushions on the floor. At the end of his first day he was sent home with a letter to his parents from Mrs.Lapidus, folded and stapled to a string around his neck, explaining that due to their son's preference he would be known as Gogol at school. What about the parents' preference ? Ashima and Ashoke wondered. But since neither of them felt comfortable pressing the issue, they had no choice but to give in.


          And so Gogol's formal education began. At the top of sheets of scratchy pale yellow paper he wrote out his pet name again and again, and the alphabet in capitals and lower case. He learned to add and subtract, and to spell his first words. In the front covers of the text books from which he was taught to read he left his legacy, writing his name in number-two pencil below a series of others. In art class, his favorite hour of the week, he carved his name with paper clips into the bottom of clay cups and bowls. He pasted uncooked pasta to cardboard, and left his signature in fat brush strokes below paintings. Day after day he brought his creations home to Ashima, who hung them proudly on the refrigerator door. "Gogol G," he signed his work in the lower right-hand corner, as if there were a need to distinguish him from any other Gogol in the school. 

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 21

                                                  (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


               In September of 1973 Gogol was taken for the first time to the kindergarten at the town's public elementary school by his father, and as his mother tended to vomit the moment she found herself in a moving car, she couldn't accompany them. It was already the second week of the school year, but for the past week, Gogol had been in bed, just like his mother, listless, claiming to have a stomach ache, even vomiting one day into his mother's pink wastepaper basket. He didn't want to go to school. He didn't want to wear the new clothes his mother had bought him from Sears, hanging on a knob of his dresser, or carry his Charlie Brown lunch box, or board the yellow school bus that stops at the end of Pemberton Road. The school, unlike the nursery school, was several miles from the house and from the university. On numerous occasions he'd been driven to see the building, a low, long, brick structure with a flat roof and a flag that flaps at the top of a tall white pole planted on the lawn.


           There was a reason Gogol didn't want to go to the kindergarten. His parents had told him that at school, instead of being called Gogol, he would be called by a new name, a good name, which his parents had decided on. The name Nikhil was not to the liking of Gogol, "why do I have to have a new name ?" he asked his parents, tears springing to his eyes. It would be one thing if his parents were to call him Nikhil, too.  But they told him that the new name would be used only by the teachers and children at school. He was afraid to be Nikhil, someone he didn't know. Who didn't know him. His parents told him that they each have two names, too, as do all Bengali friends in America, and all their relatives in Calcutta. It was a part of growing up, they told him, part of being a Bengali. They wrote it for him on a sheet of paper, asked him to copy it over ten times. "Don't worry," his father said. "To me and your mother, you will never be anyone but Gogol."


          At school, Ashoke and Gogol were greeted by the secretary, Mrs.McNab, who asked Ashoke to fill out a registration form. He provided a copy of Gogol's birth certificate and immunization record, which Mrs.McNab put in a folder along with the registration. "This way," Mrs.McNab said, leading them to the principal's office. CANDACE LAPIDUS,the name on the door said. Mrs.Lapidus was a tall, slender woman with short white-blond hair. She wore frosted blue eye shadow and lemon yellow suit.


          Mrs.Lapidus assured Ashoke that missing the first week of kindergarten was not a problem, that things had yet to settle down. She shook Ashoke's hand and told him that there were two other Indian children at the school, Jayadev Modi in the third grade and Rekha Saxena in fifth. Perhaps Gangulis knew them ? Ashoke told Mrs.Lapidus that they do not. She looked at the registration form and smiled kindly at the boy, who was clutching his father's hand. Gogol was dressed in powder blue pants, red and white canvas sneakers, a a striped turtleneck top.


        "Welcome to elementary school, Nikhil. I am your principal, Mrs.Lapidus."


         Gogol looked down at his sneakers. The way the principal pronounced his new name was different from the way his parents say it, the second part of it longer sounding like "heel." She bent down so that her face was level with his, and extended a hand to his shoulder. "Can you tell me how old you are, Nikhil ?"

       When the question was repeated and there was still no response Mrs.Lapidus asked, "Mr.Ganguli, does Nikhil follow English ?"


        "Of course he follows," said Ashoke. "My son is perfectly bilingual."


          In order to prove Gogol knew English, Ashoke did something he had never done before, and addressed his son in careful, accented English. "Go on, Gogol," he said, patting him on the head. "Tell Mrs.Lapidus how old you are."


        "What was that ?" Mrs.Lapidus asked.


         "I beg your pardon, madam ?"


         "That name you called him. Something with a G."


         "Oh that, that is what we call him at home only. But his good name should be--is"--he nods his head firmly--"Nikhil."


          Mrs.Lapidus frowned. I'm afraid I don't understand. Good name ?"


          "Yes."


          Mrs.Lapidus studied the registration form. She had not had to go through this confusion with the other two Indian children. She opened up the folder and examined the immunization record, the birth certificate. "There seems to be some confusion, Mr.Ganguli," she said. "According to these documents, your son's legal name is Gogol."


        "That is correct. But please allow me to explain--"


         "That you want to call him Nikhil."


          "That is correct."


         Mrs.Lapidus nods. "The reason being ?"


         "That is our wish."


          "I'm not sure I follow you, Mr.Ganguli. Do you mean that Nikhil is middle name ? Or a nick name ? Many of the children go by nick names here. On this form there is a space--" 


          "No, no, it's not middle name," Ashoke said. He was beginning to loose patience. "He has no middle name. No nick name. The boy's good name, his school name, is Nikhil."


          Mrs.Lapidus pressed her lips together and smiled. "But clearly he doesn't respond."


         "Please, Mrs.Lapidus," Ashoke pleaded. "It's very common for a child to be confused at first. Please give it some time. I assure you he will grow accustomed."


          He bent down and this time in Bengali, calmly and quietly,  asked Gogol to please answer when Mrs.Lapidus asked a question. "Don't be scared, Gogol," he said, raising his son's chin with his finger. "You're a big boy now. No tears."


         Though Mrs.Lapidus couldn't understand a word, she listened carefully, heard that name again. Gogol. Lightly, in pencil, she wrote it down on the registration form.


         Ashoke handed over the lunch box, a windbreaker in case it gets cold. He thanked Mrs.Lapidus. "Be good, Nikhil," he said in English. .and then after a moment's hesitation, he was gone.

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 20

                                                (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


            The August that Gogol turned five, Ashima discovered she was pregnant again. In the mornings she forced herself to eat a slice of toast, only because Ashoke made it for her and watched her while she chewed it in bed. Her head constantly spun. She used to spend her days lying down, a pink plastic wastepaper basket by her side, the shades drawn,  her mouth and teeth coated with the taste of metal. She used to watch The price is right and Guiding Light and The $10,000 Pyramid on the television. Staggering out to the kitchen at lunchtime, to prepare a peanut and jelly sandwich for Gogol, she was revolted by the odor of the fridge,convinced that the contents of her vegetable drawers had been replaced with garbage, that meat was rotting on the shelves. 


         "You're going to be an older brother," she told Gogol one day, "there 'll be someone to call you Dada. Won't that be exciting ?" She asked Gogol to go and get album, and together they looked at pictures of Gogol's grandparents, and his uncles and aunts and cousins, of whom, in spite of his one visit to Calcutta, he had no memory. She used to teach him to memorize a four-line children's poem by Tagore, and the names of the deities adorning the ten-handed goddess Durga during pujo : Saraswati with her swan and Kartik with his peacock to her left, Lakshmi with her owl and Ganesh with his mouse to her right. Every afternoon Ashima used to sleep, but before nodding off she used to switch the television to channel 2, and told Gogol to watch Sesame Street and The Electric Company, in order to keep up with the English he uses at the nursery school.


          Ashoke used to cook a week's worth of chicken curry and rice in two battered Dutch ovens every Sunday ; Gogol and his father used to eat together, reheating the food, and sitting alone,  bedroom door shut because his mother could't tolerate the smell. It was odd to see his father presiding in the kitchen, standing in his mother's place at the stove. His father used to supervise Gogol while eating on the dining table. Though his father mixed up the rice and curry for Gogol, he didn't bother to shape it into individual balls the way his mother used to and lining them around the plate like the numbers on a clock-face. Gogol was taught to eat on his own with his fingers, not to let the food stain the skin of his palm. He learned to suck the marrow from lamb, to extract the bones from fish. But without his mother he didn't feel like eating. He kept wishing, every evening, that she would emerge from the bedroom and sit between him and his father, filled the air with her sari and cardigan smell. He felt bored of eating the same thing day after day, and one evening he discretely pushed the remaining food to the side. He played tick-tac-toe in the traces of leftover sauce.


          "Finish," his father said, "don't play with food that way."


          "I'm full, Baba."


          "There's still some food on your plate."


          "Baba, I can't."


          Ashoke shook his head at Gogol, disapproving, unyielding. Each day Ashoke was pained by the half-eaten sandwiches people tossed into garbage cans on campus, apples abandoned after one or two bites, "Finish it, Gogol. At your age I ate tin."  

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 19

                                                   (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


           When they first moved into the house, the grounds had yet to be landscaped. No trees grew on the property, no shrubs flank the front door, so that the cement of the foundation was clearly visible to the eye. And so for the first few months, four-year old Gogol played on uneven, dirt-covered yard littered with stones and sticks, soiling his sneakers, leaving footprints in his path. During summer Gogol could find, bright summer's days when the topsoil was poured from the back of a truck, and stepping on to the sun deck a few weeks later with both of his parents to see thin blades of grass emerge from the bald black lawn.


         In the beginning, in the evenings, the family used to go for drives, exploring their new environs bit by bit : the neglected dirt lanes, the shaded black roads, the farms where one could pick pumpkins in autumn and berries sold in green cardboard boxes in July.  They used drive until it was dark, without destination in mind, past hidden ponds and graveyards, culs-de-sac and dead ends. Some times they drove out of the town altogether, to one of the beaches along the North Shore. Even in summer they never went to swim or to turn brown beneath the sun. Instead they went dressed in their ordinary clothes. By the time they arrived, the ticket collector's booth was empty, the crowds gone, there was only a handful of cars in the parking lot, and the only other visitors were people walking their dogs or watching the sun set or dragging metal detectors through the sand. On the beach Gogol collected rocks, dug tunnels in the sand. He darted in and out of the ocean, making faint, temporary footprints, soaking his rolled-up cuffs. His mother cried out, laughing, as she lifted her sari a few inches above her ankles, her slippers in one hand, and placed her feet in foaming, ice-cold water. She reached out to Gogol, took his hand. "Not so far," she told him. The waves retreat, gathering force, the soft,dark sand seeming to shift away instantly beneath their feet, causing them to loose their balance. "I'm falling. It's pulling me in," she always said.

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 18

                                                 (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


              After two years in an overheated university-subsidized apartment, Ashima and Ashoke were ready to purchase a home. In the evening after dinner, they set out in their car, Gogol in the back seat, to look at houses for sale. They didn't look in the historic district, where the chairman of Ashoke's department lives, in an eighteenth-century building to which he and Ashima and Gogol were invited once a year for Boxing Day tea. Instead they looked on ordinary roads where plastic wading pools and baseball bats were left out on the lawns. All the houses belonged to Americans. Shoes were worn inside, trays of cat litter were placed in the kitchens, dogs bark and jump when Ashima and Ashoke rang the bell. They learned the names of the different architectural styles : cape, saltbox, raised ranch, garrison. In the end they decided on a shingled two-story colonial in a recently built development, a house previously occupied by no one, erected on a quarter acre of land. This was the small patch of America to which they lay claim. Gogol accompanied his parents to banks, sat waiting as they signed the endless papers. The mortgage was approved and the move was scheduled for spring. Ashoke and Ashima were amazed, when moving by U-Haul to the new house, to discover how much they possessed ; each of them had come to America with a single suitcase, a few weeks' worth of clothes. Now there were enough old issues of the Globe stacked in the corners of the apartment to wrap all their plates and glasses. There were whole year's of Time magazine to toss out.


         The walls of the house were painted, the driveway sealed with pitch, the shingles and sun deck weatherproofed and stained. Ashoke took photographs of every room, Gogol standing somewhere in the frame, to send to relatives in India. There  were pictures of Gogol opening up the refrigerator, pretending to talk on the phone. He was a sturdily built child, with full cheeks but already pensive features. When he posed for the camera he had to be coaxed into a smile. The house was fifteen minutes from the nearest Supermarket, forty minutes from a mall. The address was 67, Pemberton Road. Their neighbors were the Johnsons, the Mertons, the Aspris, the Hills. There were four modest bedrooms, seven-foot ceilings, a one-car garage. In the living rooms was a brick fireplace and a bay window overlooking the yard. In the kitchen there were matching yellow, appliances, a lazy Susan, linoleum made to look like tiles. A watercolor by Ashima's father, of a caravan of camels in a desert in Rajasthan, was framed at the local print shop and hung on the living room wall. Gogol had a room of his own, a bed with built-in drawer in its base, metal shelves that hold Tinkertoys, Lincoln Logs, a View-Master, an Etch-A-Sketch. Most of Gogol's toys came from yard sales, as did most of the furniture, and the curtains, and a toaster, and a set of pots and pans. At first Ashima was reluctant to introduce such items into her home, ashamed at the thought of buying what had originally belonged to strangers, American strangers at that. But Ashoke pointed out that even his chairman shopped at yard sales, that in spite of living in a mansion an American was not above wearing a pair of secondhand pants, bought for fifty cents.     

                                               

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 17

                                                 (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


            In the year 1971 the Gangulis had moved to a University town outside Boston. As far as they knew, they were the only Bengali residents there. The town has a historic district, a brief strip of colonial architecture visited by tourists on summer weekends. There was a white steepled Congregational church, a stone courthouse with an adjoining jail, a cupolaed public library, a wooden well from which Paul Revere was rumored to have drunk. In winter, tapers burn in the windows of homes after dark. Ashoke had been hired as an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the university. In exchange for teaching five classes, he earned sixteen thousand dollars a year. He was given his own office, with his name etched on to a strip of black plastic by the door. He shared, along with the other members of his department, the services of an elderly secretary named Mrs. Jones, whose husband used to teach in the English department until his death, was about his own mother's age. Mrs.Jones was leading a life that Ashoke's mother would consider humiliating : eating alone, driving herself to work in snow and sleet, seeing her children and grandchildren, at most, three or four times a year.


           The job was every thing that Ashoke had ever dreamed of. He had always hoped to teach in a university rather than work for a corporation. What a thrill, he used to think, to stand lecturing before a roomful of American students. What a sense of accomplishment it gave him to see his name printed under "Faculty" in the university directory. What joy each time Mrs.Jones said to him, "Professor Ganguli, your wife is on the phone." From his fourth-floor office he had a sweeping view of the quadrangle, surrounded by vine-covered brick buildings, and on pleasant days he used to take his lunch on a bench, listening to the melody of bells chiming from the campus clock tower. On Fridays, after he had taught his last class, he used to visit the library, to read international newspapers on long wooden poles. He read about U.S planes bombing Vietcong supply routes in Cambodia, Naxalites being murdered on the streets of Calcutta, India and Pakistan going to war. At times he used to wander up to the library's sun-filled, unpopulated top floor, where all the literature was shelved.


          For Ashima, migrating to the suburbs, used to feel more drastic, more distressing than the move from Calcutta to Cambridge had been. She wished Ashoke had accepted the position at Northeastern so that they could  have stayed in the city. She was distressed that in this town there were no sidewalks to speak of, no street lights, no public transportation, no stores for miles at a time. She had no interest in learning how to drive the new Toyota Corolla it was now necessary for them to own. It was an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been ordinary life, only to discover that that previous life had vanished replaced by something more complicated and demanding. Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believed, was something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect.


          Her forays out of the apartment, while her husband was at work, were limited to the university within which they lived, and to the historic district that flanks the campus on one edge. She used to wander with Gogol, letting him run across the quadrangle, or sitting with him on rainy days to watch television in the student lounge. Once a week she made thirty samosas to sell at international coffeehouse, for twenty-five cents each, next to the linzer squares baked by Mrs. Etzold, and baklava by Mrs. Cassolis. On Fridays she took Gogol to the public library for children's story hour. After he turned four, she used to drop him off and fetch him from the university-run nursery school three mornings a week. For the hours that Gogol was at nursery school, finger-painting and learning the English alphabet, Ashima was despondent, unaccustomed, all over again to being on her own. She missed her son's habit of always holding on to the free end of her sari as they walked together. She missed the sound of his silky, high-pitched little-boy voice, telling her that he was hungry, or tired, or needed to go to the bathroom. To avoid being alone she used to sit in the reading room of the public library, in a cracked leather armchair, writing letters to her  mother, or reading magazines or  one of her Bengali books from home. The room was cheerful, filled with light, with a tomato-colored carpet on the floor and people reading the paper around a big, round wooden table with forsythias or cattails arranged at its center. When she missed Gogol especially, she wandered into the children's room : there , pinned to a bulletin board, was a picture of him in profile, sitting cross-legged on a cushion during story hour, listening to the children's librarian, Mrs.Aiken, reading The Cat in the Hat.      
      

                                                 

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 16

                                                (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


         Ashoke and Ashima left for India six days later, six weeks before they had planned. Alan and Judy, waking the next morning to Ashima's sobs, then hearing the news from Ashoke, left a vase filled with flowers by the door. In those six days, they got an express passport with "Gogol Ganguli" typed across United States of America seal, as there was no much time left to get the newly selected good name to be registered in the place of nick name "Gogol",  Ashoke signing on his son's behalf. The day before leaving, Ashima put Gogol in his stroller, put the sweater she'd knit for her father and paintbrushes in a shopping bag, and walked to Harvard Square,to the subway station. "Excuse me," she asked a gentleman on the street, "I must get on the train." The man helped her carry down the stroller, and Ashima waited on the platform. When the train came she headed immediately back to the Central Square. As the train slowed down to a halt, she stood up, disembarked the train, leaving behind the shopping bag purposely beneath her seat.. "Hey, the Indian lady forgot her stuff," she heard as the doors shut, and as the train pulled away she heard a fist pounding on glass, but she kept walking, pushing Gogol along the platform.


         The following evening they boarded a Pan Am flight to London, where after five-hour layover they would board a second flight to Calcutta, via Tehran And Bombay. On the runway in Boston, her seat belt buckled, Ashima looked at her watch and calculated the Indian time on her fingers. But this time no image of her family came to mind. She refused to picture what she could see soon enough : her mother's vermilion erased from her part, her brother's thick hair shaved from his head in mourning. The wheels began to move, causing the enormous metal wings to flap gently up and down. Ashima looked at Ashoke, who was double-checking to make sure their passports and green cards were in order. She watched him adjust his watch in anticipation of their arrival.


         "I don't want to go," she said, turning toward the dark oval window. "I don't want to see them. I can't."


        Ashoke put his hand over hers as the plane began to gather speed. And then Boston tilted away and they ascended effortlessly over a blackened Atlantic. The wheels retracted and the cabin started shaking as they struggle upward,through the first layer of clouds. Though Gogol's ears had been stuffed with cotton, he screamed nevertheless in the arms of his grieving mother as they climbed further still, as he flew for the first time in his life across the world.    

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 15

                                                  (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


                 One night Ashima heard her husband speaking over phone, soberly but loudly enough so that she feared he would wake Alan and Judy upstairs, "Yes, all right, I see. Don't worry.yes, I will." For a while he was silent, listening. "They want to talk to you," he said to Ashima, briefly putting a hand to her shoulder. In the dark , he handed her the phone, and after a moment's hesitation, he got out of bed.


              She took the phone to hear the news for herself, expecting her mother to be on phone, she felt a thrill, for it would be the first time she would hear her mother's voice in nearly three years,  since her departure from Dum Dum  Airport that  she would be called Monu by her mother. Only it wasn't her mother but her brother, Rana, on the other end. His voice sounded weak, barely recognizable. Ashima's first question was what time it was there. She had to repeat the question three times, shouting in order to be heard. Rana told her it was lunch time. "Are you still planning to visit in December ?" he asked.


          She felt her chest ache, moved after all this time to hear her brother call her Didi, his older sister, a term he alone in the world was entitled to use. "Of course we're coming," she said, "put Ma on, let me talk to her."


         "She's not at home now," Rana said after a static-filled pause.


         "And Baba ?" 


          A patch of silence followed before his voice returned. "Not here."


          "Oh." She remembered the time difference ; her father must be at work already at the Desh offices, her mother at the market, a burlap bag in hand, buying vegetables and fish.


           "How is little Gogol ?" Rana asked her, "does he speak English ?"


          She laughed. "He doesn't speak much of anything at the moment." She began to tell Rana that she was teaching Gogol to say "Dida" and "Dadu" and "Mamu," to recognize grandparents and his uncle from photographs. But another burst of static, longer this time, quieted her in mid-sentence. 


           "Rana ? Can you here me ?"


           "I can't hear you, Didi," Rana said, his voice growing fainter. "Can't hear let's speak later."


           "Yes," she said, "later. See you soon. Very soon. Write to me." She put down the phone, invigorated by the sound of her brother's voice. An instant later she was confused  and somewhat irritated. Why had he gone to the trouble of calling only to ask an obvious question ? Why called while both her were out ?


            Ashoke returned from kitchen with a glass of water in his hand. He put down the water and switched on the small lamp by the side of the bed.


           "I'm awake,"  Ashoke said though his voice was still small from fatigue.


            "Me too."


            "What about Gogol ?"


             "Asleep again." She got up and put him in the crib, drawing blanket to his shoulders, then returned to the bed, shivering.  "I don't understand it," she said, shaking her head at the rumpled sheet. "Why did Rana go to the trouble of calling just now ? It's so expensive. It doesn't make sense." She turned to look at Ashoke. "What did he say to you, exactly ?"


          Ashoke shook his head, and then he reached across her side of the bed and pressed her hand so tightly that it was slightly painful. He pressed her to the bed,lying on the top of her, his face to one side, his body suddenly trembling. He held her this way for so long that she began to wonder if he was going to turn off the light and caress her. Instead he told her what Rana told him in a few minutes ago, what Rana couldn't bear to tell his sister, over the telephone, himself : that her father died the previous day evening, of a heart attack, playing patience on his bed.
   

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 14

                                                  (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)




            The trip to Calcutta was four months away. Ashima regretted that they couldn't go earlier, in time for Durga pujo, but it would be years for Ashoke was eligible for a sabbatical, and three weeks in December was all they could manage.


           At breakneck speed Ashima knit sweater-vests for her father, her father-in-law, her brother, her three favorite uncles.


          One day Ashima went for shopping in downtown Boston, spending hours in the basement of Jordan Marsh as she pushed Gogol in his stroller, spending every last penny ; bought mismatched teaspoons, percale pillowcases, colored candles, soaps on ropes. She also bought a Timex watch for her father-in-law in a drugstore, Bic pens for her cousins, embroidery thread for her mother and her aunts. On the train home she was exhilarated, exhausted, nervous with anticipation of the trip. The train was crowded and she stood struggling to hang on to all the bags and the stroller and the overhead strap, until a young girl offered her a seat. Ashima thanked her, sinking gratefully into the seat, pushing the bags protectively behind her legs. She leaned her head against the window closed her eyes thinking of home. She pictured the black iron bars in the windows of her parent's flat, and Gogol, in his American baby clothes and diapers, playing beneath the ceiling fan, on her parents' four-poster bed.


          When she opened her eyes she saw that the train was standing still, the doors open at her stop. She leaped up, her heart racing. "Excuse me, please," she said, pushing the stroller and herself through the tightly packed bodies. "Ma'am," someone said as she struggled past, about to step on to the platform, "your things." The doors of the subway clamp shut as she realized her mistake, and the train rolled slowly away. She stood there watching until the rear car disappeared into the tunnel, until she and Gogol were only people remaining on the platform. She pushed the stroller back down Massachusetts Avenue, weeping freely, knowing that she couldn't possibly afford to go back and buy it all again. For the rest of the afternoon she was furious with herself, humiliated at the prospect of arriving in Calcutta empty-handed apart from the purchases she had made. But when Ashoke came home he called MBTA lost and found, the following day the bags were returned, not a teaspoon missing, this miracle caused Ashima to feel connected to Cambridge in a way she had not previously thought possible, affiliated with its exceptions as well as its rules. She had a story to tell at dinner parties. Friends listened , amazed at her luck. "Only in this country," Maya Nandi said.

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 13

                                                 (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


         Gogol's Annaprasan began with a conch shell repeatedly tapped and passed around, but no one in the room was able to get it to emit a sound. Blades of grass and a pradeep's slim, a steady flame are held to Gogol's head. The child was entranced, didn't squirm or run away, opened his mouth obediently while feeding him payesh three times. Ashima's eyes filled with tears as Gogol's mouth eagerly invited the spoon. She couldn't help wishing her own brother were here to feed him, her own parents to bless him with their hands on his head. And then the grand finale, the moment they had all been waiting for. To predict his future path in life, Gogol was offered a plate holding a clump of cold Cambridge soil dug up from the backyard, a ballpoint pen, and a dollar bill, to see if he would be a landowner, scholar, or a businessman. Most children would grab at one of them, sometimes all of them, but Gogol touched nothing. He showed no interest in the plate, instead turned his head away, briefly burying his face in his honorary uncle's shoulder.

         "Put the money in his hand," someone in the group called out. "An American boy must be rich !"

        "No !" his father protested. "The pen. Gogol take the pen."
        Gogol regarded the plate doubtfully. Dozens of dark heads hovered expectantly. The material of Punjabi pajama set began to scratch his skin.

       "Go on, Gogol, take something," Dilip Nandi said, drawing the plate close. Gogol frowned, and his lower lip trembled. Only then, forced at six months to confront his destiny, did he began to cry.

       Another August, Gogol was one, grabbing, walking a little, repeating words in two languages. He used to call his mother "Ma," his father "Baba."

        Ashoke and Ashima were planning their first trip to Calcutta in December, during Ashoke's winter break. The upcoming journey inspired them to try to come up with a good name apart from the nick name 'Gogol', so they could submit his passport application. They consulted their Bengali friends to find a suitable name for the boy ; finally decided to name him as 'Nikhil'. The name, Nikhil, was artfully connected to the old name, in memory of Nikolai Gogol, and also respectable Bengali good name ; meaning "he who is entire, encompassing all," and it was relatively easy to pronounce, though there was a danger that Americans obsessed with abbreviation, would truncate it to Nick.