(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
Letters used to arrive from her parents, from her husband's parents, from aunts and uncles and cousins and friends. The letters were filled with every possible blessing and good wishes. "We are dying to see him," her mother writes. "These are the most crucial months. Every hour there is a change," Ashima wrote back with careful descriptions of her son, reporting the circumstances of his first smile, the day he first rolled over, his first squeal of delight. She wrote that they are saving money for a trip home of the following December, after Gogol runs one.
The first bad news from their homes in India was the death of Ashima's grandmother. Ashima was inconsolable for days, thinking of the last time she saw her grandmother, her dida, a few days before flying to Boston. She remembered her grandmother feeding her sweets with her own hands. Unlike her parents she had not admonished Ashima not to eat beef or wear skirts or cut off her hair or forget her family the moment she landed in Boston.
By February, when Gogol was six months old, Ashoke and Ashima had known enough people to entertain them on an occasion : Gogol's annaprasan, his rice ceremony. There used to be no baptism for Bengali babies, no ritualistic naming in the eyes of God, instead, the first formal ceremony of their lives centered around the consumption of solid food. They asked Dilip Nandi to play the part of Ashima's brother, to hold the child and feed him rice, for the very first time. Gogol was dressed as an infant Bengali groom, in a pale yellow pajama-punjabi. The fragrance of cumin seeds, sent in the package along with the pajamas from Calcutta, lingered in the weave, a headpiece that Ashima cut out of paper, decorated with pieces of aluminium foil, was tied around Gogol's head with string. He wore a thin gold chain around his neck, his tiny forehead had been decorated with sandalwood paste to form six miniature beige moons floating above his brows, his eyes had been darkened with a touch of kohl. The food was arranged in ten separate bowls, a bowl contained payesh, a warm rice pudding Ashima had prepared for the baby to eat, customarily on a birthday as a child, alongside a bakery cake.
He was photographed by his father and his friends. Ashima, wearing a silvery sari, a wedding gift worn for the first time, the sleeves of her blouse reaching the crook of her elbow, was busy of setting up the buffet. She set out paper plates that had to be tripled to hold the weight of the biryani, the carp in yogurt sauce, the dal, the six different vegetable dishes she'd prepared during the past week.
Ashoke wore a transparent white punjabi top over bell-bottom trousers. They'd invited Alan Judy from upstairs, who looked as they always do, in jeans and thick sweaters, leather sandals buckled over woolly socks. Judy eyed on the buffet, bit into something that turned out to be a shrimp cutlet. "I thought Indians were supposed to be vegetarian," she whispered to Alan.
Gogol's feeding began. It was all just a touch, a gesture. No one expects the boy to eat more than a grain of rice here, a drop of dal there ; it was all meant to introduce him to a lifetime of consumption, a meal to inaugurate the tens of thousands of unremembered meals to come.
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