(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.
No comments:
Post a Comment