(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.
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