(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."
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