(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.
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