ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 4

                                                     (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


            Eight thousand miles away, in Cambridge, Ashima had come to know Ashoke. Their home was fairly furnished apartment, ten minutes by foot to Harvard and twenty to MIT. The apartment was on the first floor of a three-story house, covered with salmon-colored shingles and surrounded by well-maintained lawn. The gray of the roof matched the pavement of the sidewalk and the street. A row of cars parked at meters perpetually lines one side of the house. At the corner of the block there was a small used bookstore, which one enters by going down three steps from the sidewalk, and across from it a musty shop that sells the newspaper and cigarettes and eggs and where, to Ashima's mild disgust, a furry black cat was permitted to sit as it pleases on the shelves. Other than those small businesses, there were more shingled houses, the same shape and size and in the same state of mild decrepitude, painted mint, or lilac, or powder blue. This was the house Ashoke brought Ashima on the day of their arrival at Logan Airport.. Ashima suffered jet lag and she could barely make out a thing for two days. On the third day morning she stepped briefly outside wearing a pair of Ashoke's socks under her thin-soled slippers, the New England chill piercing her ears and jaw, that she had her first real glimpse of America.
        The apartment consisted of three rooms all in a row without a corridor. There was a living room at the front with a three sided window overlooking the street, a pass-through bedroom in the middle, a kitchen at the back. It was not at all what she had expected. Not at all like the houses in Gone With the Wind or The Seven-Year Itch, movies she'd seen with her brother and cousins at the Lighthouse and the Metro. The thick glass windowpanes were covered by dreary dark brown curtains. She found, to her surprise, the powerful cooking gas that flares up at any time of day or night from four burners on the stove, and the hot tap water fierce enough to scald her skin, and cold water safe enough to drink.