(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
Ashima's initial reaction at the glimpse of the baby, before the umbilical cord was clipped and they carried him away, was of a creature coated with a thick white paste, and streaks of blood, her blood, on the entire body of the child.A needle placed in the small of her back had removed all her sensation from her waist to the knees, and had given her a blistering headache in the final stages of her delivery. When it was all over she began to shiver profoundly, as if was beset with an acute fever. For half an hour she trembled, in a daze, covered by a blanket, her inside empty, her outside still misshapen. She was unable to speak, to allow the nurse to help exchange her blood-soaked gown for a fresh one. In spite of endless glasses of water, her throat was parched. She was told to sit on a toilet, to squirt warm water from a bottle bewteen her legs. Eventually she was sponged clan, put into a new gown,wheeled into yet another room. The lights were soothingly dim, and there was only one other bed next to hers, empty for the time being. When Ashoke arrived, Patty was taking Ashima's blood pressure, and Ashima was reclining against a pile of pillows, the child wrapped like an oblong white parcel in her arms. Beside the bed was a bassinet, labeled with a card that says BABY BOY GANGULI.
"He is here," she said quietly, looking up at Ashoke with a weak smile. Her skin was faintly yellow, the color missing from her lips. She had circles beneath her eyes, and her hair, spilling from its braid, looked as though it had not been combed for days. Her voice was hoarse, as if she'd caught in a cold. He pulled up a chair by the side of the bed and Patty helped to transfer the child from mother's to father's arms. In the process, the child pierced the silence in the room with a short lived cry. His parents reacted with mutual alarm, but Patty laughed approvingly. "You see," Patty said to Ashima, "he's already getting to know you."
Ashoke did as Patty instructed him, stretching out his arms, putting one hand below the neck, another below the bottom.
"Go on," Patty urged. "He wants to be held tightly. He is stronger than you think."
Ashoke lifted the minuscule parcel higher, close to his chest. "Like this ?"
"There you go," Patty said. "I'll leave you three alone for a while."
At first Ashoke was more perplexed than moved, by the pointier head, the puffiness of the lips, small white spots on the cheeks, the upper lip that droops prominently over the lower one. The skin was pale and translucent enough to show slim green veins at the temples. The scalp was covered by a mass of wispy black hair.
"What are the eyes like ? Why won't he open them ? Has he opened them ?" inquired Ashoke.
She simply nodded
They sat in silence. "How are you feeling ? Was it all right ?" he asked Ashima. But there was no answer, he found her sleeping.
When he looked back to the child, the eyes were open, staring up at him, unblinking, as dark as the hair on its head.
Next day there were three more visitors the baby had, all were Bengali ; Maya and Dilip Nandi, a young married couple in Cambridge whom Ashima and Ashoke had met a few months ago in the Purity Supreme, and Dr.Guptha, a mathematics postdoc from Dehradun, a bachelor in his fifties, whom Ashoke had befriended in the corridors of MIT.
Ashima was trained by the nursing staff how to change diapers and how to clean the umbilical stub, It took nearly three days for her to get the complete knowledge of these practices. She was given hot saltwater baths to soothe her bruises and stitches. She was given a list of pediatricians, and countless brochures on breast-feeding, and bonding, and immunizing, and samples of baby shampoos and Q-Tips and creams. On the fourth day Ashima and the baby were to be discharged. She was informed by Mr.Wilcox, the compiler of the hospital birth certificates, that they had to choose a name for the boy and that in America a baby cannot be discharged from the hospital without birth certificate containing the name of the baby born in a hospital.
Ashoke and Ashima were not aware of this procedure and they were puzzled to select the name of the boy, in Bengal tradition was that the a newly born child's name had to be determined by grandparents,, and no such people, from either mother's side or from father's side of the boy, are readily available in such a foreign place which is about eight thousand miles away from their homeland.
"But,sir," Ashima protested, "we can't possibly name him ourselves, and we are waiting for a letter from home in India."
"I see," said Mr.Wilcox, "that's unfortunate. I'm afraid your only alternative is to have a certificate with a tentative name as you choose now, you will, of course be required to amend the permanent record when a name is decided upon."
Ashima looked at Ashoke expectantly and he had preferred to be named 'Gogol', in memory of his favorite Russian novelist Nikolai Gogol. Thus 'Gogol Ganguli' is registered in hospital files. They took it to be a pet name, not to be taken seriously, simply something to put on the certificate for then to release them from the hospital. Mr. Wilcox, however, did not recommend to choose a temporary name saying "to amend the the name of the birth certificate, you'll have to appear before a judge, pay a fee. The red tape is endless."
"Good-bye, Gogol," Patty said, planting a quiet kiss on his shoulder, and to Ashima, dressed once again in her wrinkled silk sari, "Good luck." A first photograph, somewhat overexposed, is taken by Dr.Guptha.
Gogol, an indistinct blanketed mass, reposing in his mother's arms, left the hospital along with his mother and father.
"So, Gogol entered the world"
No comments:
Post a Comment