(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
It was Gogol's fourteenth Birth day that they celebrated in 1982 ; it was another occasion for his parents to throw a party to their Bengali friends. His own school friends were invited the previous day, a tame affair, with pizzas that his father had picked upon his way home from work. Gogol watched a basketball game along with his friends on television. for the first time in his life he had said no to the frosted cake, the box of harlequin ice cream, the hot dogs in buns, the balloons and streamers taped on the walls. The other celebration, the Bengali one, was held on the closest Saturday to the actual date of his birth. As usual his mother cooked days beforehand, cramming the refrigerator with stacks of foil-covered trays. She made sure to prepare his favorite things : lamb curry with lots of potatoes, luchis, thick channa dal with swollen brown raisins, pineapple chutney, sandeshes molded out of saffron-tinted ricotta cheese. All this was less stressful to her than the task of feeding a handful of American children, half of whom always claimed they were allergic to milk, all of whom refused to eat the crusts of their bread.
Close to forty guests came from three different states. Women were dressed in saris far more dazzling than the pants and polo shirts their husbands wore. A group of men sat in a circle on the floor and immediately started a game of poker. These were his mashis and meshos, his honorary aunts and uncles. They all brought their children, his parents' crowd did not believe in baby-sitters. Gogol was the oldest child in the group ; he was too old to be playing hide-and-seek with eight year-old Sonia and her pony-tailed , gap-toothed friends, but not old enough to sit in the living room and discuss Reaganomics with his father and rest of the husbands, or to sit around the dining room table, gossiping, with his mother and the wives. The closest person to him in age was a girl named Moushumi, whose family recently moved to Massachusetts from England, and whose thirteenth birthday was celebrated in a similar fashion a few months ago. But Gogol and Moushumi had nothing to say each other. Moushumi sat cross-legged on the floor, in glasses with maroon plastic frames and a puffy polka-dotted headband holding back her thick, chin-length hair In her lap was a kelly green Bermuda bag with pink piping and wooden handles ; inside the bag was a was a tube of 7UP-flavored lip balm that she drew from time to time across her mouth.
She was reading a well-thumbed paperback copy of Pride and Prejudice while the other children, Gogol included, watch The Love Boat and Fantasy Island, piled together on top and around the sides of his parents' bed. Occasionally one of the children asked Moushumi to say something, anything, in her English accent. Sonia asked if she'd ever seen Princess Diana on the street. "I detest American television," Moushumi eventually declared to every one's delight, then wandered into the hallway to continue her reading.
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