(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
From the airport they were ushered into waiting taxis and down VIP Road, past a colossal landfill and into the heart of North Calcutta. Gogol was accustomed to the scenery, yet he still stared, at the short, dark men pulling the rickshaws and the crumbling buildings side by side with fretwork balconies, hammers and sickles painted on their facades. He stared at the commuters who cling precariously to trams and buses, threatening at any moment to spill on to the street, and at the families who boiled rice and shampooed their hair on the side walk. At his mother's flat on Amherst Street, where his uncle's family lived now, neighbors looked from their windows and roofs as Gogol and his family emerged from the taxi. They stood out in their bright, expensive sneakers, American haircuts, backpacks slung over one shoulder. Once inside, he and Sonia were given cups of Horlick's, plates of syrupy, spongy rossogollas for which they had no appetite but which they dutifully ate. They had their feet traced onto pieces pf paper, and a servant was sent to Bata to bring back rubber slippers for them to wear indoors. The suitcases were unlocked and unbound and all the gifts were unearted, admired and tried on for size.
In the days that followed they adjusted once again to sleeping under a mosquito net, bathing by pouring tin cups of water over their heads. In the morning Gogol watched his cousins put on their white and blue school uniforms and strap water bottles across their chests. His aunt, Uma Maima, preside in the kitchen all morning, harassing the servants as they squat by the drain scouring the dirty dishes with ash, or pound heaps of spices on slabs that resemble tombstones. At the Ganguli's house in Alipore, he saw the room in which they would have lived had his parents remained in India, the ebony four-poster bed on which they would have slept all together, the armoire in which they would have stored their clothes.
Instead of renting an apartment of their own, they spent eight months with their various relatives, shuttling from home to home. They stayed in Ballygunge, Tollygunge, Salt Lake, Budge Budge, ferried by endless bumpy taxi rides back and forth through the city. Every few weeks there was a different bed to sleep in, another family to live with, a new schedule to learn. Depending on where they were, they ate sitting on red clay or cement or terrazzo floors, or at marble-topped tables too cold to rest their elbows on. Their cousins and aunts and uncles asked them about life in America, about what they eat for breakfast, about their friends at school. They looked at the pictures of their house at Pemberon Road. "Carpets in the bathroom," they wondered. His father kept busy with his research, delivering lectures at Jadavpur University. His mother shopped in the New Market and went to movies and saw her old school friends. For eight months she did not set her foot in a kitchen. She wandered freely around a city in which Gogol, in spite of his many visits, had no sense of direction. Within three months Sonia had read of each of her Laura Ingalls Wilder books a dozen times. Gogol occasionally opened up one of his textbooks. Though he had brought his sneakers with him, hoping to keep his cross-country training, it was impossible, on those cracked, congested, chock-a-block streets, to run. The one day he tried, Uma Maima, watching from the rooftop, sent a servant to follow him so that Gogol did not get lost.
On Armhest street, on the roof one day, with its view of Howrah Bridge in the distance, Gogol smoked a bidi tightly rolled in olive green leaves with one of the servants. Of all the people who surrounded them at practically all times, Sonia was his only ally, the only person to speak and sit and see as he did. While the rest of the household slept, he and Sonia fought over Walkman, over the melting collection of tapes Gogol recorded back in his room at home. From time to time, they privately admitted to excruciating cravings, for hamburgers or a slice of pepperoni pizza or a cold glass of milk.
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