(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
They were surprised, in the summer, to learn that their father had planned a trip for them, first to Delhi to visit an uncle, and then to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. It would be Gogol and Sonia's first journey outside of Calcutta, their first time on an Indian train. They departed from Howrah, that immense, soaring, echoing station, where barefoot coolies in red cotton shirts piled the Ganguli's Samsonite luggage on their heads, where entire families slept, covered, in rows on the floor. Gogol was aware of the dangers involved ; his cousins had told him about the bandits that lurk in Bihar, so that his father wore a special garment under his shirt, with hidden pockets to carry cash, and his mother and Sonia remove their gold jewels. On the platform they walked from compartment to compartment, looking for their four names on the passenger list pasted outside wall of the train.. they settled on their blue berths, the top two swinging down from the walls when it was time to sleep and held in place by sliding latches during the day.A conductor gave them their bedding, heavy white cotton sheets and thin woolen blankets. In the morning they looked at the scenery through the tinted window of their air-conditioned car. As a result, the view, no matter how bright the day, was gloomy and gray.
They were unaccustomed, after all these months, to being just four of them. For a few days, in Agra, which was as foreign to Ashima and Ashoke as it was to Gogol and Sonia, they were tourists, staying at a hotel with a swimming pool, sipping bottled water, eating in restaurants with forks and spoons, paying by credit card. Ashima and Ashoke spoke in broken Hindi, and when young boys approached to sell postcards or marble trinkets Gogol and Sonia were forced to say, "English, please." Gogol noticed in certain restaurants that they were the only Indians apart from the serving staff. For two days they wandered around the marble mausoleum that glows gray and yellow and pink and orange depending on the light. They admired its perfect symmetry and posed for photographs beneath the minarets from which tourists used to leap to their deaths. "I want a picture here, but the two of us," Ashima said to Ashoke as they wandered around the massive plinth, and so under the blinding Agra sun, overlooking the dried-up Yamuna, Ashoke taught Gogol how to use the Nikon, how to focus and advance the film. A tour guide told them that after the Taj was completed, each of the builders, twenty-two thousand men, had his thumbs cut off so that the structure could never be built again. That night in the hotel Sonia woke up screaming that her own thumbs were missing. "I's just legend," her parents told her. But the idea of it haunted Gogol as well. No other building they'd seen had affected him so powerfully. Their second day at the Taj he attempted to sketch the dome and a portion of the facade, but that building's grace eluded him and he threw the attempt away. Instead, he immersed himself in the guidebook, studying the history of Mughal architecture, learning the succession of emperors' names ; Babur, Humayun, Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, Aurangzeb. At Agra Fort he and his family looked through the window of the room where Shah Jahan was imprisoned by his own son. At Sikandra, Akbar's tomb, they gazed at gilded frescoes in the entry way, chipped, ransacked, burned, the gems gouged out with penknives, graffiti etched in to the stone. At Fatehpur Sikri, Akbar's abandoned sandstone city, they wandered among courtyards and cloisters as parrots and hawks flew overhead, and in Salim Chishti's tomb Ashima tied red threads for good luck to a marble lattice screen.
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