(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
Bad luck trailed them on the trip back to Calcutta. At Benares station, Sonia asked her father to buy her a slice of jackfruit, which made her lips itch unbearably, then swelled to three times their size. Somewhere in Bihar, in the middle of the night, a businessman in another compartment was stabbed in sleep and was robbed of three hundred thousand rupees, and the train stopped for five hours while the local police investigatd. The Gagulis learned the cause of the delay the following morning, as breakfast was being served, the passengers agitated and horrified, all speaking of the same thing. "Wake up. Some guy on the train got murdered," Gogol said to Sonia from his top berth to hers. No one was more horrified than Ashoke.
Upon morning in Calcutta, Gogol and Sonia both got terribly ill. It was the air, the rice, the wind, their relatives casually remarked ; they were not made to survive in a a poor country, they said. They had constipation followed by the opposite. Doctors came to the house in the evening with stethoscopes in black leather bags. They were given a course of Entroquinol, ajowan water that burned their throats. And once they'd recovered it was time to go back : the day they were convinced would never come was just two weeks away. Kashmiri pencil cups were bought for Ashoke to give to give to his colleagues at the university. Gogol bought Indian comic books to give to his American friends. On the evening of their departure he watched his parents standing in front of framed pictures of his dead grandparents on the walls, heads bowed, weeping like children. And then the caravan of taxis came to whisk them one last time across the city. Their flight was at dawn and so they must leave in darkness, driving through the streets so empty they were unrecognizable, a tram with its small single headlight the only the other thing that moved. At the airport the row of people who had greeted them, had hosted and fed and fawned over them for all these months, those with whom he shared a name if not his life, assembled once more on the balcony, to wane good-bye. Gogol knew that his relatives would stand there until the plane had drifted away, until the flashing lights were no longer visible in the sky. As they journeyed back to Boston Gogol felt relieved, and with relief he peeled back the foil covering his breakfast and asked the British Airways stewardess for a glass of orange juice. With relief he put on his headset to watch The Big Chill and listen to top-forty songs all the way home.
Within twenty-four hours he and his family were back on Pemberton Road, the late August grass in need of trimming, a quart of milk and some bread left by their tenants in the refrigerator, four grocery bags on the staircase filled with mail. At first Gangulis slept most of the day and were wide awake at night, gorging themselves on toast at three in the morning, unpacking the suitcases one by one. Though they were home they were disconcerted by the space, by the uncompromising silence that surrounded them. They still felt somehow in transit, still disconnected from their lives, bound up in an alternate schedule, an intimacy only four of them share. But by the end of the week, after his mother's friends came to admire her new gold and saris, after the eight suitcases had been aired out on the sun deck and put away, after the chanachur was poured into Tupperware and the smuggled mangoes eaten for breakfast with cereal and tea, it was as if they had never gone. "How dark you've become," his parents' friends said regretfully to Gogol and Sonia. They retreated to their three rooms, to their three seperate beds, to their thick mattresses and pillows and fitted sheets. After a single trip to their supermarket, the refrigerator and the cupboards filled with familiar labels : Skippy, Hood, Bumble Bee, Land O' Lakes. His mother entered the kitchen and prepared their meals once again ; his father drove the car and mowed the lawn and returned to the university. Gogol and Sonia slept for as long as they wanted, watched television, made themselves peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at any time of day. Once again they were free to quarrel, to tease each other, to shout and holler and say shut up. They took hot showers, spoke to each other in English, rode their bicycles around the neighborhood. They called up their American friends, who were happy enough to see them but asked them nothing about where they'd been. And so the eight months were put behind them, quickly shed, quickly forgotten, like clothes worn for a special occasion, or for a season that had passed, suddenly cumbersome, irrelevant to their lives.
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