(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
Plenty of people changed their names : actors, writers, revolutionaries, transvestites,. In history class, Gogol had learned that European immigrants had their names changed at Ellis Island, that slaves renamed themselves once they were emancipated. Though Gogol did not know it, even Nikolai Gogol renamed himself, simplifying his surname at the age of twenty-two from Gogol-Yanovsky to Gogol upon publication in the Literary Gazette. (He had also published under the name Yanov, and once signed his work "OOOO" in the honor of four o's in his full name.)
One day in the summer of 1986, in the frantic weeks before moving away from his family, before his freshman year at Yale was about to begin, Gogol Ganguli did the same. He rode the commuter rail into Boston, switching to the Green Line at North Station, getting out at Lechmere. The area was somewhat familiar ; he had been to Lechmere countless times with his family, and he had been to the Museum of science on field trips from school. But he had never been to this neighborhood on his own, and in spite of the directions he'd written on a sheet of paper he got briefly lost on his way to the Middlesex Probate and Family Court. He wore a blue oxford shirt, khakis, a camel-colored corduroy blazer bought for his college interviews that was too warm for the sultry day. Knotted around his neck was his only tie, maroon with yellow stripes on the diagonal. By now Gogol was just shy of six feet tall, his body slender, his thick brown-black hair slightly in need of cut. His face was lean, intelligent, suddenly handsome, the bones more prominent, the pale gold skin clean-shaven and clear He had inherited Ashima's eyes, large, penetrating, with bold, elegant brows, and shared with Ashoke the slight bump at the top of his nose.
The courthouse was an imposing, old, pillared brick building occupying a full city block, but the entrance was off to the side, down a set of steps. Inside, Gogol emptied his pockets and stepped through a metal detector, as if he were at an airport, about to embark on a journey. He was soothed by the chill of the air-conditioning, by the beautifully carved plaster ceiling, by the voices that echo pleasantly in the marbled interior. This was a place, he gathered, that people come to seek divorces, dispute wills. A man at the information booth told him to wait upstairs, in an area filled with round tables, where people sat eating their lunch. Gogol sat impatiently, one long leg jiggling up and down. He had forgotten to bring a book to read and so he picked up a discarded section of the Globe, skimming an article in the "Arts" section about Andrew Wyeth's Helga paintings. Eventually he began to practice his new signature in the margins of the paper. He tried it in various styles, his hand unaccustomed to the angles of the N, the dotting of the two i's. He wondered how many times he had written his old name, at the tops of how many tests and quizzes, how many homework assignments, how many yearbook inscriptions to friends. How many times does a person write his name in a life time ; a million ? Two million ?
The idea to change his name had first occurred ti him a few months ago. He was sitting in the waiting room of his dentist, flipping through an issue of Reader's Digest. He'd been turning the pages at random until he came to an article that caused him to stop. The article was called "Second Baptism." "Can you identify the following famous people ?" was written beneath the headlines. A list of names followed and, at the bottom of the page, printed in tiny letters upside down, the famous personalities they corresponded to. The only one he guessed correctly was Robert Zimmerman, Bob Dylan's real name. He had no idea that Leon Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein. That Gerald Ford's name was Leslie Lynch King, Jr. ; they had all renamed themselves, the article said, adding that it was a right belonging to every American citizen. He read that tens of thousands of Americans had their names changed each year. All it took was a legal petition, the article had said. And suddenly he envisioned "Gogol" added to the list of names, "Nikhil" printed in tiny letters up side down.
No comments:
Post a Comment