(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
It wasn't until his first day in New Haven, after his father and teary mother and Sonia were heading back up 95 toward Boston, that he began to introduce himself as Nikhil. The first people to call him by his new name were his suitemates, Brandon and Jonathan, both of whom had been notified by mail over the summer that his name was Gogol. Brandon, lanky and blond, grew up in Massachusetts not far from Gogol, and went to Andover. Jonathan, who was Korean and plays the cello, came from L.A.
"Is Gogol your first name or your last ?" Brandon wanted to know.
Normally that question agitates him. But today he had a new answer. "Actually, that's my middle name," Gogol said by way of explanation, sitting with them in the common room to their suite. "Nikhil is my first name. It got left out for some reason."
Jonathan nodded in acceptance, distracted by the task of setting up his stereo components. Brandon nodded too. "Hey, Nikhil," Brandon said awhile later, after they have arranged the furniture in the common room to their liking. "Want to smoke a bowl ?" Since everything was suddenly so new, going by a new name didn't feel so terribly strange to Gogol. He lived in a new state, had a new telephone number. He ate his meals off a tray in Commons, shared a bathroom with a floor full of people, showered each morning in a stall. He slept in a new bed, which his mother insisted on making before she left.
He spent the days of orientation rushing around campus, back and forth along the intersecting flagstone path, past the clock tower, and the turreted, crenelated buildings. He was too harried, at first, to sit on the grass in Old Campus as the other students did, perusing their course catalogues,playing Frisbee, getting to know one another among the verdigris-covered statues of robed, seated men. He made a list of all the places he had to go, encircling the buildings on his campus map. When he was alone in his room he typed out a written request on his Smith Corona, notifying the registrar's office of his name change, providing examples of his former and current signatures side by side. He gave these documents to a secretary, along with a copy of the change-of-name form. He told his freshman counselor about his name change ; he told the person in charge of processing his student ID and his library card. He corrected the error in stealth, not bothering to explain to Jonathan and Brandon what he was so busy doing all day, and then suddenly it was over. By the time the upperclassmen arrived and classes began, he had paved the way for the whole university to call him Nikhil : students and professors and TAs and girls at parties. Nikhil registered for his first four classes : Intro to the History of Art, Medieval History, a semester of Spanish, Astronomy to fulfill his hard science requirement. At the last minute he registered for a drawing class, something they would consider frivolous at this stage of his life, in spite of the fact that his own grandfather was an artist. they were already distressed that he had not settled on a major and a profession. Like the rest of their Bengali friends, his parents expect him to be, if not engineer, then a doctor, a lawyer, an economist at the very least. These were the fields that brought them to America, his father repeatedly reminded him, the professions that had earned them security and respect.
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