(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
Now that Gogol had his independent identity as Nikhil it was easier to ignore his parents, to tune out their concerns and pleas. With relief, he typed his name at the tops of his freshman papers. He read the telephone messages his suitemates left for Nikhil on assorted scraps in their rooms. He opened up a checking account, wrote his new name into course books. "Me llamo Nikhil," he said in his Spanish class. It was as Nikhil, that first semester, that he grew a goatee, started smoking Camel Lights at parties and while writing papers and before exams, discovered Brian Eno and Elvis Costello and Charlie Parker. It was as Nikhil that he took Metro-North into Manhattan one week end with Jonathan and himself a fake ID that allowed him to be served liquor in New Haven bars. It was as Nikhil that he lost his virginity at a party at Ezra Stiles, with a girl wearing a plaid woolen skirt and combat boots and mustard tights. By the time he woke up, hung-over, at three in the morning, she had vanished from the room, and he was unable to recall her name.
There was only one complication : He didn't feel like Nikhil. Not yet. Part of the problem was that the people who now knew him as Nikhil had no idea that he used to be Gogol. They knew him only in the present, not at all in the past. But after eighteen years of Gogol, two months of Nikhil felt scant, inconsequential. At times he felt as if he was cast himself in a play, acting the part of twins,indistinguishable to the naked eye yet fundamentally different. At times he still felt his old name, painfully and without warning , the way his front tooth had unbearably throbbed in recent weeks after a filling, threatening for an instant to severe from his gums when he drank coffee, or iced water, and once when he was riding in an elevator. He feared being discovered, having the whole charade somehow unravel, and in nightmares his files were exposed, his original name printed on the front page of the Yale Daily News. Once, he signed his old name by mistake on a credit card slip at the college bookstore. Occasionally he had to hear Nikhil three times before he answered.
Even more startling was when those who normally call him Gogol refer to him as Nikhil. Though he had asked his parents to refer to him as Nikhil, when called on Saturday mornings, if Brandon or Jonathan happened to pick up the phone, the fact of it troubled him, making him feel in that instant that he was not related to them, not their child. "Please come to our home with Nikhil one week end," Ashima said to his roommates when she and Ashoke visited campus during parents weekend in October, the suite hastily cleared of liquor bottles and ashtrays and Brandon's bong for the occasion. The substitution sounded wrong to Gogol, correct but off-key, the way it sounded when his parents spoke English to him instead of Bengali. Stranger still was one of his parents addressed him, in front of his new friends, as Nikhil directly : "Nikhil, show us the buildings where you have your classes," his father suggested. Later that evening , out to dinner with Jonathan at a restaurant at Chapel Street, Ashima slipped asking, "Gogol, have you decided yet what your major will be ?" Though Jonathan, listening to something his father was saying, didn't hear, Gogol felt helpless, annoyed yet unable to blame his mother, caught in the mess he'd made.
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