(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
During his first semester, obediently but unwillingly, he went home every other weekend, after his last Friday class. He rode Amtrak to Boston and then switched to a commuter rail, his duffel bag stuffed with course books and dirty laundry. Somewhere along two-and-a-half-hour journey, Nikhil evaporated and Gogol claimed him again. His father came to the station to fetch him, always calling ahead to check whether the train was on time. Together they drove through the town along the familiar tree-lined roads, his father asking after his studies. Between Friday night and Sunday afternoon the laundry, thanked to his mother, and got done, but the course books were neglected ; in spite of his intentions, Gogol found himself capable of doing little at his parents' but eat and sleep. The desk in his room felt too small. He was distracted by the telephone ringing, by his parents and Sonia talking and moving through the house. He missed Sterling Library, where he studies every night after dinner, and the nocturnal schedule of which he was then a part. He missed being in suite in Farnam, smoking one of Brandon's cigarettes, listening to music with Jonathan, learning how to tell classical composers apart.
At home he watched MTV with Sonia as she doctored her jeans, cutting inches off the bottoms and inserting zippers at the newly narrowed ankles. Sonia was in high school then, going to the dances Gogol never went to himself, already going to parties at which both boys and girls were present. Her braces had come off her teeth, revealing a confident, frequent American smile. Her formerly shoulder-length hair had been chopped asymmetrically by one of her friends. Ashima lived in fear that Sonia would color a streak of it blond, as Sonia had threatened on more than one occasion to do, and that she would have additional holes pierced in her earlobes at the mall. They argued violently about such things, Ashima crying, Sonia slamming doors. Some weekends his parents were invited to parties, and they insisted that both Gogol and Sonia went with them. The host or hostess showed him to a room where he could study alone while the party thundered below, but he always ended up watching television with Sonia and the other children, just as he had done all his life. "I'm eighteen," he said once to his parents as they drove back from a party, a fact that made no difference to them. One weekend Gogol made the mistake of referring to New Haven as home. "Sorry, I left it at home," said when his father asked if he remembered to buy the Yale decal his parents wanted to paste to the rear window of their car. Ashima was outraged by the remark, dwelling on it all day. "Only three months, and listen to you," she said, telling him that after twenty years in America, she still couldn't bring herself to refer to Pemberton Road as home.
But now it was his room at Yale where Gogol felt most comfortable. He liked its oldness, its persistent grace. He liked that so many students had occupied it before him. He liked the solidity of plaster walls, its dark wooden floorboards, however battered and stained. He liked the dormer window he saw first thing in the mornings when he opened his eyes and looking at Battell Chapel. He had fallen in love with Gothic architecture of the campus, always astonished by the physical beauty that surrounded him, that rooted him to his eniivrons in a way he had never felt while growing up on Pemberton Road. In the Spring semester he took an introductory class in architecture. He read about how pyramids and Greek temples and Medieval cathedrals were built, studying the plans of churches and places in his textbook. He learned the endless terms, the vocabulary that classified the details of the ancient buildings. Together the words from another language he wanted to know. For his drawing class, in which he was required to make sketches every week, he was inspired to draw the details of buildings : flying buttresses, pointed archways filled with flowing tracery, thick rounded doorways, squat columns of pale pink stone.
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