(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
In the autumn of sophomore year, he boarded a particularly crowded train at Union Station. It was the Wednesday before thanksgiving. He edged through the compartments, his duffel bag heavy with books for his Renaissance architecture class, for which he had to write a paper over the next five days. Passengers had already staked out parts of the vestibule, sitting glumly on their luggage. "Standing room only," the conductor hollered. "I want my money back," a passenger complained. Gogol kept walking, from one compartment to the next, looking for an uncrowded vestibule in which he might sit. In the very last car of the train he saw an empty seat. A girl was seated next to the window, reading a folded-back issue of The New Yorker. Arranged on the seat beside her was a chocolate brown, shearling-lined suede coat, which was what had caused the person in front of Gogol to move on. But something told Gogol the coat belonged to the girl, and so he stopped and said, "Is that yours ?"
She lifted up her narrow body and in a single, swift motion arranged the coat beneath her buttocks and legs. It's a face he recognized from campus, someone he'd crossed paths within the corridors of buildings as he walked to and from class. He remembered that freshman year she'd hair dyed an emphatic shade of cranberry red, cut to her jaw. She'd grown it to her shoulders now, and allowed it to resume what appeared to be its natural shade, light brown, with bits of blond here and there. It was parted just off-center, a bit crooked at the base. The hair her eyebrows was darker, lending her otherwise friendly features a serious expression. She wore a pair of nicely faded jeans, brown leather boots with yellow laces and thick rubber soles. A cabled sweater the same flecked gray of her eyes was too large for her, the sleeves coming partway up her hands. A man's billfold bulged prominently from the front pocket of her jeans.
"Hi, I'm Ruth," she said, recognizing him in that same vague way.
"I'm Nikhil." He sat, too exhausted to put his duffel bag away in the luggage rack overhead. He shoved it as best he could under his seat, his long legs bent awkwardly, aware that he was perspiring. He unzipped his blue down parka. He massaged his fingers, crisscrossed with welts from the leather straps of the bag.
"Sorry," Ruth said, watching him. "I guess I was just trying to put off the inevitable."
Still seated, he pried his arms free of the parka. "What do you mean ?"
"Making it look like someone was sitting here. With the coat."
"It's pretty brilliant, actually. Sometimes I pretend to fall asleep for the same reason," he admitted. "No one wants to sit next to me if I'm sleeping."
She laughed softly, putting a strand of her hair behind her ear. Her beauty was direct, unassuming. She wore no make-up apart from something glossy on her lips ; two small brown moles by her right cheekbone were the only things that distract from the pale peach of her complexion. She had slim, small hands with unpolished nails and ragged cuticles. She leaned over to put the magazine away and get a book from the bag at her feet, and he briefly glimpsed the skin above her waistband.
"Are you going to Boston ?" he asked.
"Maine. That's where my dad lives. I have to switch to a bus at South Station. It's another four hours from there. What college are you in ?"
"J.E."
He learned that she was in Silliman, that she was planning to be an English major. Comparing notes of their experiences at college so far, they discovered that they had both taken Psychology 110 the previous spring. The book in her hands was a paperback copy of Timon of Athens, and though she kept a finger marking her page she never read a word of it. She told him she was raised on a commune in Vermont, the child of hippies, educated at home until the seventh grade. Her parents were divorced now. Her father lived with her stepmother, raising llamas on a farm. Her mother, an anthropologist, was doing fieldwork on midwives in Thailand.
He couldn't imagine coming from such parents, such a background, and when he described his own upbringing it felt bland by comparison. But Ruth expressed interest, asking about his visits to Calcutta. She told him h er parents went to India once, to an ashram somewhere, before she was born. She asked what the streets were like, and the houses, and so on the blank page of his book on perspective Gogol drew a floor plan of his maternal grandparents' flat, navigating Ruth along the verandas and the terrazzo floors, telling her about the chalky blue walls, the narrow stone kitchen, the sitting room with cane furniture that looked as if it belonged on a porch. He drew with confidence, thanks to the drafting course he was taking then. He showed her the room where he and Sonia sleep when they visited, and describing the view of the tiny lane lined with corrugated tin-roofed businesses. When he was finished, Ruth took the book from him and looked at the drawing he had made, trailing her finger through the rooms. "I'd love to go," she said, and suddenly he imagined her face and arms tanned, a backpack strapped to her shoulders, walking along Chowringhee as other western tourists do, shopping in New Market, staying at the Grand.
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