(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
By the following year his parents knew vaguely about Ruth. Though he had been in Maine twice, meeting her father and stepmother, Sonia, who secretly had a boyfriend these days, was the only person in his family to have met Ruth, during a weekend when Sonia came to New Haven. His parents had expressed no curiosity about his girlfriend. His relationship with her was one accomplishment in his life about which they were not in the least bit proud or pleased. Ruth told him she didn't mind their disapproval, that she found it romantic. But Gogol knew it was not right. He wished his parents could simply accept her, as his family accepted him, without pressure of any kind. "You are too young to get involved this way," Ashoke and Ashima told him. They'd even gone so far to point out examples of Bengali men they knew who had married Americans, marriages that had ended in divorce. It only made things worse when they said that marriage was last thing on his mind. At times he hung up on them. He pitied his parents when they spoke to him this way, for having no experience of being young and in love. He suspected that they were secretly glad when Ruth went away to Oxford for a semester. She'd mentioned her interest in going there long ago, in the first week of their courtship, when the spring of junior year had felt like a remote speck on the horizon. She'd asked him if he minded if she applied, and though the idea of her being so far had made him queasy he'd said no, of course not, that twelve weeks would go like that.
He was lost that spring without her. He spent all the time in studio, especially the Friday nights and weekends he would normally had been with her, the two of them eating at Naples and going to see movies in the law school auditorium. He listened to the music she loved : Simon and Garfunkel, Neil Young, Cat Stevens, buying himself brand-new copies of the albums she'd inherited from her parents. It sickened him to think of the physical distance between them, to think that when he was asleep at night she was leaning over a sink somewhere, brushing her teeth
and washing her face to start the next day. He longed for her as his parents had longed, all these years, for the people they love in India, for the first time in his life, he knew this feeling. But his parents refused to give him the money to fly to England on his spring break. He spent what little money he had from working in the dining hall on transatlantic phone calls to Ruth twice a week. Twice a day he checked his campus mailbox for letters and postcards stamped with the multicolored profiles of the queen. He carried these letters and post cards wherever he went, stuck into his books. "My Shakespeare class is the best I've taken," she'd written in violet-colored ink. "The coffee is undrinkable. Everyone constantly says 'cheers.' I think of you all the time."
No comments:
Post a Comment