ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 76

                                           (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


           Gogol had not expected to enjoy himself, to be attracted to Moushumi in the least. It struck him that there was no term for what they once were to each other. Their parents were friends, not they. She was a family acquaintance but she was not family. Their contact until tonight had been artificial , imposed, something like his relationship to his cousins in India but lacking even the justification of blood ties. Until they had met tonight, he'd never seen her outside the context of her family, or she his. He decided that it was her very familiarity that made him curious about her, he wondered when he might see her again. When he began to walk to the subway and reached Broadway, he changed his mind and hailed a cab. The decision felt indulgent, as it was not particularly late, or cold, or raining, and he was in no great rush to be home. But he had the urge to be alone all of a sudden, to be thoroughly passive, to revisit the evening in solitude. The driver of the cab was a Bangladeshi ; the name on the registration card pasted to the plexiglass behind the front seat said Mustafa Sayeed. He was talking in Bengali on his cell phone, complaining of traffic on the FDR, of difficult passengers, as they sail uptown, past the shuttered shops and restaurants on Eighth Avenue. Gogol sat silently,as if he were any other passenger, lost in his own thoughts, thinking of Moushumi.  But as they neared his apartment, he said to the driver, in Bengali, "It's that one upon the right."
          The driver turned around, surprised, smiling. "I didn't realize," he said.
         "That's okay," Gogol said, reaching for his wallet. He tipped the driver excessively and stepped out of the car.


In the days that followed, he began to remember things about Moushumi, the images that came to him without warning while he was sitting at his desk at work, or during a meeting, or drifting off to sleep, or standing in the mornings under the shower. They were scenes he'd carried with him, buried but intact, scenes he'd never thought about or had reasons to conjure up until now. He was grateful that his mind had retained these images of her, pleased with himself, as if he'd just  discovered an innate talent for a sport or a game he'd never played. He remembered her family at the pujos he'd attended every year, twice a year, with his family, where she would be dressed in a sari carefully pinned to the top her shoulder, but she would always take it off after an hour or two and put on her jeans. He didn't remember Moushumi ever accompanying other teenagers to the McDonald's that was across the street, or eventually sitting in someone's car in the parking lot, listening to the radio and drinking beer from a can. He struggled but failed to recall her presence at Pemberton Road ; still, he was secretly pleased that she'd seen those rooms, tasted his mother's cooking, washed her hands in the bathroom, however long ago.
            

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 75

                                                (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


              In spite of Gogol's expression of his innocence about her prenuptial disaster, she was certain that every Bengali family knew about it. Though she tried to speak lightly about that episode, he detected the bitterness in her voice.  
           She attempted to divert his attention from the topic. He sensed it and asked her, "when was the last time we saw each other."
          "Correct if I'm wrong, but I think it was your high school graduation party."
          He remembered that day when his family and friends assembled in a brightly lit basement of a church his parents had rented, and big folding tables were arranged in  the hallways.
         "You were there ?"
         She nodded. "It was right before we moved to New Jersey. You sat with your American friends from high school. A few of your teachers were there. You seemed little embarrassed by it all."
        He shook his head. "I don't remember you there. Did I speak to you ?"
        "You ignored me thoroughly. But it doesn't matter." she smiled. "I'm sure I brought a book with me."
         They had a second round of drinks. The bar was beginning to fill up, people sitting on either side of them. When he'd arrived, he'd been bothered by the lack of people, of sounds, feeling on display, but now the crowd bothered him even more.
         "It's getting pretty crazy in here," he said
         "It's not usually like this on a Sunday. Should we move ?"
         "Maybe," he considered.
         They asked for the bill, stepped out together, they saw that not even an hour passed.
         "Where're you headed ?" she asked, in a way that made him realize that she assumed the date is over. 
         He'd not planned to take her for dinner, but said that he was thinking of getting something to eat, did she want to join him ?
          "I'd like that,"  she said.
          They decided to walk a bit, stopped in front of a small place that looked as if it had just opened. They studied the handwritten menu taped on the window, the review of the place printed in the Times. 
        "Shall we try it ?" he asked, stepping away and reaching for the door. Inside, the walls were painted red, old posters advertising wine, and street signs and photographs of Paris arranged on the walls.
         "This place must seem silly to you," he acknowledged watching her gaze up at the walls.
          She shook her head. "It's pretty authentic, actually."
          She asked for a bottle of champagne and looked carefully at the wine list. He asked for another single malt, but was told that there was only beer and wine.
          "Shall we have a bottle ?" she said, handing him the list.
          "You choose."
          She ordered a salad and bouillabaisse and a bottle of Sancerre. He ordered the cassoulet. She didn't speak French to the waiter, who was French himself, but the way she pronounced the items on the menu made it clear that she was fluent. It impressed him. Apart from Bengali, he'd never  bothered to master another language. The meal passed quickly. He spoke of his projects involved, his upcoming exam.
         She offered to pay her share when the bill came, as she'd done in the bar, but this time he insisted on treating. He walked her to her apartment, which was on a run-down but pretty residential block, close to the bar where they'd met. She thanked him for the dinner, said she'd a great time. Again she kissed him on both cheeks. He was parched from the alcohol he'd consumed. "So, should we make our parents happy and see each other again?"
          She looked at him, studying his face intently. "Maybe." She smiled at him, nodding. "Give me a call."

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 74

                                          (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


          "Nikhil," she said as he sat down on the stool beside her, and ordered a single malt.
           "Yes."
            "As opposed to Gogol."
            "Yes." It had annoyed him, when he'd called her, that she hadn't recognized him as Nikhil. This was the first time he'd been out with a woman who'd once known him by that other name. On the phone, she'd sounded guarded, faintly suspicious, as he had. The conversation had been brief and thoroughly awkward. "I hope you don't mind my calling," he had begun, after explaining to her that he'd changed his name, "Let me check my book," sh'd told him when he'd asked if she was free Sunday evening for a drink, and then he'd listened to her footsteps clicking across bare wooden floor.
          She studied him for a moment, playfully twisting her lips. "As I recall, given that you're a year older than me, I was taught by my parents to call you Gogol Dada."
         He was aware of the bartender glancing at them briefly, assessing their potential. He could smell Moushumi's perfume, something slightly overpowering that made him think of wet moss and prunes. The silence and the intimacy of the room disconcerted him. "Let's not dwell on that." 
        She laughed. "I'll drink to that," she said, lifting her glass.
        "I never did, of course," she added.
        "Did what ?"
        "Call you Gogol Dada. I don't remember our ever talking, really."
         He sipped his drink. "Neither do I."
         "So, I've never done this before," she said after a pause. She spoke matter-of-factly, but nevertheless she averted her gaze.
         He knew what she was referring to. In spite of this he asked, "Done what ?"
         "Gone out on a blind date that's been engineered by my mom."
         "Well, it's not a blind date, exactly." he said.
          "No ?"
          "We already know each other, in a way."
           She shrugged and gave a quick smile, as if she'd yet to be convinced. Her teeth were crowded together, not entirely straight. "I guess, I guess we do."
          Together they watched as the bartender put a CD into the player mounted to the wall. Some jazz. He was thankful for the distraction.
          "I was sorry to hear about your father," she said.
          Though she sounded genuinely sympathetic, he wondered whether she even remembered,  his father. He was tempted to ask her, but instead he nodded. "Thanks," he said, all he could ever think to say.
          "How is your mother getting along ?"
          "All right, I guess."
          "Is she okay on her own ?"
          "Sonia's living with her now."
          "Oh. That's good. That must be a relief to you." She reached for the Dunhills, opening the box and peeling back the gold foil. After offering one to him, she reached for the box of matches that lied in an ashtray on the bar and lighted a cigarette for herself. "Do you guys still live in that same house I used to visit ?" she asked.
          "Yeah."
         "I remember it."
         "Do you ?"
         "I remember that the driveway was to the right of the house as you faced it. There was a flagstone path out into the lawn."
          The fact that she could recall these details so precisely was at once startling and endearing to him. "Wow. I'm impressed."
          "I also remember watching lots of television in a room covered with really thick brownish gold carpeting."
           He groaned. "It still is."
           She apologized for not being at the funeral, she'd been in Paris at the time. It was where she'd  lived after graduating from Brown, she explained. Now she was a candidate for a Ph.D, in French literature at NYU. She'd been living in the city for almost two years. She'd spent the past summer temping, working for two months in the business office of an expensive midtown hotel. Her job was to review and file all the exit surveys left by the guests, making copies, distribute them to the appropriate people. This simple task had taken up her day.
           "Why did you leave Paris for New York ?" he asked. "I'd think you'd rather study French literature in France."
           "I moved here for love," she said. Her frankness surprised him. "Surely you know about my prenuptial disaster."
           "Not really," he lied.


           

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 73

                                        (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


           Mrs. Bridget and Gogol shared a cab to his apartment. Bridget excused herself to use the bathroom and when she emerged, her wedding ring was absent from her finger, and this gave Gogol to vaguely understand her present mental state. When they were together, he was ravenous ; it had been a long time since he'd  made love. And yet he couldn't think of involving her to satiate his urge, for he'd heard of her husbands commitment to her, at length. Only twice a week, the nights the review class met. did he look forward to her company. They didn't have each others phone numbers.He didn't know where she lived. She always went to his apartment. She never spent the night. He liked the limitations. He'd never been in a situation with a woman in which so little of him was involved, so little expected. He didn't know, nor did he want to know, her husband's name. Then one weekend, when he was on the train to Massachusetts to see his mother and Sonia, a south bound train sliced by, an he wondered if perhaps the husband was on the other train, on his way to see Bridget.


From time to time his mother asked him if he had a new girl friend. In the past she broached the topic defensively, but now she was hopeful, quietly concerned. She even asked once whether it was possible to patch things up with Maxine. When he pointed out to her that she had disliked Maxine, his mother said that that wasn't the point, the point was for him to move on with his life. He worked to remain calm, during these conversations, not to accuse her of meddling, as he once would have done. When he told her that he wasn't even thirty, she told him that by that age she'd already celebrated her tenth wedding anniversary. He was aware, without having to be told, that his father's death had accelerated certain expectations, that by now his mother wanted him settled. The fact that he was single didn't worry him, and yet he was conscious of the degree to which it  troubled his mother. She made a point of mentioning the engagement and wedding of the Bengali children he'd grown up with in Massachusetts, and his cousins in India. She mentioned grandchildren being born.
            One day when he was speaking to her on phone, she asked him if he might be willing to call someone. He had known her as a girl, his mother explained. Her name was Moushumi Mazoomdar. He remembered her vaguely. She was the daughter of friends of his parents who had lived for a while in Massachusetts, then moved to New Jersey when he was in high school. She had a British accent. Always with a book in her hand at parties. This was all that he remembers about her ; details neither appealing nor unappealing. His mother told him that she was a year  younger than he was, that she had a much younger brother, that her father was a renowned chemist with a patent to his name. That he called her mother Rina Mashi, her father Shubir Mesho. Her parents had driven up for his father's funeral, his mother said , from New Jersey, but Gogol had no memory of them there. Moushumi lived in New York city these days, was a graduate student at NYU. She was supposed to have been married a year ago, a wedding that he and his mother and Sonia had been invited to, but her fiance, an American, had backed out of the engagement, well after the hotel had been booked, the invitations sent, the gift registry selected. Her parents were a bit worried about her. She could use a friend, his mother said. Why didn't he give her a call ?
           Gogol had no intention of calling the girl whom her mother referred to ; his exam was coming up, besides, as much as he wanted to make his mother happy, he refused to let her set him up with someone. He refused to go that far. The next  time he was home for the weekend his mother brought it up again. This time, because his mother insisted on noting down her number, he did it so, still with no intention of calling. But his mother persisted, reminding him, the next time they spoke, that her parents had come to his father's funeral that it was the least he cold do. A cup of tea, a conversation - did he have no time for that ?


Finally Gogol called Moushumi, suggesting to meet at a bar, in the East Village as was selected by  her. It was a small, dark, silent space, a single square room with just three booths against one wall. She was there, sitting at the bar reading a paperback book, when he arrived, and when she looked up from the its pages, though it was she who was waiting for him, he had the feeling that he was interrupting her. She had a slender face, pleasingly feline features, spare, straight brows. Her eyes were heavy-lidded and boldly lined on the op lids, in the manner of 1960s movie stars. Her hair was middle-parted, gathered into a chignon, and she wore stylishly narrow tortoiseshell glasses. A gray wool skirt and a thin blue sweater clung suggestively to her sides. Opaque black tights covered her calves. A collection of white shopping bags lied at the base of her stool. On the phone he'd not bothered to ask what she looked like, assuming he could recognize her, but now he was no longer sure.
          "Moshumi ?" he asked, approaching her.
          "Hey there," she said, closing the cover of the book, and kissing him casually on both sides of his face. The book had a plain ivory cover, a little written in French. Her British accent, one of the few things he clearly remembered about her, was gone, she sounded as American as he did, with a low, gravelly voice that had surprised him on the phone. She had ordered herself a martini with olives. Beside it was a blue packet of Dunhills.

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 72

                                        (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


            A year had passed since Gogol's father's death. He still lived in New York, rented the apartment on Amsterdam Avenue. He worked for the same firm. The only significant difference in his life, apart from the permanent absence of his father, was the additional absence of Maxine. At first she had been patient with him, and for a while he'd allowed himself to fall back into her life, going home after work to her parents' house, to their world in which nothing had changed. Initially she had tolerated his silence at the dinner table, his indifference in bed, his need to speak to his mother and Sonia every evening, and to visit them, on weekends, without her. But she couldn't tolerate being excluded from the family's plans to travel to Calcutta that summer to see their relatives and scatter Ashoke's ashes in the Ganges. They began to argue about this and other things, Maxine going so far one day as  to admit that  she felt jealous of his mother and sister, an accusation that struck Gogol as so absurd that he had no energy to argue any more. And so, a few months after his father's death, he stepped out of Maxine's life for good. Recently, when he met Gerald and Lydia in a gallery, he learned of their daughter's engagement to another man.
           On weekends he visited Massachusetts, to the house in which his father's photograph, hung in a frame on a wall in the upstairs hallway, draped a garland of rose petals around the frame and anointed his father's forehead with sandal wood paste through the glass. It was the photograph more than anything that drew the Gogol back to the house again and again.
         His visits home were different now, often it was Sonia who did the cooking. Sonia  was still there with his mother, four days a week she left the house at five-thirty in the morning, took a train to downtown Boston. She worked as a paralegal, was applying to law schools nearby. It was she who drove his mother to weekend parties, and to Haymarket on Saturday mornings. Their mother had become thinner, her hair gray. The sight of her bare wrists, the white column of her part, pained Gogol when he first caught sight of her. From Sonia he learned of how her mother spent her evenings, alone in her bed, unable to sleep, watching television without sound. One weekend he suggested going to one of the beaches where his father liked to walk. At first his mother agreed, cheered by, but as soon as they stepped out into the windy parking lot she got back into the car, saying she would wait.
            He was preparing for his registration exam, the two-day ordeal that would enable him to become a licensed architect, to stamp drawings and design  things under his own name. He studied in his apartment, and occasionally up at one of the libraries at Columbia, learning about the matter-of- fact aspects of his profession : electricity, materials, lateral forces. He enrolled in a review class to help him prepare for the exam. The class met twice a week in the evenings, after work. He enjoyed the passivity of sitting in a class room again, listening to an instructor, being taught what he didn't  know. It was a small class, and afterward several of them soon began going out for drinks. Though he was invited to join them, he always said no. Then one day, as they were all filing out of the classroom, one of the women approached him, and said, "So what's your excuse ?" and because he had none, that night he tagged along. The woman's name was Bridget, and at bar she sat beside him. She was starkly attractive, with brown hair cut exclusively short, the sort of style that would have looked disastrous on most women. She spoke slowly, deliberately, her speech unhurried. She was raised in the south, in New Orleans. She told him that she worked for a small firm, a husband-and-wife team who operate out of a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights. For a while they talked about the projects they were working on, the architects they both admired : Gropius, van der Rohe, Saarinen. She was his age, married. She saw her husband on weekends, he was a professor at a college in Boston. He thought of his parents then, living apart for the final months of his father's life. "That must be difficult," he told her. "It can be ," she said. "But it was either that or adjuncting in New York." she told him about the house her husband rented in Brookline, a sprawling Victorian that costed less than half of their one-bedroom apartment in Murray Hill. She said  that her husband had insisted on putting her name on the mailbox, her voice on the answering machine. He had even insisted on hanging a few items of her clothing in the closet, putting a tube of her lipstick in the medicine cabinet. She told Gogol that her husband delighted in illusion like these, was consoled by them, whereas she found them simply to be reminders of what was missing.

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 71

                                             (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


          In the weeks that followed, as their neighbors' hedges and windows were decorated with strings of colored lights, as the piles of Christmas cards arrived at the house, each of them assumed a task his father normally had done. In the mornings Sonia drove into town and did the grocery shopping.  Gogol paid the bills, shoveled the driveway when it snowed. Instead of arranging the Christmas cards on the fireplace mantel, Ashima glanced at the senders' addresses and then,  without opening the envelopes, she threw them away. She spent hours on the phone and had all the names changed on the bank account, the mortgage, the bills.
            Gogol felt gloomy in the afternoons, and he went running or drove to the university, parking behind his father's department, observing the picturesque universe that his father spent in for most of the past twenty-five years. Eventually, on weekends, they began to visit the homes of their parents' friends who lived in surrounding suburbs. Gogol drove one way, Sonia the other. Ashima sat in the back seat. At the homes of their friends, his mother told the story of calling the hospital. "He went in for a stomachache," she said each time, reciting the details of the afternoon at her side on that fateful day, reciting in a way that Gogol couldn't bear to have it repeated, a way he quickly came to dread. Friends suggested her to go to India, saw her brother and cousins for a while. But for the first time in her life, she had no desire to escape to Calcutta, not now. "Now I know why he went to Cleveland," she told people, refusing, even in death, to utter her husband's name. "He was teaching me how to live alone."
          Early in January, after the holidays, Gogol boarded a train and went back to New York. Sonia was staying on with Ashima, thinking of getting an apartment in Boston or Cambridge so that she would be nearby. They came to the station to see him off. After boarding the train he waved at his mother and Sonia, his diminished family, through the tinted glass, hardly visible to them. He remembered his family all coming to see him off each time,  in his first year of college, he would head back to Yale. And though, over the years, his departure had become mundane, his father would always stand until the train was out of sight. The train rattled forward and left the station.

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 70

                                           (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


             It was nearly ten in the morning when Gogol woke up again, unobstructed sun light brightening the room. A dull, steady ache persisted on the right side of his head, emanating from deep inside his skull. He opened the sliding glass door to the balcony and stood outside. His eyes burned from fatigue. He saw a few people out there, walking their dogs, couples exercising side by side. He put on his coat, went outside and attempted to walk around the man-made pond there, which, he was told , his father was doing in his leisure time as an exercise. He found the chill brutal, and so returned to the apartment. He took a shower, changing into the same clothes he'd worn the day before. He called himself a cab, went to the airport, boarded a flight to Boston. He was terrified to see his mother and sister, along with a few friends of the family,waiting for him, more than he had been to see his father's body  in the morgue.


         For the first week they were never alone. No longer a family of four, they became a household of more than ten people, friends coming by to sit with them quietly in the living room, their heads bent, drinking cups of tea, a cluster of people attempting to make up for his father's loss. His mother had shampooed the vermilion from her part. She had taken off her iron wedding bracelet, along with all other bracelets she'd always worn. Cards and flowers came continually to the house, from his father's  colleagues at the university,from the women who work with his mother at the library, from neighbors who normally do little but wave from their lawns. People called from west coast, from Texas, from Michigan and DC. The phone rang constantly, and their throats turning weak from explaining again and again, that he was not ill, it was completely unexpected. A short obituary ran in the town paper, citing the names of Ashima and Gogol and Sonia, mentioning that the children had been educated at the local schools. In the middle of the night they called their relatives in India, to whom it was the first time they had had to bear such news from the family.
          For ten days following his father's death, he and his mother and Sonia ate mourner's diet, foregoing meat and fish. They ate only rice and dal and vegetables, plainly prepared. When his grand parents died in India, Gogol remembered, his father sitting unshaven on a chair, staring through them, speaking to no one.Now, sitting together at the kitchen table, his father's chair empty, eating meatless meals was the only thing that seemed to make sense. It was only for its duration, their grief slightly abated, the enforced absence of certain foods on their plates conjuring his father's presence somehow.
          On the eleventh day they invited their friends to make the end of the mourning period. There was a religious ceremony conducted on floor in one corner of the living room ; Gogol was asked to sit in front of a picture of his father, as a priest chanted verses in Sanskrit. Before the ceremony they had spent the whole day looking for a picture to frame, going through albums. But there were almost no pictures of him alone, his father was forever behind the lens. They decided to crop one, of him and Ashima standing together years ago. They prepared an elaborate meal,  fish and meat, cooked as his father liked them most, with extra potatoes and fresh coriander leaves. The friends his parents had collected for almost thirty years were in attendance, to pay their respects, cars from six different states lining the whole Pemberton Road.
           Maxine drove up from New York, bringing Gogol the clothes he normally kept at her house, his laptop, his mail. His bosses had given him a month off from work. It was a bit of shock to see Maxine, to introduce her to Sonia. This time he didn't care how the house, how the pile of guests' shoes heaped by the doorway, might appear to her eyes. He could tell that she felt useless, a bit excluded in this house full of Bengalis.  And yet he didn't bother to translate what people were saying, to introduce her to everyone, to stay close by her side. "I'm so sorry," he heard say to his mother, aware that his father's death didn't affect Maxine in the least. "You guys can't stay with your mother forever," Maxine said when they were alone for a moment after the ceremony, upstairs in his room, sitting side by side on the edge of the bed. "You know that" she said gently, put her hand to his cheek. He stared at her, took her hand and put it back in her lap. 
         "I miss you, Nikhil"
          He nodded.
         "What about New Year's Eve ?" she said.
         "What about it ?"
         "Do you still want to try to go up to New Hampshire ?"  For they had talked of this, going away together, just the two of them, Maxine picking him up after Christmas, staying at the lake house. Maxine was  going to teach him how to ski. 
          "I don't think so. " 
           "It might do you good," she said. She glanced around the room. "To get away from all this."
           "I don't want to get away."
            

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 69

                                          (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)

            Gogol's father's car, described to him by his mother on the telephone last night, was still parked in the visitors' parking lot.There was no sign of his father in the car, no maps or scraps of paper, all he found in the glove compartment was the registration and owner's manual. He drove the car in silence through the cold, bleak afternoon, following the directions a nurse at the hospital had given him to the apartment where his father had lived.

          His father's apartment was part of a complex called Baron's Court. A man outside the first of the buildings nodded to him as he drove past, seeming to recognize the car, mistaken him for his father. All the apartments were so identical the only thing to distinguish each building was a number and a name. He parked in front of his father 's building, thinking of his father living there alone those past three months, he felt the first threat of tears, but he knew that his father didn't mind, that he was not offended by such things. He remained in the car long enough to see an elderly, sprightly couple, emerging with tennis rackets, the residents there, he remembered his telling him as retired or divorced.

            His father's apartment was on the second floor. He unlocked the door, and as he entered into, he saw  a pair of his father's sneakers, and a pair of flip-flops for wearing around the house. The  door opened onto a spacious living room, with a sliding glass door to the right, a kitchen on the left. Against the refrigerator was a picture of himself and his mother and Sonia. They were standing at Fatehpur Sikri for the photograph. He was a freshman in high school, thin and glum, Sonia just a girl, his mother was in a salwar kameeze. He opened the cupboards, found four plates, two mugs, four glasses, one knife and two forks, in one cupboard, and a box of tea bags, a pack of biscuits, a five-pound bag of sugar that had not been poured into bowl, a tin of evaporated milk, in another cupboard. 

           He walked through the rest of the apartment. "Don't bring anything back," his mother had told him on the phone, "It's not our way." He felt throwing out the food, were it his father in his place, he would have packed the spare rice and tea bags into his suitcase, he had abhorred waste of any kind.

          It took much longer time than he expected to empty the apartment, of filling the garbage bags and carrying up and down the stairs he'd to make, left him exhausted. By the time he was finished, it was already beginning to get dark. He'd a list of people to call before the business of day was over : Call rental office. Call university. Cancel utilities. When he finished, he drove through town to the dealer who leased the car to his father, and then he took a cab to Baron's Court. In the lobby he noticed a menu for pizza delivery. He ordered a pizza, called home as he waited for it to arrive. For an hour the line was busy ; by the time he got through, his mother and Sonia were both asleep, a friend of the family informed him. The house was filled with noise, and it was only then that he realized how quiet it was on his end. He considered going to the basement to get the tape player or the television. Instead he called Maxine, describing the details of his day, amazed to think she'd been with him at the beginning of it, that it was in her arms, in her bed, that he'd woken.

            "I should have come with you," she said. "I could still make it out there by morning."

            "I'm finished. There's nothing else to do. I'm taking the first flight back tomorrow."

           "You're not going to spend the night  there, are you, Nick ?" she asked him.

           "I've to. There're not any other flights tonight."

           "In that apartment, I mean."

           He felt defensive, after all his efforts, he felt protective of the three empty rooms."I don't know anyone here."

         "For God's sake, get out of there. Check yourself into a hotel."

         "Okay," he said. He thought of the last time he'd seen his father, three months ago, waving good-bye as he and Maxine pulled out of the doorway on their way to New Hampshire.

         "You were with me," he told her.

         "What ?"

         "The last time I saw my father. You were there."

          "I know. I'm so sorry, Nick. Just promise me you'll go to a hotel."

         "Yeah. I promise." He didn't want to inhabit an anonymous room. As long as he was there, he didn't want to leave his father's apartment empty. He lied on the couch in the dark, in his clothes, his body covered by his jacket, preferring that to stripped mattress in the bedroom. For hours he lied in the dark, falling in and out of sleep. He thought of his father just yesterday morning. What had he been doing when he'd begun to feel badly ? Was he making tea at the stove ? He imagined his father by the door, bending over to tie his shoe laces for the last time. Putting on his coat and scarf and driving to the hospital, the thought death absent from his mind. Eventually Gogol was aware of bluish light creeping into the room. He felt strangely vigilant, as if, were he to pay close enough attention, some sign of his father might manifest itself, putting a stop to the events of the day. He watched the sky whiten, listened as the perfect silence was replaced by the faintest hum of distant traffic, until suddenly he succumbed, for a few hours, to the deepest sleep possible, his mind blank and undisturbed, his limbs motionless, weighted down.

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 68

                                          (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


           Gogol took a cab from the airport to the hospital, shocked by how much colder it was in Ohio than in New York, by t  he thick layer of snow that caked the ground. The hospital was a compound of beige stone buildings situated on the crest of a softly sloping hill. He entered the same emergency room his father had entered the day before. After giving his name, he was told to wait in an empty room in the sixth floor. There were no magazines in the room, no television, only a collection of  wing chairs lined up against the walls. There was little commotion, no doctors or nurses scurrying down the halls. When the elevator doors opened, he saw a cart stacked with breakfast trays, he felt hungry all of a sudden as his last meal had been at the restaurant the night before, and he hadn't  taken the bagel that the stewardess had offered on the plane.
          The doors opened and a short, pleasant  looking, middle-aged man with a beard, stepped into the room. He wore a white knee-length coat over his clothing and carried a clipboard. "Hello," he said, smiling kindly at Gogol.
           "Are you - - were you my father's doctor ?"
           "No, I'm Mr. Davenport. I'll be taking you downstairs."
          Mr. Davenport escorted Gogol in an elevator reserved for patients and doctors, to the subbasement of the hospital. He stood with Gogol in the morgue as a sheet was pulled back to show his father's face. The face was yellow and waxy, a thickened oddly bloated image. The lips nearly colorless, were set in an expression of uncharacteristic haughtiness, Below the sheet, Gogol realized, his father was unclothed. The fact shamed him, caused him to turn briefly away. When he looked again he studied the face more closely, still thinking that perhaps it was a mistake, that a tap on his father's shoulder would wake him. The only thing that felt familiar was the mustache, the excess hair on his cheeks and chin shaved less than twenty-four hours ago.
          "His glasses are missing," Gogol said, looking up at Mr.Davenport.
          Mr. Davenport didn't reply. After a few minutes he said, "Mr. Ganguli, are you able to positively identify the body ? Is this your father ?"
           "Yes, that's him," Gogol heard himself saying. After a few moments he realized that a chair had been brought for him to sit in, that Mr. Davenport had stepped aside. Gogol sat down. He wondered if he should touch his father's face, laid a hand on his forehead as his father used to do to Gogol when he was unwell, to see if he had a fever. He was terrified to graze, with his index finger, his father's mustache, an eyebrow, a bit of the hair on his head, those parts of him, he knew, that were still quietly living.
           A resident arrived , explaining exactly how and when the heart attack happened, why there was nothing doctors could do. Gogol was given the clothes that his father had been wearing, an envelope containing wallet and his father's car keys. He told the hospital that no religious services were necessary. He was told that the body would be cremated at the funeral home that they suggested, the ashes would be ready in a few days and he could pick them up personally, or had them sent along with the death certificate directly to Pemberton Road. Before leaving he asked to see the exact emergency room is father was last alive. Gogol glimpsed the bed around which the curtains partly girded his father when life left him.

ABCDs ; The Cul ture-Conflict. 67

                                              (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


            "Is there anyone in the Cleveland area to identify and claim the body ?" Ashima was asked. Instead of answering, she hung up the phone as the women on phone was still speaking, pressing down the receiver as hard as she could into the cradle, keeping her hand there for a while, as if to smother the words she'd just heard. She stared at her empty tea cup, and then at the kettle on the stove, which she'd turned off in order to hear her husband's voice just hours ago. She began to shiver violently, the house instantly feeling twenty degrees colder. She pulled her sari tightly around her shoulders, like a shawl. She got up and walked systematically through the rooms of the house, turning on all lights and flooding over the garage, as if she and Ashoke were expecting company. She returned to the kitchen and stared at the pile of Christmas cards on the table, most of them ready to be dropped in the mailbox. She opened her address book, suddenly unable to remember her son's phone number, a thing she could normally dial in her sleep. There was no answer at his office or at his apartment and so she tried the number she'd written down for Maxine. It was listed, along with the other numbers, under G, both for Ganguli and for Gogol.
             
           Sonia flew back from San Francisco to be with Ashima. Gogol flew from LaGuardia to Cleveland alone. He left early the next morning, boarding the first flight he could get. The flight was more than half empty, men and few women in business suits, people used to such flights and to traveling at such hours, typing on laptops or reading news of the day. He was unaccustomed to the banality of domestic flights, the narrow cabin, the single bag he'd packed, small enough to stove overhead. Maxine had offered to go with him, but he'd told her no. He didn't want to be with someone who barely knew his father, who'd met him only once. She walked him to Ninth Avenue, stood with him at dawn, her hair uncombed, her face still thick with sleep, her coat and pair of boots slipped on over her pajamas. He withdrew cash from an ATM, hailed a cab. Most of the city, including Gerald and Lydia, were still asleep.
            He and Maxine had been at a book party for one Maxine's writer friends the night before. Afterward they'd gone out to dinner with a small group. At about ten O'clock they returned to her parents' house as usual, tired as if it were much later, pausing on their way upstairs to say good night to Gerald and Lydia, who were sitting under a blanket on the sofa, watching a French film on video, sipping glasses of after-dinner wine. The lights had been turned off, but from the glow of the television screen Gogol could see that Lydia was resting her head on Gerald's shoulder, that they both had their feet propped against the edge of the coffee table. "Oh. Nick. Your mother called," Gerald had said, glancing up from the screen. "Twice," Lydia added. He felt a sting of embarrassment. No, she hadn't left any message, they said. His mother called him more often these days, now that she was living on her own. Every day, she needed to hear the voice of her children. But she had never called him at Maxine's parents'. She called him at work, or left message at his  apartment that he would receive days later. He decided that  whatever it was could wait until morning. "Thanks, Gerald," he'd said, his arm around Maxine's waist, turning to leave the room. But then the phone had rung again, "Hello," Gerald had said, and then to Gogol, "It's your sister, this time."

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 66

                                             (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


             Every three weekends Ashima's husband came home. He used to come home by taxi - though she was willing to drive herself around their town, she was not willing to get on the high way and drive to Logan. When her husband was in the house, she shopped and cooked as she used to. He did the things she still didn't know how to do. He paid all the bills, and raked the leaves on the lawn, and put gas from self-service station into her car. His visits were too short to make a difference, and, within hours it seemed Sunday came, and she was on her own again. When they were apart, they spoke by phone every night, in her nightgown watching television they'd owned for decades that was on her side of the bed. When she found nothing interesting her on TV she leafed through books she took out of the library. 
           One day it was three in the afternoon, it was chilly and she hated the abbreviated days of early winter, darkness descending mere hours after noon. She was resigned to warming dinner for herself in a little while, changing into her nightgown, switching on the electric blanket on her bed, the phone rang, and her husband said hello while she heard noises in the background of the phone, people speaking. "Are you watching  television," she asked Ashok.
          "I'm in the hospital," he told her. 
          "What's happened ?" She turned off the whistling kettle, startled, her chest tightening, terrified that he'd been in some sort of accident.
          "My stomach's been bothering me since morning." He told Ashima it was probably something he'd eaten, that he'd been the previous evening to the home of some Bengali students he'd met in Cleveland who were still teaching themselves to cook, where he was subjected to a suspicious-looking chicken biryani.
          She exhaled audibly, relieved that it was nothing serious. "So take an Alka-Seltzer."
           "I did. It didn't help. I just came to the emergency room because all the doctors' offices are closed today."
            "You're working too hard.You're no longer a student, you know. I hope you're not getting an ulcer," she said.
           "No. I hope not."
          "Who drove you there ?"
           "No one. I'm here on my own. Really, it's not that bad."
            Nevertheless she felt a sympathy for him, at the thought of him driving to the hospital alone. She missed him suddenly, remembering afternoons years ago when they'd first moved to this town when he would surprise her and come home from the university in the middle of the day. They would indulge in a proper Bengali lunch instead of the sandwiches they'd gotten used to by then, boiling rice and warming the previous night's leftovers, filling their stomachs, sitting and talking at the table, sleepy and sated, as their palms turned yellow and dry.
          "What does the doctor say ?" she asked Ashoke now.
          "I'm waiting to see him. It's rather long wait. Do me one thing."
           "What ?"
          "Call Dr. Sandler tomorrow. I'm for a physical anyway. Make an appointment for me next Saturday, if he has an opening."
          "All right."
          "Don't worry. I'm feeling better already. I'll call you when I get home."
          "All right." She hung up the phone, prepared her tea, returned to the table. She wrote "call Dr. Sandler" on one of the red envelopes. She took a sip of tea and wondered if she ought  to call Gogol and Sonia. She decided to send a card each to Ashoke, Gogol, and Sonia. Though she'd been polite enough the one time Gogol had brought Maxine to the house, Ashima didn't want for a daughter-in-law. She had been startled that Maxine had addressed her as Ashima, and her husband as Ashoke. And yet Gogol had been dating her for over a year now. By now Ashima knew that Gogol was spending  his nights with Maxine, sleeping under the same roof as her parents, a thing Ashima refused to admit to her Bengali friends. She even had his number there ; she'd called it once, listening to the voice of the woman who must be Maxine's mother, not leaving any message. She knew the relationship was something she must be willing to accept. Sonia had told her this, and  so had her American friends at the library. Sonia, who was working for an environmental agency and studying for her LSAT, had said it was not too far to travel home.
           From time to time, Ashima was looking out the window, a lilac sky of early evening, and looking up at the phone on the wall, wishing it would ring. She would buy her husband a cell  phone for Christmas, she decided. She was not bothered to rest, or to get up and turn on the lamp over the table, or the lights on the lawn or any of the other rooms, until the telephone rang. emarketeranswered after half a ring, but it was only a telemarketer, asking reluctantly if a Mrs., um ---
         "Ganguli," Ashima replied tartly before hanging up.
         At twilight the sky turned a pale but intense blue, and turned dark.
         At five O'clock her husband still had not called. She called his apartment and got no answer. She called ten minutes later, then ten minutes after that. Each time she called she listened to the tone, but she didn't leave a message. She considered the places he might have stopped on his way home ; the pharmacy to pick up a prescription or the supermarket for food. By six O'clock she called directory assistance, asking for an operator in Cleveland, then called the number of the hospital he told her he'd gone to. She asked for the emergency room, was connected to one part of the hospital after another. "He's just there for an examination," she told the people who answered and told her to hold. She spelled the last name, "G like green," "N like napkin." She held the line until she was tempted to hang up, wondering all the while if her husband was trying to reach her from home , regretting not having call waiting. She disconnected, called again. "Ganguli," she said. Again she was told to hold. Then a person came on the line, a young woman's voice, no older than Sonia probably. "Yes. I do apologize for the wait. To whom am I speaking ?"
          "Ashima Ganguli," Ashima said. "Ashoke Ganguli's wife. To whom am I speaking, please ?"
          "I see. I'm sorry, ma'am. I'm the intern who first examined your husband."
           "I've been holding on for nearly half an hour. Is my husband still there or has he gone ?"
           "I'm very sorry ma'am," the young woman repeated. "We've been trying to reach you."
            And then the young woman told her that the patient, Ashoke Ganguli, has expired.
           Expired. A word used for library cards, for magazine subscriptions. A word which, for several seconds, had no effect whatsoever on Ashima.
           "No, no, it must be a mistake," Ashima said calmly, shaking her head, a small laugh escaping from her throat. "My husband is not there for  emergency. Only for a stomachache."
          "I'm sorry, Mrs.......Ganguli, is it ?"
           She listened to something about a heart attack, that it had been massive, that all attempts  to revive him had failed.

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 65

                                         (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


           Ashima sat at the kitchen table on Pemberton Road, a cup of Lipton tea growing cold by her hand, addressing Christmas cards. She prided herself on each entry of all the Bengalis she and Ashoke had known over the years. She had made her own Christmas cards this year, an idea she picked up from a book in the crafts section of the library. This year's card was a drawing she had done herself, of an elephant decked with red and green jewels, glued on to silver paper. The elephant was the replica of a drawing her father had done for Gogol over twenty-seven years ago. The ability of her to reproduce the elephant had surprised her. She had not drawn a thing since she was a child, had assumed she'd long forgotten what her father had once taught her, and what her son had inherited, about holding the pen with confidence and making bold , swift strokes. She spent a whole day redoing the drawing on different sheets of paper, coloring it  in, trimming it to size, taking it to the university copy center. For an entire evening she had driven herself to different stationery stores in the town, looking for red envelopes that the cards would fit into.
            She had time to do things like this now that she was alone. Now that there was no one to feed or entertain or talk to for weeks at a time. At forty-eight she had come to experience the solitude that her husband and son and daughter already knew, and which they claim not to mind. "It's not such a big deal," her children tell her. "Everyone should live on their own at some point." But Ashima felt  too old to learn such a skill. She hated returning in the evening to a dark, empty house, going to sleep on one side of the bed and waking up on another. At first she was wildly industrious, cleaning out closets and scrubbing the insides of kitchen cupboards and scraping the shelves of the refrigerator, rinsing out the vegetable bins. In spite of the security system she would sit up startled in the middle of the night by a sound somewhere in the house, or the rapid taps that traveled through the baseboards when heat flowed through the pipes. For nights on end, she would double-check all the window locks, making  sure that they were fastened tightly. 
          Now she did the laundry once a month. She no longer dusted, or noticed dust, for that matter. She ate on the sofa, in front of the television, simple meals of buttered toast and dal, a single pot lasting her a week and an omelette to go with it if she had energy to bother. Sometimes she ate the way Gogol and Sonia did when they visited, standing in front of the refrigerator, not bothering to heat up the food in the oven or to put it on a plate.
          Her hair is thinning and graying, still parted in the middle, worn in a bun instead of a braid. She'd been fitted for bifocals, hung on a chain around her neck. Three afternoons a week and two Saturdays a month, she worked at the public library, just as Sonia had done when she was high school. It was Ashima's first job in America, the first since before she was married. She signed her small pay checks over to Ashoke, and he deposited them for her at the bank into their  account. Her responsibilities in the library were, shelving the books that people returned, making sure that sections of shelves were in precise alphabetical order, sometimes running a feather duster along the spines. She mended old books, put protective covers on new arrivals, organized monthly displays on subjects, such as gardening, presidential biographies, poetry, African-American history. Lately she'd begun to work at the main desk, greeting the regular patrons by name as they walk  through the doors, filling out forms for inter-library loans. She was friendly with the other women who work at the  library, most of them also with grown children. A number of them live alone, as Ashima did now, because they were divorced. Over tea in the staff room, they gossip, about the patrons, about the perils of dating in middle age. On occasions she had her library friends over to the house for lunch, went shopping with them on weekends to outlet stores in Maine.