(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
Gogol graduated from the architecture program at Columbia in May 1994 and started living in New York working for a firm in midtown, with celebrated large-scale commissions to its name. It was not the sort of job he'd envisioned for himself as a student ; designing and renovating private residences was what he wanted to do. That might come later, his advisers had told him ; f or now, it was important to apprentice with the big names. And so, facing the tawny brick wall of a neighboring building across the air shaft, he worked with a team on designs for hotels and museums and corporate headquarters in cities ha'd never seen : Brussels, Buenos Aires, Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong. His contributions were incidental, and never fully his own : a stairwell, a skylight, a corridor, an air- conditioning duct. Still, he knew that each component of a building, however small, is nevertheless essential, and he found it gratifying that after all his years of schooling, all his crits and unbuilt projects, his efforts were to have some practical end. He typically worked late into his evenings, and on most of weekends, drawing designs on the computer, drafting plans, writing specifications, building Styrofoam and cardboard models to scale. He went home to a studio in Morningside Heights, with two windows facing west, on Amsterdam Avenue. It was the first apartment he had to himself, after an evolving chain of roommates all through college and graduate school. There was so much street noise that when he was on the phone and windows were open, people often asked if he was calling from a pay phone. The kitchen was built into what should have been an entryway, a space so small that the refrigerator stood several feet away, over by the bathroom door.
His parents were distressed by how little money he made, and occasionally his father sent him checks in the mail to help him with his rent, his credit card bills. They had been disappointed that he had been to Columbia. They 'd hoped he would choose MIT, the other architecture program to which he'd been accepted. But after four years in New Haven he didn't want to move back to Massachusetts, to the one city in America his parents knew. He didn't want to attend his father's alma mater, and live in the apartment in Central Square as his parents once had, and revisit the streets about which his parents spoke nostalgically. He didn't want to go home on the weekends, to go with them to pujos and Bengali parties, to remain unquestionably in their world.
He preferred, New York, a place his parents didn't know well. whose beauty they were blind to, which they feared. He had come t o know this city slightly during his years at Yale, on visits with architecture classes. He had been to a few parties at Columbia. Sometimes he and Ruth rode in on Metro-North, and they went to museums, or to the village, or to browse for books at the Strand.
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