(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
Maxine was surprised to hear certain things about Gogol's life : that all his parents' friends were Bengali, that they had had an arranged marriage, that his mother cooked,Indian food every day, that she wore saris and a bindi. "Really ?" she said, not fully believing him. "But you are so different. I would never have thought that." He didn't feel insulted, but he was aware that a line had been drawn all the same. To him the terms of his parents' marriage were something at once unthinkable and unremarkable ; nearly all their friends and relatives had been married in the same way. But their lives bear no resemblance to that of Gerald and Lydia : expensive pieces of jewelry presented on Lydia's birthday, flowers brought home for no reason at all, the two of them kissing openly, going for walks through the city, or to dinner, just as Gogol and Maxine did. Seeing the two of them curled up on the sofa in the evenings, Gerald's head resting on Lydia's shoulder, Gogol was reminded that in all his life he had never witnessed a single moment of physical affection between his parents. Whatever love existed between them was an utterly private, uncelebrated thing. "That's so depressing," Maxine said when he confessed this fact to her, and though it upset him to hear her reaction, he couldn't help but agree. One day Maxine asked him if his parents wanted him to marry an Indian girl. She posed the question out of curiosity, without hoping for a particular response. He felt angry at his parents then, wishing they could be otherwise, knowing in his heart what the answer was. "I don't know," he told her. "I guess so. It doesn't matter what they want."
She visited him infrequently, she and Gogol were never close to his neighborhood for any reason, and even the absolute privacy they would have had there was of no appeal. Still, some nights when her parents had a dinner party she had no interest in, or simply to be fair, she appeared, quickly filling up the small space with her gardenia perfume, her coat, her big brown leather bag, her discarded clothes, and they made love on his futon as the traffic rumbled below. He was nervous to have her in his place, aware that he had put nothing up on his walls, that he had not bothered to buy lamps to replace the dismal glow of the ceiling light. "Oh, Nikhil, it's too awful," she eventually said on one of these occasions, barely three months after they'd met. "I won't let you live here." When his mother had said more or less the same thing, the first time his parents had visited the apartment, he'd argued with her, hotly defending the merits of his spartan,, solitary existence. But when Maxine said it, adding "you should stay with me," he was quietly thrilled. By then he knew enough about her to know that she was not one to offer things if she didn't mean them. Still, he demurred, what would her parents think ? She shrugged. "My parent love you," she said matter-of-factly, definitively, just as she said everything else. And so he moved in with her in a way, bringing a few bags of his clothes, nothing else. His futon and his table, his kettle and toaster and television and the rest of his things, remained on Amsterdam Avenue. His answering machine continued to record his messages. He continued to receive the mail there, in a nameless metal box.
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