(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
With work as an excuse Gogol didn't go home to Massachusetts all summer. The firm was entering a competition, submitting designs for a new five-star hotel to be built in Miami. At eleven at night, he was still there, along with most of the other designers on his team, all rushing to finish drawings and models by the month's end. When his phone rang, he hoped it was Maxine, calling to coax him into leaving the office. Instead it was his mother.
"Why are you calling me here so late ?" he asked her, distracted, his eyes still focused on the computer screen.
"Because you are not at your apartment," she said. "You're never at your apartment,Gogol. In the middle of the night I've called and you're not there."
"I am , Ma," he lied. "I need my sleep. I shut off the phone."
"I can't imagine why anyone would want to have a phone only to shut it off," his mother said.
"So, is there a reason you're calling me ?"
She asked him to visit the following weekend, the Saturday before his birthday.
"I can't," he said. He told her he had a deadline at work, but it wasn't true ; that was the day he and Maxine were leaving for New Hampshire, for two weeks. But his mother insisted, his father was leaving for Ohio the following day- didn't Gogol want to go with them to the airport to see him off ?
He knew vaguely of his father's plans to spend nine months at a small university somewhere outside Cleveland, that he and a colleague had received a grant funded by the colleague's university, to direct research for a corporation there.His father had sent him a clipping about the grant printed in the campus newspaper, with a photograph of his father standing outside the engineering building : "Prestigious grant for Professor Ganguli," the caption read. At first it was assumed that his parents would shut up the house, or rent it out to students, and that his mother would go too. But then his mother had surprised them, pointing out that there would be nothing for her to do in Ohio for nine months, that his father would be busy all day at the lab, and that she preferred to stay in Massachusetts, even if it meant staying in the house alone.
"Why do I have to see him off ?" Gogol asked his mother now. He knew that for his parents, the act of travel was never regarded casually, that even the most ordinary of journeys was seen off and greeted at either end. And yet he continued, "Baba and I already live in different states. I'm practically as far from Ohio as I'm from Boston."
"That's no way to think," his mother said. "Please, Gogol you haven't been home since May."
"I have a job, Ma. I'm busy. Besides, Sonia is not coming."
"Sonia lives in California. You're so close."
"Listen, I can't come home that weekend," he said. The truth seeped out of him slowly. He knew it was his only defense at this point. "I'm going on a vacation. I've already made plans."
"Why do you wait to tell us these things at the last minute ?" his mother asked. "What sort of vacation ? What plans?"
"I'm going to spend a couple of weeks in New Hampshire."
"Oh," his mother was surprised. "Why do you want to go there, of all places ? What's the difference between New Hampshire and here ?"
"I'm going with a girl I'm seeing," he told her. "Her parents have a place there."
Though she said nothing for a while, he knew what his mother was thinking, that he was willing to go on vacation with someone else's parents but not see his own.
"Where is this place exactly ?"
"I don't know. Somewhere in the mountains."
"What's her name ?"
"Max."
"That's a boy's name."
He shook his head. "No, Ma. It's Maxine."
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