(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
"Nikhil's father is upstairs," his mother said to Maxine, lifting out a samosa with a slotted spatula and putting it on a paper-towel-lined plate. "With the man from the alarm company. Sorry, lunch will be ready in a minute," she added. "I was not expecting you to arrive for another half an hour."
"Why on earth are we getting a security system ?" Gogol wanted to know.
"It was your father's idea," his mother said, "now that I will be on my own." She said that there had been two burglaries recently in the neighborhood, both of them in the middle of the afternoon. "Even in good areas like this, these days there are crimes," she said to Maxine, shaking her head.
His mother offered them glasses of frothy pink lassi, thick and sweet-tasting, flavored with rose water. They sat in the formal living room, where they normally never sat. Maxine saw school pictures of Sonia and him in front of blue-gray background arranged on the mantel of the brick fireplace, the family portraits from Olan Mills. She looked at his childhood photo albums with his mother. She admired the material of his mother's sari, mentioning that her mother curates textiles at the Met.
"The Met ?"
"Metropolitan Museum of art," Maxine explained.
"You've been there, Ma," Gogol said. "It's the big Museum on Fifth Avenue. With all the steps. I took you there to see the Egyptian temple, remember ?"
"Yes, I remember. My father was an artist," she told Maxine, pointing to one of his grandfather's watercolors on the wall.
They heard footsteps coming down the stairs, and then his father entered the living room, along with a uniformed man holding a clipboard. Unlike his mother, his father was not dressed up at all. He wore a pair of thin brown cotton pants, an untucked, slightly wrinkled short-sleeved shirt and flip-flops. His gray hair looked more sparse than the last time Gogol remembered, his potbelly more pronounced. "Here's your copy of the receipt. Any problem, you just call eight hundred number," the uniformed man said. He and his father shook hands. "Have a nice day," the man called out before leaving.
"Hi, Baba," Gogol said. "I'd like you to meet Maxine."
"Hello," his father said, putting up a hand, looking as if he was about to take an oath. He didn't sit down with them. Instead he asked Maxine, "That is your car outside ?"
"It's a rental," she said.
"Better to put in the driveway," his father told her.
"It doesn't matter," Gogol said. "It's fine where it is."
"But better to be careful," his father persisted. "The neighborhood children, they are not very careful. One time my car was on the road and a baseball went through the window. I can park it for you if you like."
"I'll do it," Gogol said, getting up, irritated by his parents' perpetual fear of disaster. When he returned to the house, the lunch was set out, too rich for the weather. Along with the samosas, there were breaded chicken cutlets, chickpeas with tamarind sauce, lamb biryani, chutney made with tomatoes from the garden. It was a meal he knew it had taken his mother over a day to prepare, and yet the amount of effort embarrassed him. The water glasses were already filled, plates and forks and paper napkins set on the dining room table they use only for special occasions, with uncomfortable high-backed chairs and seats upholstered in gold velvet.
"Go ahead and start," his mother said, still hovering between the dining room and kitchen, finishing up the last of the samosas.
His parents were diffident around Maxine, at first keeping their distance,not boisterous as they typically were around their Bengali friends. They asked where she went to college, what it was her parents do. But Maxine was immune to their awkwardness, drawing them out, devoting her attention to them fully, and Gogol was reminded of the first time he'd met her, when she'd seduced him in the same way. She asked his father about his research project in Cleveland, his mother about her part-time job at the local public library, which she had recently begun. Gogol was only partly attentive to the conversation. He was overly aware that they were not used to passing things around the table, or to chewing food with their mouths fully closed. They averted their eyes when Maxine accidentally leaned over to run her hand through his hair. To his relief she ate generously, asking his mother how she made this and that, telling her it was the best Indian food she had ever tasted, accepting his mother's offer to pack them some extra cutlets and samosas for the road.
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