(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
In spite of the fact that there was nothing in particular to do, Gogol found a pattern of spending his time there. There he found a certain stringency to life, a willful doing without a purpose. In the morning they woke up early to the frenzied chirping of the birds, breakfast was eaten by seven, on the screened-in porch overlooking the lake where they had all their meals, homemade preserves slathered on thick slices of bread. their news of the world came from the local paper Gerald brought back each day from the general store. In the late afternoons, they showered and dressed for dinner. They used to sit with their drinks on the lawn, eating pieces of the cheese Gogol and Maxine brought from New York, and watch the sun set behind the mountains, bats darting between the pines that soar as tall as ten-story buildings. Dinners were simple : boiled corn from a farm stand, cold chicken, pasta with pesto, tomatoes from the garden sliced and salted on a plate. Lydia baked pies and cobblers with berries picked by hand. Occasionally she disappeared for the day, to go antiquing in the surrounding towns. There was no television to watch in the evenings, just an old stereo on which they sometimes played a symphony or jazz. On the first rainy day Gerald and Lydia taught him to play cribbage. They were often in bed by nine. The phone, in the main house, seldom rings.
Gogol grew to appreciate being utterly disconnected from the world. He grew used to the quiet, to the scent of sun-warmed wood. The only sounds were the occasional motorboat cutting across the water, screen doors snapping shut. He presented Gerald and Lydia with a sketch of the main house done one afternoon down at the beach, the first thing he'd drawn in years that hadn't been for work. They set it atop the crowded mantel of the stone fireplace, next to piles of books and photographs, promised to have it framed. Nothing was locked, not the main house, or the cabin that he and Maxine slept in. Anyone could walk in. He thought of the alarm system now installed in his parents' house, wondered why they couldn't relax about their physical surroundings in the same way. Ratliffs owned the moon that floats over the lake, and the sun and the clouds. It was a place that had been good to them, as much a part of them as a member of the family. The idea of returning to a single place year after year appealed to Gogol deeply. Yet he couldn't picture his family occupying a house like this, playing board games on rainy afternoons, watching shooting stars at night, all their relatives gathered neatly on a small strip of sand. It was an impulse his parents had never felt, this needed to be so far from things. They would have felt lonely in this setting, remarking that they were the only Indians. They wouldn't go to hiking, as he and Maxine and Gerald and Lydia did almost every day, up the rocky mountain trails, to watch the sun set over the valley. They wouldn't care to cook with the fresh basil that grew rampant in Gerald's garden or to spend a whole day boiling blue berries for jam. His mother wouldn't put on a bathing suit or swim He felt no nostalgia for the vacations he'd spent with his family, and he realized now that they were never really true vacations at all. Instead they overwhelming, disorienting expeditions, either going to Calcutta, or sight seeing in places they didn't belong to and intended never to see again. Some summers there had been road trips with one or two Bengali families, in rented vans, going to Toronto or Atlanta or Chicago, places where they had other Bengali friends. The fathers would be huddled at the front, taking turns at the wheel, consulting maps highlighted by AAA. All the children would sit in the back with plastic tubs of aloo dum and cold flattened luchis wrapped in foil, fried the day before, which they would stop in state parks to eat on picnic tables. They'd stayed in motels, slept whole families to a single room, swum in pools that could be seen from the road.
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