(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
Ashima sat at the kitchen table on Pemberton Road, a cup of Lipton tea growing cold by her hand, addressing Christmas cards. She prided herself on each entry of all the Bengalis she and Ashoke had known over the years. She had made her own Christmas cards this year, an idea she picked up from a book in the crafts section of the library. This year's card was a drawing she had done herself, of an elephant decked with red and green jewels, glued on to silver paper. The elephant was the replica of a drawing her father had done for Gogol over twenty-seven years ago. The ability of her to reproduce the elephant had surprised her. She had not drawn a thing since she was a child, had assumed she'd long forgotten what her father had once taught her, and what her son had inherited, about holding the pen with confidence and making bold , swift strokes. She spent a whole day redoing the drawing on different sheets of paper, coloring it in, trimming it to size, taking it to the university copy center. For an entire evening she had driven herself to different stationery stores in the town, looking for red envelopes that the cards would fit into.
She had time to do things like this now that she was alone. Now that there was no one to feed or entertain or talk to for weeks at a time. At forty-eight she had come to experience the solitude that her husband and son and daughter already knew, and which they claim not to mind. "It's not such a big deal," her children tell her. "Everyone should live on their own at some point." But Ashima felt too old to learn such a skill. She hated returning in the evening to a dark, empty house, going to sleep on one side of the bed and waking up on another. At first she was wildly industrious, cleaning out closets and scrubbing the insides of kitchen cupboards and scraping the shelves of the refrigerator, rinsing out the vegetable bins. In spite of the security system she would sit up startled in the middle of the night by a sound somewhere in the house, or the rapid taps that traveled through the baseboards when heat flowed through the pipes. For nights on end, she would double-check all the window locks, making sure that they were fastened tightly.
Now she did the laundry once a month. She no longer dusted, or noticed dust, for that matter. She ate on the sofa, in front of the television, simple meals of buttered toast and dal, a single pot lasting her a week and an omelette to go with it if she had energy to bother. Sometimes she ate the way Gogol and Sonia did when they visited, standing in front of the refrigerator, not bothering to heat up the food in the oven or to put it on a plate.
Her hair is thinning and graying, still parted in the middle, worn in a bun instead of a braid. She'd been fitted for bifocals, hung on a chain around her neck. Three afternoons a week and two Saturdays a month, she worked at the public library, just as Sonia had done when she was high school. It was Ashima's first job in America, the first since before she was married. She signed her small pay checks over to Ashoke, and he deposited them for her at the bank into their account. Her responsibilities in the library were, shelving the books that people returned, making sure that sections of shelves were in precise alphabetical order, sometimes running a feather duster along the spines. She mended old books, put protective covers on new arrivals, organized monthly displays on subjects, such as gardening, presidential biographies, poetry, African-American history. Lately she'd begun to work at the main desk, greeting the regular patrons by name as they walk through the doors, filling out forms for inter-library loans. She was friendly with the other women who work at the library, most of them also with grown children. A number of them live alone, as Ashima did now, because they were divorced. Over tea in the staff room, they gossip, about the patrons, about the perils of dating in middle age. On occasions she had her library friends over to the house for lunch, went shopping with them on weekends to outlet stores in Maine.
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