(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
In the weeks that followed, as their neighbors' hedges and windows were decorated with strings of colored lights, as the piles of Christmas cards arrived at the house, each of them assumed a task his father normally had done. In the mornings Sonia drove into town and did the grocery shopping. Gogol paid the bills, shoveled the driveway when it snowed. Instead of arranging the Christmas cards on the fireplace mantel, Ashima glanced at the senders' addresses and then, without opening the envelopes, she threw them away. She spent hours on the phone and had all the names changed on the bank account, the mortgage, the bills.
Gogol felt gloomy in the afternoons, and he went running or drove to the university, parking behind his father's department, observing the picturesque universe that his father spent in for most of the past twenty-five years. Eventually, on weekends, they began to visit the homes of their parents' friends who lived in surrounding suburbs. Gogol drove one way, Sonia the other. Ashima sat in the back seat. At the homes of their friends, his mother told the story of calling the hospital. "He went in for a stomachache," she said each time, reciting the details of the afternoon at her side on that fateful day, reciting in a way that Gogol couldn't bear to have it repeated, a way he quickly came to dread. Friends suggested her to go to India, saw her brother and cousins for a while. But for the first time in her life, she had no desire to escape to Calcutta, not now. "Now I know why he went to Cleveland," she told people, refusing, even in death, to utter her husband's name. "He was teaching me how to live alone."
Early in January, after the holidays, Gogol boarded a train and went back to New York. Sonia was staying on with Ashima, thinking of getting an apartment in Boston or Cambridge so that she would be nearby. They came to the station to see him off. After boarding the train he waved at his mother and Sonia, his diminished family, through the tinted glass, hardly visible to them. He remembered his family all coming to see him off each time, in his first year of college, he would head back to Yale. And though, over the years, his departure had become mundane, his father would always stand until the train was out of sight. The train rattled forward and left the station.
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