(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
Gogol had not expected to enjoy himself, to be attracted to Moushumi in the least. It struck him that there was no term for what they once were to each other. Their parents were friends, not they. She was a family acquaintance but she was not family. Their contact until tonight had been artificial , imposed, something like his relationship to his cousins in India but lacking even the justification of blood ties. Until they had met tonight, he'd never seen her outside the context of her family, or she his. He decided that it was her very familiarity that made him curious about her, he wondered when he might see her again. When he began to walk to the subway and reached Broadway, he changed his mind and hailed a cab. The decision felt indulgent, as it was not particularly late, or cold, or raining, and he was in no great rush to be home. But he had the urge to be alone all of a sudden, to be thoroughly passive, to revisit the evening in solitude. The driver of the cab was a Bangladeshi ; the name on the registration card pasted to the plexiglass behind the front seat said Mustafa Sayeed. He was talking in Bengali on his cell phone, complaining of traffic on the FDR, of difficult passengers, as they sail uptown, past the shuttered shops and restaurants on Eighth Avenue. Gogol sat silently,as if he were any other passenger, lost in his own thoughts, thinking of Moushumi. But as they neared his apartment, he said to the driver, in Bengali, "It's that one upon the right."
The driver turned around, surprised, smiling. "I didn't realize," he said.
"That's okay," Gogol said, reaching for his wallet. He tipped the driver excessively and stepped out of the car.
In the days that followed, he began to remember things about Moushumi, the images that came to him without warning while he was sitting at his desk at work, or during a meeting, or drifting off to sleep, or standing in the mornings under the shower. They were scenes he'd carried with him, buried but intact, scenes he'd never thought about or had reasons to conjure up until now. He was grateful that his mind had retained these images of her, pleased with himself, as if he'd just discovered an innate talent for a sport or a game he'd never played. He remembered her family at the pujos he'd attended every year, twice a year, with his family, where she would be dressed in a sari carefully pinned to the top her shoulder, but she would always take it off after an hour or two and put on her jeans. He didn't remember Moushumi ever accompanying other teenagers to the McDonald's that was across the street, or eventually sitting in someone's car in the parking lot, listening to the radio and drinking beer from a can. He struggled but failed to recall her presence at Pemberton Road ; still, he was secretly pleased that she'd seen those rooms, tasted his mother's cooking, washed her hands in the bathroom, however long ago.
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