(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
Thanksgiving of his senior year Gogol took the train, alone, up to Boston. He and Ruth were no longer together. Instead of coming back from Oxford after those twelve weeks, she'd stayed on to do a summer course, explaining that a professor she admired would be retiring after that. Gogol had spent the summer on Pemberton Road. He had had an unpaid internship at a small architecture firm in Cambridge, where he had run errands at Charrette for the designers, been sent to photographs nearby sites, lettered a few drawings. To make money he worked nights washing dishes at an Italian restaurant in his parents' town. Late in August he'd gone to Logan to welcome Ruth home. He had waited for her at the arrival gate, taken her to a hotel for one night, paying for it with the money he'd made at the restaurant. The room overlooked the Public Garden, its walls covered with thickly striped pink-and-cream paper. They'd made love for the fist time in a double bed. They'd gone out for their meals, neither of them able to afford the items on the room service menu. They walked up Newbury Street and went to a Greek restaurant with tables on the sidewalk. Gogol found Ruth looked different with her speech peppered with words and phrases she'd picked up in England, like "I imagine" and "I suppose" and "presumably." She spoke of her semester and how much she'd liked England, the travelling she'd done in Barcelona and Rome. She wanted to go back to England for graduate school, she said. "I imagine they've got good architecture schools," she'd added. "You could come as well." The next morning he'd put her on the bus to Maine. But within days of being together again in New Haven, in an apartment he'd rented on Howe Street with friends, they'd begun fighting, both admitting in the end that something had changed.
They avoided each other now, when they happened to cross paths in the library and on the streets. He'd scratched out her phone number and the addresses he'd written down for her at Oxford and in Maine. But boarding the train it was impossible not to think of the afternoon, two years ago, they'd met. As usual the train was incredibly crowded, and this time he sat for the half journey in the vestibule. After Westerly he found a seat, and settled down with the course selection guide for next semester. But he felt distracted for some reason, gloomy, impatient to be off the train ; he didn't bother to remove his coat, didn't bother to go to cafe car for something to drink even though he was thirsty. He put away the course guide and opened up a library book that might be helpful for his senior thesis project, a comparison between Renaissance Italian and Mughal palace design. But after a few paragraphs he closed this book as well. His stomach growled and he wondered what there would be for dinner at home, what his father had prepared. His mother and Sonia had gone to India for three weeks to attend a cousin's wedding, and this year Gogol and his father would spend Thanksgiving at the home of friends.
He angled his head against the window and watched the autumnal landscape pass :the spewing pink and purple waters of a dye mill, electrical power stations, a big ball-shaped water tank covered with rust. Abandoned factories, with rows of small square windows partly bashed in, ravaged as if by moths. On the trees topmost branches were bare, the remaining leaves yellow and paper-thin. The train moved more slowly than usual, and when he looked at his watch he saw that they were running well behind schedule. And then, somewhere outside Providence, in an abandoned, grassy field, the train stopped. For over an hour they stood there as a solid, scarlet disk of sun sunk into tree-line horizon. The lights turned off, and the air inside the train turned uncomfortably warm. The conductors rushed anxiously through the compartments. "Probably a broken wire," the gentleman sitting beside Gogol remarked. Across the aisle a gray-haired woman was reading, a coat clutched like a blanket to her chest. Behind him two students were discussing the poems of Ben Jonson. It was not until they started moving again that an announcement was made on the loudspeaker about a medical emergency. But the truth, overheard by one of the passengers from a conductor, quickly circulated : a suicide had been committed, a person had jumped in front of the train.
He was shocked and discomfited by the news, feeling bad about his irritation and impatience, wondering if the victim had been a man or a woman, young or old. He imagined the person consulting the same schedule that's in his backpack, determining exactly when the train would be passing through. As a result of the delay he missed his commuter rail connection in Boston, waited forty minutes for the next train. He put a call to his parents' house, but no one answered. He tried his father's department at the university, but there too the phone rang and rang. At the station he saw his father waiting on the darkened platform, wearing sneakers and corduroys, anxious in his face.
"Sorry, I'm late," Gogol said. "how long have you been waiting ?"
"Since quarter to six," his father said. Gogol looked at his watch. It was nearly eight.
"There was an accident."
"I know. I called. What happened ? Were you hurt ?"
Gogol shook his head. "Someone jumped onto the tracks. Somewhere in Rhode Island. I tried to call you. They had to wait for the police, I think."
"I was worried."
"I hope you haven't been standing out in the cold all this time," Gogol said, and from his father's lack of response he knew that this was exactly what he had done. Gogol wondered what was like for his father to be without his mother and Sonia. He wondered if he was lonely. But his father was not the type to admit such things, to speak openly of his desires, his moods, his needs. They walked to the parking lot, got into the car, and began the short drive home. They were silent in the car, Ashoke concentrating on the driving, Gogol fidgeting with the radio.
"I want to tell you something," his father said when they'd already turned onto Pemberton Road.
"What ?" Gogol asked.
"It's about your name."
Gogol looked at his father, puzzled. "My name ?"
His father shut off the radio, "Gogol."
These days he was called Gogol so seldom that the sound of it no longer upset him as it used to. After three years of being Nikhil the vast majority of the time, he no longer minded.
"There is a reason for the discussion about your name now," his father continued.
"Right, Baba. Gogol's is your favorite author, I know. But it doesn't mean that I've to dedicate myself, with all my fancies and conveniences, for your demigod, whatever be the rationale behind it," asserted Gogol.
Ashoke felt indignant to discuss the matter further and coolly lead him into the house.
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