(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
Two days later , a new semester began. It was Moushumi's eighth semester at NYU. She was finished with classes, would never in her life take a class again. Never again would she sit for for an exam. This fact delighted her - finally, a formal emancipation from student-hood. Though she still had a dissertation to write, still had an adviser to monitor her progress, she felt unmoored already, somehow beyond the world that had defined and structured and limited her for so long. This was the third time she'd taught the class. Beginning French, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, a total of three hours a week. All she had had to do was look ahead in her calender and change the date of the class meetings. Her biggest effort would be to learn her students' names. She was always flattered when they assumed herself was French, or half-French. She enjoyed their looks of disbelief when she told them she was from New Jersey, born to Bengali parents.
Moushumi had been given an eight A.M section, something that had annoyed her at first. But now that she was up, showered, dressed, walking down the street, a latte from the deli on their block in one hand, she was invigorated. Being out at this hour already felt like an accomplishment. When she had left the apartment, Nikhil had been still asleep, undisturbed by the persistent beeping of the alarm. The night before, she had laid out her clothes, her papers, something she had not done since she was a girl preparing for school. She liked walking through the streets so early, had liked rising by herself in semidarkness, liked the sense of promise it lent the day. It was a pleasant change from their usual routine - Nikhil showered, in his suit, flying out the door as she was just pouring herself a first cup of coffee. She was thankful not to have to face her desk in the corner of their bedroom first thing surrounded by by as it was by sacks full of dirty cloths they kept meaning to drop off at the laundry but got around only once a month, when buying new socks and underwear became necessary. Moushumi wondered how long she would live her life with the trappings of student hood in spite of the fact that she was a married woman, that she was as far along in her studies as she was, that Nikhil had a respectable if not terribly lucrative job. It would have been different with Graham ; he had made more than enough money for the both of them. And yet that, too, had been frustrating, causing her to fear that her career was somehow an indulgence, unnecessary. Once she had a job, a real full-time tenure-track job, she reminded herself, things would be different. She imagined where that first job might take her, assumed she would be in some far-flung town in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes she joked with Nikhil about their having to pick up and move, in a few years, to Iowa, to Kalamazoo. Buth they both knew it was out of question for him to leave New York, that she would be the one to fly back and forth on weekends. There was something appealing to her about this prospect, to make a clan start in a place where no one knows her, as she had done in Paris. . It was the one thing about her parents' lives she truly aadmired ; their ability, for better or for worse, to turn their back on their homes.
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