(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
Gogol woke up late on Sunday morning, alone, from a bad dream he could not recall. He looked over at Moushumi's side of the bed, at the untidy pile of her books and magazines on the end table, the bottle of lavender room spray she liked to squirt sometimes on their pillows, the tortoiseshell barrette with strands of her hair caught in its clasp. She was at another conference this weekend, in Palm Beach.. By tonight she would be home. She claimed she'd told him about the conference months ago, but he didn't remember. "Don't worry," she'd said as she was packing, "I won't be there long enough to get a tan." But when he'd seen her bathing suit on top of the clothing on the bed, a strange panic had welled up inside of him as he thought of her lying without him by a hotel pool, her eyes closed, a book at her side. "At least one of us wasn't cold," he thought to himself now, crossing his arms tightly in front of his chest. Since the previous day afternoon the building's boiler had been broken, turning the apartment into an icebox. Last night he'd had to turn the oven on in order to tolerate being in the living room, and he'd worn his old Yale sweatpants, a thick sweater over a T-shirt, and a pair of rag-wool socks to bed. He threw back the comforter and the extra blanket he'd placed on top of it in the middle of the night. He couldn't find the blanket at first, nearly called Moushumi at the hotel to ask where she kept it. But by then it was nearly three in the morning, and so, eventually, he'd hunted it down himself, found it wedged on the top shelf of the hall closet, an unused wedding gift still in its zippered plastic case.
He got out of the bed, brushed his teeth with freezing cold water from the tap, decided to skip shaving. He pulled on jeans and an extra sweater, and Moushumi's bathrobe over that, not caring how ridiculous he looked. He made a pot of coffee, toasted some bread to eat with butter and jam. He opened the front door and retrieved the Times, removing the wrapper, putting it on the coffee table to read later. There was a drawing for work to be completed by the next day, a cross section for a high school auditorium in Chicago. He unrolled the plan from lts tube and spread it it out on the dining table, securing the corners with paper back books. He put on his Abbey Road CD, and tried to work on the drawing. But his fingers were stiff and so he rolled up the plan, left a note for Moushumi on the kitchen counter, and went to the office.
He was glad to have an excuse to be out of the apartment, instead of waiting for her, at some point that evening, to return. It felt milder outside, the air pleasantly damp, and instead of taking the train he walked the thirty blocks, up Park Avenue and over to Madison. He was the only person at the office. He sat in the darkened drafting room, surrounded by the desks of his co-workers, some piled with drawings and models, others as neat as a pin. He crouched over his table, a single pool of light from a swinging metal lamp illuminating the drawing. At the end of the week, it would be the fourth anniversary of his father's death. there was a photograph of his mother and Sonia and himself at Fatehpur Sikri, hanging on the wall in front of him. And next to this, a picture of Moushumi, an old passport photo he'd found and asked to keep. She was in her early twenties, her hair loose, her heavy-lidded eyes slightly lowered, looking to one side. It was taken before he'd begun to date her, when she was living in Paris. And yet they had met ; after all her adventures, it was he whom she had married. He with whom she shared her life.
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