(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
A week later Gogol and Moushumi met for lunch. It was the middle of the week and she had offered to meet him someplace near his office, so he'd told her to come to the building where he worked. When the receptionist told him she was waiting in the lobby he felt the anticipation raised in his chest ; all morning he'd been unable to concentrate on his work. He spent a few minutes showing her around, pointing out photographs of projects he'd worked on, introducing her to one of the principal designers, showing her the room where the partners meet. His coworkers in the drafting room looked up from their desks as she passed by. It was early November, the temperature had suddenly dropped, fallen leaves, battered and bleached, scuttled in swirls on the pavement. Gogol had no hat or gloves, and as they walked he put his hands in the pockets of his jacket, and Moushumi, in contrast, seemed enviably protected, at ease in the cold.
He took her to an Italian restaurant where he went from time to time with people at work. The entrance was a few steps below street level, the windows shielded with panels of lace. The waiter recognized him, smiled. They were led to a small table at the back as opposed to t he long one in the center that he normally sat at. Underneath the coat he saw that she was wearing a nubbly gray suit, with large buttons on the jacket and a bell-shaped skirt that stopped short of knees.
"I taught today," she explained ; she preferred to wear a suit when she taught, she said, given that her students were only a decade younger than she was. Otherwise she felt no sense of authority. He envied her students suddenly, seeing her without fail, three times a week, pictured them gathered together around a table, staring at her continuously as she wrote on the board.
"The pastas are usually pretty good here," he said as the waiter handed them menu.
"Join me for a glass of wine," she said. "I'm done for the day."
"Lucky you. I have a stressful meeting to go to after this."
She looked at him, closing the menu. "All the more reason for a drink," she pointed out cheerfully.
"True," he conceded.
"Two glasses of Merlot," she said when the waiter returned. She ordered what he did, porcini ravioli and a salad of arugula and pears. He was nervous that she would be disappointed by the choice, but when the food arrived she eyed it approvingly, and she ate heartily, quickly, sopping up the leftover sauce on her plate with bread. As they drank their wine and ate their meal, he admired the light on her face, the faint pale hairs shone against the contours of her cheek. She spoke of her students, the topic for the dissertation she planned to write, about twentieth-century francophone poets from Algeria.
The room was quiet again, the lunch crowd had come and gone. He looked around for the waiter, signaled for the check, dismayed that their plates were empty, that the hour had passed.
"She is your sister, signore ?" the waiter asked as he set the check between them, glancing at Moushumi and then back at Gogol.
"Oh, no," Gogol said, shaking his head, laughing, at once insulted and oddly aroused. In a way, he realized, it's true - they share the same coloring, the straight eyebrows, the long, slender bodies, the high cheekbones and dark hair.
"You are sure ?" the waiter persisted.
"Quite sure," Gogol said.
"But you could be," the waiter said. "Si, si, there is quite a resemblance."
"You think so ?" Moushumi said. She appeared to be at ease with no comparison, looking comically askance at Gogol. And yet he noticed that some color had risen to her cheeks, whether from the wine or from self-consciousness he didn't know.
"It 's funny he should say that," she said, once thy stepped out into the cold.
"What do you mean ?"
"Well, it's just funny to think that all our lives our parents raised us according to the illusion that we were cousins, that we were all part of some makeshift extended Bengali family and now here we are, years later, and someone actually thinks we're related."
He didn't know what to say. The waiter's comment had discomfited him, making his attraction to Moushumi feel mildly illicit.
"You're not dressed warmly enough," she observed, twisting the woolen scarf around her neck.
"It's so damn hot in my apartment all the time," he said. "For some reason I can never get my mind around the fact that it won't be the same temperature outside."
"Don't you check the paper ?"
"I get it on my way to work."
"I always check the weather by phone when I leave the house," Moushumi said.
"You're joking." He stared at her, surprised that she should actually be the type to go to such lengths. "Please tell me you're joking."
She laughed. "I don't admit that to just anyone, you know."
"Why don't you barrow this ?"and she began to untie her scarf again.
"Please, I'm fine." He put a hand to his throat, against the knot of his tie.
"Sure ?"
He nodded, half tempted to say yes, to feel her scarf against his skin.
"Well, at the very least you need a hat," she told him.
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