(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
Within three months they'd clothes and toothbrushes at each other's apartments. He saw her entire weekends without makeup, saw her with gray shadows under her eyes as she typed papers at her desk, and when he kissed her head he tasted the oil that accumulated on her scalp between shampoos. He saw the hair that grew on her legs between waxings, the black roots that emerged between the appointments at the saloon, and in these moments,these glimpses, he believed he had known no greater intimacy. He learned she slept, always, with her left leg straight, and her right leg bent, ankle over knee, in the shape of a 4. He learned that she was prone to snoring, ever so faintly, sounding like a lawn mower that would not start, and to gnashing her jaws, which he massaged for her as she slept. At restaurants and bars, they sometimes slip Bengali phrases into their conversation in order to comment with impunity on another diner's unfortunate hair or shoes.
They talked endlessly about how they knew and didn't know each other. In a way there was little to explain. There had been the same parties to attend when they were growing up, the same episodes of The Love Boat and Fantasy Island the children watched as the parents feasted in another part of the house, the same meals served to them on paper plates, the carpets lined with news papers when the hosts happened to be particularly fastidious. He could imagine her life, even after she and her family moved away to New Jersey, easily. He could imagine the large suburban house her family owned ; the china cabinet in the dining room, her mother's prized possession ; the large public high school in which she'd excelled but that she'd miserably attended. There had been the same frequent trips to Calcutta, being plucked out of their American lives for months at a time. They calculated the many months that they were in that distant city together, on trips that had overlapped by weeks and once by months, unaware of each other's presence. They talked about how they were both routinely assumed to be Greek, Egyptian, Mexican - even in this misrendering they were joined.
She spoke with nostalgia of the years her family had spent in England, living at first in London, which she barely remembers, and then in a brick semidetached house in Croydon , with rose bushes in front. She told him that she'd hated moving to America, that she'd held on to her British accent for as long as she could. For some reason, her parents feared America much more than England, perhaps because of its vastness,, or perhaps because in their minds it had a less of a link to India. A few months before their arrival in Massachusetts, a child had disappeared while playing in his yard and was never found ; for a long time afterward there were posters in the supermarket. She was always used to call her mother every time she and her friends moved to another house in the neighborhood, to play with the neighboring girls.
He didn't feel insulted when she told him that for most of her life he was exactly the type of person she had sought to avoid. If any thing it flatters him. From earliest girlhood, she said, she had been determined not to allow her parents to have a hand in her marriage. She had always been admonished not to marry an American, as had he, but he gathered that in her case these warnings had been relentless, and had therefore plagued her far more than they had him. When she was only five years old, she was asked by her relatives if she planned to get married in red sari or white gown. Though she'd refused to indulge them, she knew , even then, what the correct response was. By the time she was twelve she had made a pact, with two other Bengali girls she knew, never to marry a Bengali man. They had written a statement vowing never to do so, and spit on it at the same time, and buried it somewhere in her parents' backyard.
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