(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
The shameful truth in Moushumi's life was that she used to hate any sort of association with Bengali boys right from adolescent age, was in fact desperately lonely. She'd rebuffed the Indian men she wasn't interested in, and she had been forbidden as a teenager to date. In college she'd harbored lengthy infatuations, with students with whom she never spoke, with professors and teaching assistants. Occasionally one of her infatuations would culminate in a lunch or coffee date, an encounter on which she pinned all her hopes but which led to nothing. Toward the end of the college, as graduation loomed, she was convinced in her bones that there would be no one at all. Sometimes she wondered if it was her horror of being married to someone she didn't love, that had caused her, subconsciously, to shut herself off. Even now she regretted herself as a teenager, irritated with having revisited her past, regretted her obedience, her long, unstyled hair, her piano lessons and lace-collared shirts. She regretted her mortifying lack of confidence, the extra ten pounds she carried on her frame during puberty. When she said, "no wonder you never talked to me back then," he felt tenderness toward her, when she herself disparaged this way. And though he'd witnessed that stage of her himself, he could no longer picture it ; those vague recollections of her he'd carried with him all his life had been wiped clean, replaced by the woman he knew now.
At Brown her rebellion had been academic. At her parents insistence, she'd majored in chemistry, for they were hopeful she would follow in her father's footsteps. Without telling them she'd, unlike Americans or Indians, pursued a double major in French. Her four years of secret study had prepared her, at the end of college to escape as far as possible. Deaf to her parents', she'd scraped together all the money she had and moved to Paris, with no specific plans.
After years of being convinced that she would never have a lover, suddenly it was easy to fall effortlessly into affairs, with no hesitation, she allowed men to seduce her in cafes, in parks, while she gazed at paintings in museums. She gave herself openly, completely, not caring about the consequences. She was exactly the same person, looked and behaved the same way, and yet suddenly in that new city, she was transformed into the kind of girl she'd once envied, had believed she would never become. She allowed the men to buy her drinks, dinners, later to take her in taxis to their apartments, in neighborhoods she'd not yet discovered on her own. In retrospect she saw that her sudden lack of inhibition had intoxicated her more than any of the men had. Some of them had been married, far older, fathers to children in secondary schools. The men had been French for the most part, but also German, Persian, Italian, Lebanese. There were days when she slept with one man after lunch, another after dinner. They were a bit excessive, she told Gogol with a roll of her eyes, the type lavish her with perfume and jewels.
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