(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
Moushumi found a job working for an agency, helping American business people learn conversational French, and French Business people learn conversational English. She would meet them in cafes, or speak with them by phone, asking questions about their families, their backgrounds, their favorite books and foods. Her fiance was part of that crowd. He was an investment banker from New York, an American expatriate, living in Paris for years. She'd fallen in love and very quickly moved in with him. His name was Graham and for him she'd applied to New York University. They took a place on York Avenue. They lived there in secret, with two telephone lines so that her parents would never know. When her parents came to the city, he'd disappear to a hotel, removing all traces of himself from the apartment. It had been exciting at first, maintaining such elaborate lie. But then it had gotten tiresome, impossible. She brought him home to New Jersey, prepared herself for battle, but in fact, to her enormous surprise, her parents were relieved. By then she was old enough so that it didn't matter to them that he was an American. Enough of their parents' children had married Americans, had produced pale, dark-haired, half-American grandchildren, and none of it was as terrible as they had feared. And so her parents did their best to accept him. They told their Bengali friends that Graham was well behaved, Ivy educated, earned an impressive salary. they learned to overlook the fact his parents were divorced, that his father'd remarried not once but twice, that his second wife was only ten years older than Moushumi.
One night in a taxi stuck in midtown traffic, she had impulsively asked him to marry her. Looking back on it, she supposed it was all those years of people attempting to claim her, choose her, of feeling an invisible net cast around her, that had led her to this proposal. Graham had accepted, gave her his grandmother's diamond. He had agreed to fly with her and her parents to Calcutta, to meet her extended family and ask her grandparents' blessing. He'd charmed them all, learned to sit on the floor and eat with his fingers, take the dust from her grandparents' feet. He'd visited the homes of dozens of her relatives, eaten the plates full of syrupy mishti, patiently posed for countless photographs on rooftops, surrounded by her cousins. He had agreed to a Hindu wedding and so she and her mother had gone shopping in Gariahat and New Market, selected a dozen saris, gold jewelry, a dhoti and a topor for Graham that her mother carried by hand on the plane ride back. The wedding was planned for summer in New Jersey, an engagement party thrown, a few gifts already received. Her mother had typed up an explanation of Bengali wedding rituals on the computer and mailed it to all the Americans on the guest list. A photograph of the two of them was taken for the local paper in her parents' town.
A few weeks before wedding, they were out to dinner with friends, getting happily drunk, and she heard Graham talking about their time in Calcutta. To her surprise, he was complaining about it, commenting that he found it taxing, found the culture repressed. All they did was visit her relatives, he said. Though he thought the city was fascinating, the society, in his opinion, was somewhat provincial. People tended to stay at home most of the time. There was nothing to drink. "Imagine dealing with fifty in-laws without alcohol. I couldn't even hold her hand on the street without attracting stares," he had said. She had listened to him, partly sympathetic, partly horrified.
For it was one thing for her to reject her background, to be critical of her family's heritage, she realized that he had fooled everyone, including her. On their walk home from the restaurant, she brought it up, saying that his comments had upset her, why hadn't he told her these things ? Was he only pretending to enjoy himself all that time ? They'd begun to argue, a chasm opening up between them, swallowing them, and suddenly in a rage, she'd removed his grandfather's ring from
her finger and tossed it into the street, into oncoming traffic, and then Graham had struck her on the face as the pedestrians watched. By the end of the week, he had moved out of the apartment they shared. She stopped going to school, filed for incompletes in all her classes. She swallowed half a bottle of pills, was forced to drink charcoal in an emergency room. She was given a referral to
a therapist. She called her adviser at NYU, told him she'd had a nervous breakdown, took off the rest of the semester. The wedding was canceled, hundreds of phone calls made.
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