(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
After that disaster of breaking the marriage, which was about to take place with Graham, Moushumi impulsively thought of moving back to Paris. But she was in school, too invested to drop out, and besides she'd no money for that. She fled the apartment on York Avenue, unable to afford on her own. She refused to go home to her parents. Some friends in Brooklyn took her in. It was painful, she told Gogol, living with a couple at that particular time, listening to them shower together in the mornings, watching them kiss and shut the door to their bedroom at the end of each night, but in the beginning she could not face being alone. She started temping. By the time she saved enough to move to her own place in the East Village, she was thankful to be alone. All summer she went to movie by herself, sometimes as many as three a day. She bought TV Guide every week and read it from cover to cover, planning her nights around her favorite shows. She began to subsist on a diets of raita and Triscuits. She grew thinner than she'd ever been in her life, so that in few pictures taken of her in that period her face was faintly unrecognizable. She went to end-of-summer sales and bought everything in size four ; six months later she would be forced to donate it all to a thrift shop. When autumn came, she threw herself into her studies, catching up on all the work she'd abandoned that spring, began every now and then to date. And then one day her mother called, asking if she remembered a boy named Gogol.
* * * * * * *
They married within a year at a Double Tree hotel in New Jersey, close to the suburb where her parents lived. It was not the type of wedding either of them really wanted. They would have preferred a sit-down dinner, jazz played during the reception, black-and-white photographs, keeping things small. But their parents insisted on inviting close to three hundred people, and serving Indian food, and providing easy parking for all the guests. Gogol and Moushumi agreed that it was better to give in to these expectations than to put up a fight. It was what they deserved, they joked, for having listened to their mothers, and for getting together in the first place, and the fact that they were united in their resignation made the consequences somewhat bearable. Within weeks of announcing their engagement, the date was settled, the hotel booked, the menu decided,
and though for a while there were nightly phone calls, her mother asking if they preferred a sheet cake or layers, sage-or rose-colored napkins, Chardonnay or Chablis, there was little for either Gogol or Moushumi to do other than listen and say yes, whichever seemed best, it all sounded fine.
"Consider yourselves lucky," Gogol's coworkers told him. Planning a wedding was incredibly stressful, the first real trial of a marriage, they said. Still, it felt a strange to be so uninvolved in his own wedding, and he was reminded of the many other celebrations in his life, all the birthdays and
graduation parties his parents had thrown when he was growing up, in his honor, attended by his parents' friends, occasions on which he had always felt at a slight remove.
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