(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
On their last day in Paris, in the morning, he shopped for gifts for his in-laws, his mother, Sonia. It was the day Moushumi was presenting her paper. He had offered to go with her, to sit in the audience and listen to her speak. But she told him that was silly, why sit in the middle of a roomful of people speaking a language he didn't understand when there was still of the city he could see ? And so, after shopping, he set off, alone, for the Louvre, a destination he'd put off until now. At the end of the day he met her at a cafe in the Latin Quarter. She was there waiting for him behind a glassed-in partition on the sidewalk, wearing a dark red lipstick, sipping a glass of wine.
He sat down, ordered a coffee. "How was it ? How did it go ?"
She lighted a cigarette. "Okay. Over with, at any rate."
She looked more regretful than relieved, her eyes lingering over the small round table between them.
Normally she wanted a full account of his adventures, but today they sat silently, watching the passers-by. He showed her the things he'd bought, a tie for his father-in-law, soaps for their mothers, a shirt for her brother, Samrat, a silk scarf for Sonia, sketch books for himself, bottles of ink, a pen. She admired the drawings he'd done. It's a cafe they'd been before, and he felt the slight nostalgia it was sometimes possible to feel at the end of an extended stay in a foreign place, taking in the details that would soon evaporate from his mind : the surly waiter who had served them both times, the view of the shops across the street, the green and yellow straw chairs.
"Are you sad to be leaving ?" he asked, stirring sugar into his coffee, drinking it back in one gulp.
"A little. I guess a little part of me wishes I'd never left Paris, you know ?"
He leaned over, took both her hands into his. "But then we would never have met," he said, with more confidence than he felt.
"True," she acknowledged. And then : "May be we'll move here one day."
He nodded. "May be."
She looked beautiful to him, tired, the concentrated light of the dying day on her face, infusing it with an amber-pink glow. He wanted to remember this moment, the two of them together, here. This was how he wanted to remember Paris. He took his camera, focusing on her face.
"Nikhil, please, don't," she said , laughing, shaking her head. "I look awful." She shielded her face with the back of her hand.
He still held up the camera. "Oh, come on, Mo. You're beautiful. You look great."
But she refused to indulge him, moving her chair out of view with a scrape on the pavement ; she didn't want to be mistaken for a tourist in this city, she said.
A Saturday evening in May. A dinner party in Brooklyn. A dozen people were gathered around a long, scratched-up dining table, smoking cigarettes, drinking Chianti from juice glasses, sitting on series of backless stools. The room was dark apart from a domed metal lamp hanging from a long cord, with a concentrated pool of light on the table's center. An opera played on a battered boom box on the floor A joint was being passed around. Gogol took a hit, but as he sat there, holding his breath, he regretted it ; he was already starved.
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