(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
They were at the home of Moushumi's friends Astrid and Donald.It was a house under renovation ; Astrid and Donald, expecting their first child, were in the process of expanding their domain from single floor of the house to the top three. Though it was close to ten O'clock, guests continued to arrive. They removed their coats, introduced themselves, poured themselves Chianti, a dry red Italian table wine.
Gogol had been to that house a bit too frequently. Astrid was a friend of Moushumi from Brown, where she was living after returning from Paris. Astrid was teaching film theory at the New
School and Donald was moderately talented painter. They were languidly confident couple, a model, Gogol guessed. They reached out people, hosting parties, helping little bit of themselves to their friends by being passionate spokespeople of their brand of life advising their friends a stream of a quotidian things, to buy bakery products at a certain bakery on Sullivan Street, a certain butcher on Mott, a certain style of coffee maker, a certain Florentine designer of sheets for their bed. Their decrees drive Gogol crazy, though Moushumi was loyal and used to go out of the way, and out of their budget, to buy their home needs.
At the get together party, Gogol recognized a few familiar faces : Edith and Colin who were teaching sociology at Princeton and Yale, respectively, and Louise and Blake, both Ph.D. candidates, like Moushumi, at NYU. Oliver was an editor at an art magazine ; his wife Sally, worked as a pastry chef. The rest were painter friends of Donald's, poets, documentary film makers. They were all married. Even now, a fact as ordinary, as obvious, as this astonished Gogol. All married ! But this was life now, the weekend sometimes more tiring than the workweek, an endless stream of dinner parties, occasionally, after-eleven parties with dancing and drugs to remind them that they were still young, followed by Sunday brunches full of unlimited Bloody Marys and overpriced eggs.
They were an intelligent, attractive, well-dressed crowd. Also a bit incestuous. The vast majority of them know each other from Brown, and Gogol couldn't ever shake the feeling that half of the people in the room had slept with one another. At one end of the table, a woman with short red hair and cat's-eye glasses was talking about a Brecht play she'd once acted in in San Francisco, performed fully in the nude.
At their meetings, Gogol had nothing to say to these people, he didn't care about their diversified topics, he'd found them quite excruciating. Moushumi's devotion to these people puzzled him. Her smoking hadn't bothered him initially. But these days the smell of it, in her hair and on her fingertips, and in the bedroom where she sat typing, slightly disgusted him, and from time to time, he expressed his displeasure about her addiction. She'd laughed, "Oh, Nikhil," she said, "you can't be serious."
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