(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
One day Moushumi went to her mailbox for her class roaster, a business sized envelope caught her eye. She took the letter into her office, shut the door, sat at her desk. The envelope was addressed to a professor o Comparative Literature, who was teaching German as well as French. She opened the envelope. Inside she found a cover letter and a resume. For a minute she simply stared at the name centered at the top of the resume, laser- printed in an elegant font. She remembered the name, of course. The name alone, when she'd first learned it, had been enough to seduce her. Dimitri Desjardins. He pronounced Desjardins the English way, the s's intact, and in spite of her training in French this was how she still thought of it. Underneath the name was an address on West 164th street. He was looking for an adjunct position, teaching German part-time. She read through the resume, learned exactly where he'd been and what he'd done for the past decade. Traveled in Europe. A job working with the BBC. Articles and reviews published in Der Spiegel, Critical Inquiry. A Ph.D in German literature from the University of Heidelberg.
She'd met him years ago, in her final months of high school. It was a period in which she and two of her friends, in their eagerness to be college students, in desperation over the fact no one their own age was interested in dating them, drove to Princeton, loitered on the campus, browsed in the college bookstore, did their homework in the buildings they entered without an ID. Her parents had encouraged these expeditions, believing she was at the library, or attending lectures - hoped she would go to the Princeton for college, living with them at home. One day, she and her friends were sitting on the grass, they were invited to join a student coalition from the university, a coalition protesting apartheid in South Africa. The group was planning a march on Washington, calling for sanctions.
They took a chartered overnight bus to D.C. in order to be at the rally by early morning. Each of them had lied to their parents, claiming to be sleeping over at one another's homes. Every one on the bus was smoking pot and listening to the same Crosby, Stills, and Nash album continuously, on a tape player running on batteries. Moushumi had been facing backward, leaning over and talking to her friends, who were in two seats behind her, and when she turned back around he was in the neighboring seat. He seemed aloof from the rest of the group, not an actual member of the coalition, somehow dismissive of it all. He was wiry, slight, with small, downward-sloping eyes and an intellectual, ravaged-looking face that she found sexy though not handsome. His hairline was already receding, his hair curly and fair. He needed a shave ; his fingernails needed paring. He was wearing a white button-down shirt, faded Levi's with threadbare knees, pliable gold-framed spectacles that wrapped around his ears. Without introducing himself he began talking to her, as if they were already acquainted. He was twenty-seven, had gone to Williams College, was a student of European history. He was taking a German course at Princeton now, living with his parents, both of whom taught at the university, and he was going out of his mind. He had spent the years after college traveling around Asia, Latin America. He told her he probably wanted to get a Ph.D., eventually. The randomness of all this had appealed to her. He asked her what her name was and when she told him he had leaned toward her, cupping his ear, even though she knew he had heard heard it perfectly well. "How in the world do you spell that ?" he'd asked, and when she told him, he mispronounced it, as most people did. She corrected him, saying that "Mou" rhymed with "toe," but he shook his head and said, "I'll just call you Mouse."
The nick name had irritated and pleased her at the same time. It made her feel foolish, but she was aware that in renaming her he'd claimed her somehow, already made her his own. As the bus grew quiet, as everyone began to fall asleep, she had let him lean his head against her shoulder. Dimitri was asleep, or so she thought. And so she pretended to fall asleep too. After a while she felt his hand on her leg, on top of the white denim skirt she was wearing. And then slowly, he began to unbutton skirt.
No comments:
Post a Comment