(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
Ashima had decided to spend six months of her life in India, six months in the States. She would live with her younger brother, Rana, living in Calcutta, when she would visit India. Her brother used to live with his wife, and their two grown, as yet unmarried daughters, in a spacious flat in Salt Lake.There she would have a room, the first in her life intended for her exclusive use. In spring and summer she would return to the Northeast, dividing her her time among her son, her daughter, and her close Bengali friends. True to the meaning of her name, she would be without borders, without a home of her own, a resident everywhere and nowhere. But it was no longer possible for her to live here now that Sonia was going to be married. The wedding would be in Calcutta, a little over a year from now, on an auspicious January day, just as she and her husband were married nearly thirty-four years ago. Something told her that Sonia would be happy with this boy - quickly she corrected herself - this young man. He had brought happiness to her daughter, in a way Moushumi had never brought it to her son. That it was she who had encouraged Gogol to meet Moushumi would be something for which Ashima would always feel guilty. How could she had known ? But fortunately they had not considered it their duty to stay married, as the Bengalis of Ashoke and Ashima's generation did. They were not willing to accept, to adjust, to settle for something less than their ideal of happiness. That pressure had given way, in the case of the subsequent generation, to American common sense.
For the final hours she was alone in the house. Sonia had gone with Ben to pick up Gogol to the train station. It occurred to Ashima that the next time she would be by herself, she would be travelling, sitting on the plane. For the first time since her flight to meet her husband in Cambridge, in the winter of 1967, she would make the journey entirely on her own. The prospect no longer terrified her. She had learned to do things on her own, and though she still wore saris, still put her long hair in a bun, She was not the same Ashima who had once lived in Calcutta. She would return to India with American passport. In her wallet would remain her Massachusetts driver's license, her social security card. She would return to world where she would not single-handedly throw parties for dozens of people. She would not have to go to the trouble of making yogurt from half-and-half and sandesh from ricotta cheese. She would not have to make her own croquettes. They would be available to her from restaurants, brought up to the flat by servants, bearing a taste that after all these years she had still not quite managed, to her entire satisfaction, to replicate.
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