(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
Ashima finished breading the final croquette, then glanced at her wristwatch. She was slightly ahead of the schedule. She set the platter on the counter next to the stove. She took a pan out of the cupboard and poured in the oil, several cupfuls, to be heated in the minutes before her guests are expected. From a crock she selected the slotted spatula she would use. For now, there was nothing left to be done. The rest of the food had been prepared, sitting in long Corning Ware pans on the dining room table : dal coated with a thick skin that would rupture as soon as the first of it was served, a roasted cauliflower dish, eggplant, a korma of lamb. Sweet yogurt and pantuas for dessert sat on the sideboard. She eyed every thing with anticipation. Normally cooking for parties leaves her without appetite, but to night she looked forward to serving herself, sitting among her guests. With Sonia's help the house had been cleaned one last time. Ashima always loved these hours before a party, the carpets vacuumed, the coffee table wiped with Pledge, her dimmed, blurry reflection visible in the wood.
She rooted through her kitchen drawer for a packet of incense. She lighted a stick and walked from room to room. It had gratified her to go to all this effort - to make a final, celebratory meal for her children, her friends. To decide on menu, to make a list and shop in the supermarket and fill the refrigerator shelves with food. It was a pleasant change of pace, something finite in contrast to her current, overwhelming, ongoing task : to prepare for her departure, picking her bones of the house clean. For the past month, she had been dismantling her household piece by piece. Each evening she had tackled a drawer, a closet, a set of shelves. Though Sonia offered to help, Ashima preferred to do this alone. She had made piles of things to give to Gogol and Sonia, things to give to friends, things to take with her, things to donate to charities, things to put into trash bags and drive to the dump. The task both saddened and satisfied her at the same time. There was a thrill to whittling down her possessions to little more than what she had come with, to those three rooms in Cambridge in the middle of a winter's night. Tonight she would invite friends to take whatever might be useful, lamps, plants, platters, pots and pans. Sonia and Ben would rent a truck and take whatever furniture they had room for.
The walls of the house reminded her of the house when they had first moved in, bare except for the photograph of her husband, which would be the last thing she would remove. She paused for a moment waving of the incense in front of Asoke's image. She went upstairs to shower, getting into her beige bathtub, behind the crackled sliding glass doors. She was exhausted from two days of cooking. from her morning of cleaning, from these weeks of packing and dealing with the sale of the house. Her feet felt heavy against the fiberglass floor of the tub. For a while she simply stood there before tending to the shampooing of her hair, soaping of her softening, slightly shrinking fifty- three-year-old body, which she must fortify each morning with calcium pills. When she was finished, she wiped the steam off the bathroom mirror and studied her face. A widow's face. But for most of her life, she reminded herself, a wife. And perhaps, one day, a grandmother, arriving in America laden with hand-knit sweaters and gifts,leaving, a month or two later, inconsolable, in tears.
Ashima felt lonely suddenly, horribly, permanently alone, and briefly turned away from the mirror, she sobbed for her husband. She felt overwhelmed by the thought of the move she was about to make, to the city that was once home and was now in its own way foreign. She felt both impatience and indifference for all the days she still must live, for something told her she would not go quickly as her husband did. For thirty-three years she missed her life in India. Now she would miss her job at the library, the women with whom she had worked. She would miss throwing parties. She would miss living with her daughter, the surprising companionship they had formed, going into Cambridge together to see old movies at the Brattle, teaching her to cook the food Sonia had complained of eating as a child. She would miss the opportunity to drive, as she sometimes did on her way home from the library, to the university, past the engineering building where her husband once worked. She would miss the country in which she had grown to know and love her husband. Though his ashes had been scattered into the Ganges, it was here, in this house and in this town, that he would continue to dwell in her mind.
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