ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 100

                                            (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


         The previous weekend was Thanks giving. Gogol's mother and Sonia and Sonia's new boyfriend, Ben, had come, along with Moushumi's parents and brother, and they had all celebrated the holiday together in New York, crowded together in Gogol and Moushumi's apartment. It was the first time he'd not gone either to his parents' or to his in-laws' for a holiday. It felt strange to be hosting, to assume the center of responsibility. They had ordered a fresh turkey in advance from the farmers' market, planned the menu out of Food & Wine, bought folding chairs so that everyone would have a place to sit. Moushumi had gone out and bought a rolling pin, made an apple pie for the first time in her life. For Ben's sake they'd all spoken in English. Ben was half-Jewish, half-Chinese, raised in Newton, close to where Gogol and Sonia grew up. He was an editor at the Globe, He and Sonia met by chance, at a cafe on Newbury Street. Seeing them together, sneaking into the hallway so that they could kiss freely, holding hands discreetly as they sat at the table, Gogol had been oddly envious, and as they all sat eating their turkey and roasted sweet potatoes and cornbread stuffing, and the spiced cranberry chutney his mother had made, he looked at Moushumi and wondered what was wrong. They didn't argue, they still had sex, and yet he wondered. Did he still make her happy ? She accused him of nothing, but more and more he sensed her distance, her dissatisfaction, her distraction. But there had been no time to dwell on this worry. The weekend had been exhausting, getting their various family members to the apartments of nearby friends who were away and had given them keys. The day after Thanksgiving they had all gone to Jackson Heights, to the halal butcher so that both their mothers could stock up on goat meat, and then to brunch. And on Saturday there had been a concert of classical Indian music up at Columbia. Part of him wanted to bring it up with her. "Are you happy you married me ?" he would ask. But the fact that he was even thinking of this question made him afraid.
            He finished up the drawing by working through the lunch, and when stepped out of his office building it was colder, the light fading rapidly from the sky. He bought a cup of coffee and a falafel sandwich at the Egyptian restaurant on the corner and walked south as he ate, toward the Flatiron and lower Fifth Avenue, the twin towers of the World Trade Center looming in the distance, sparkling at the island's end. The falafel, wrapped in foil, was warm and messy in his hands. The stores were full, the windows decorated, the sidewalks crammed with shoppers. The thought of Christmas overwhelmed him. The previous year they went to Moushumi's parents' house. This year they would go to Pemberton Road. He no longer looked forward to the holiday ; he wanted only to be on the other side of the season. His impatience made him feel that he was, incontrovertibly, finally, an adult. He wandered absently into a perfume store, a clothing store, a store that sells only bags. He'd no idea what to get Moushumi for Christmas. Normally she dropped hints, showing him catalogues, but he had no clue as to what she was coveting this season, if it was a new pair of gloves or new pajamas she'd like. In the maze of stalls in Union Square that sell candles and shawls and handmade jewelry, nothing inspired him.

ABCDs ; The Cultur-Conflict. 99

                                              (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


           Gogol woke up late on Sunday morning, alone, from a bad dream he could not recall. He looked over at Moushumi's side of the bed, at the untidy pile of her books and magazines on the end table, the bottle of lavender room spray she liked to squirt sometimes on their pillows, the tortoiseshell barrette with strands of her hair caught in its clasp. She was at another conference this weekend, in Palm Beach.. By tonight she would be home. She claimed she'd told him about the conference months ago, but he didn't remember. "Don't worry," she'd said as she was packing, "I won't be there long enough to get a tan." But when he'd seen her bathing suit on top of the clothing on the bed, a strange panic had welled up inside of him as he thought of her lying without him by a hotel pool, her eyes closed, a book at her side. "At least one of us wasn't cold," he thought to himself now, crossing his arms tightly in front of his chest. Since the previous day afternoon the building's boiler had been broken, turning the apartment into an icebox. Last night he'd had to turn the oven on in order to tolerate being in the living room, and he'd worn his old Yale sweatpants, a thick sweater over a T-shirt, and a pair of rag-wool socks to bed. He threw back the comforter and the extra blanket he'd placed on top of it in the middle of the night. He couldn't find the blanket at first, nearly called Moushumi at the hotel to ask where she kept it. But by then it was nearly three in the morning, and so, eventually, he'd hunted it down himself, found it wedged on the top shelf of the hall closet, an unused wedding gift still in its zippered plastic case.
         He got out of the bed, brushed his teeth with freezing cold water from the tap, decided to skip shaving. He pulled on jeans and an extra sweater, and Moushumi's bathrobe over that, not caring how ridiculous he looked. He made a pot of coffee, toasted some bread to eat with butter and jam. He opened the front door and retrieved the Times, removing the wrapper, putting it on the coffee table to read later. There was a drawing for work to be completed by the next day, a cross section for a high school auditorium in Chicago. He unrolled the plan from lts tube and spread it it out on the dining table, securing the corners with paper back books. He put on his Abbey Road CD, and tried to work on the drawing. But his fingers were stiff and so he rolled up the plan, left a note for Moushumi on the kitchen counter, and went to the office.
          He was glad to have an excuse to be out of the apartment, instead of waiting for her, at some point that evening, to return. It felt milder outside, the air pleasantly damp, and instead of taking the train he walked the thirty blocks, up Park Avenue and over to Madison. He was the only person at the office. He sat in the darkened drafting room, surrounded by the desks of his co-workers, some piled with drawings and models, others as neat as a pin. He crouched over his table, a single pool of light from a swinging metal lamp illuminating the drawing. At the end of the week, it would be the fourth anniversary of his father's death. there was a photograph of his mother and Sonia and himself at Fatehpur Sikri, hanging on the wall in front of him. And next to this, a picture of Moushumi, an old passport photo he'd found and asked to keep. She was in her early twenties, her hair loose, her heavy-lidded eyes slightly lowered, looking to one side. It was taken before he'd begun to date her, when she was living in Paris. And yet they had met ; after all her adventures, it was he whom she had married. He with whom she shared her life.

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 98

                                              (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


           One night it was worse than usual. It was three o'clock, then four. Construction work had been taking place for the past few nights on their street, giant bins of rubble and concrete were moved and crushed, and Moushumi felt angry at Nikhil for being able to sleep through it. She was tempted to get up, poured herself a drink, took a bath, anything. But fatigue kept her in bed. She watched the shadows that the passing traffic threw onto their ceiling, listened to a truck wailing in the distance like a solitary, nocturnal beast. She was convinced she would be up to see the sun rise. But somehow she slept again. She was woken just after dawn by the sound of rain beating against the bedroom window, pelting it with such ferocity that she almost expected the glass to shatter. She had a splitting headache. She got out of bed and parted the curtains, then returned to bed and shook Nikhil awake. "Look," she said, pointing at the rain, as if it were something truly extraordinary. Nikhil obliged, fully asleep, sat upright, then he closed his eyes again.
            At seven-thirty she got out of bed. The morning sky was clear. She walked out of the bedroom and saw that rain had leaked through the roof, left an unsightly yellow patch on the ceiling and puddles in the apartment : one in the bathroom, another in the front hall. The sill of a window left open in the living room was soaked, streaked with mud, as were the bills and books and papers piled on it. The sight of it made her weep. At the same time she was thankful that there was something tangible for her to be upset about.
           "Why are you crying ?" Nikhil asked, squinting at his pajamas.
           "There are cracks in the ceiling," she said.
           Nikhil looked up. "They're not too bad. I'll call the super."
           "The rain water came right through the roof."
           "What rain ?"
            "Don't you remember ? It was pouring rain at dawn. It was incredible. I woke you."
            But Nikhil didn't remember a thing.


A month of Mondays and Wednesdays passed. She began to see him on Fridays as well. One Friday she found herself alone in Dimitri's apartment ; he went out as soon as she arrived, to buy a stick of butter for a white sauce he was making to pour over trout. Bartok played on the stereo expensive components scattered on the floor. She watched him from the window, walking down the block, a small, balding, unemployed middle-aged man, who was enabling her to wreck her marriage. She wondered if she was the only woman in her family ever to have betrayed her husband, to have been unfaithful. This was what upset her most to admit : that this affair caused her to feel strangely at peace, the complication of it claiming her, structuring her day. After the first time, washing up in the bathroom, she'd been horrified by what she'd done, at the sight of her clothes scattered throughout the two rooms. Before leaving, she'd combed her hair in the bathroom mirror, the only one in the apartment. She'd kept her head bent low, glancing up only briefly at the end. When she did she saw that it was one of those mirrors that was for some reason particularly flattering, due to some trick of the light or the quality of the glass, causing her skin to glow.
          There was something on Dimitri's walls. He was still living out of a series of mammoth duffel bags. She was glad not to be able to picture his life in all its detail, its mess. The only thing he'd set up are the kitchen, the stereo components, and some of his books. Each time she visited, there were modest signs of progress. She wandered around his living room, looked at the books he was beginning to organize on his plywood shelves. Apart from all the German, their personal libraries are similar. There was the same lime green spine of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. The same edition of Mimesis. The same boxed set of Proust. She pulled out an oversized volume of photographs of Paris, by Atget. She sat on an armchair, Dimitri's only piece of living room furniture. It was here that she'd sat the first time she'd visited, and he'd stood behind her, massaging a spot on her shoulder, arousing her, until she stood up, and they'd walked together to the bed.
        She heard Dimitri's footsteps on the stairs, then sound of key in the lock, slicing sharply into the apartment. She got up to put the book away, searching for the gap in which it had stood. 

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 97

                                              (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


           Dimitri and Moushumi began seeing each other Mondays and Wednesdays, after she taught her classes. She took the train uptown and they met at his apartment, where lunch was waiting. The meals were ambitious : poached fish, creamy potato gratins ; golden, puffed chickens roasted with whole lemons in their cavities. There was always a bottle of wine. They sat at a table with his books and papers and laptop pushed to one side. They listened to WQXR, drank coffee and cognac and smoked a cigarette afterward. Only then did he touch her. Sunlight streamed through large dirty windows into the shabby prewar apartment. There were two spacious rooms, flaking plaster walls, scuffed parquet floors, towering stacks of boxes, he had not yet bothered to unpack. The bed, a brand- new mattress and box spring on wheels, was never made. After sex they were always amazed to discover that the bed was moved several inches away from the wall, pushing up against the bureau on the other side of the room. She liked the way he looked at her when their limbs were still tangled together, out of breath, as if he'd been chasing her, his expression anxious before relaxing into a smile. Some gray had come into Dimitri's hair and chest, some lines around the mouth and eyes. He was heavier than before, his stomach undeniably wide, so that his thin legs appeared slightly comic. He recently turned thirty-nine. He had not been married. He didn't seem very desperate to be employed. He spent his days cooking meals, reading, listening to the classical music. She gathered that he had inherited some money from his grandmother.
          The first time they met, the day after she called him, at the bar of a crowded Italian restaurant near NYU, they had not been able to to stop staring at each other, not been able to stop talking about the resume, and the uncanny way it had fallen into Moushumi's hands. He had moved to New York only a month ago, had tried to look her up but the phone was listed under Nikhil's last name. It didn't matter, they agreed. It was better this way. They drank glasses of prosecco, an Italian wine made from grapes. She agreed to an early dinner with Dimitri that night, sitting at the bar of the restaurant, for the prosecco had gone quickly to their heads. He had ordered a salad topped with warm lambs' tongue, a poached egg, and pecorino cheese, something she swore she would not touch but ended up eating the better part of. After ward she had gone into Balducci's to buy the pasta and ready-made vodka sauce she would have at home with Nikhil.
           On Mondays and Wednesdays no one knows where she was. There were no Bengali fruit sellers to greet her on the walk from Demitri's subway stop, no neighbors to recognize her once she turned on to Dimitri's block. It reminded her of living in Paris ; for a few hours at Dimitri's she was inaccessible, anonymous. Dimitri was not terribly curious about Nikhil, did not ask her his name. He expressed no jealousy. When she told him in the Italian restaurant that she was married, his expression had not changed. He regarded their time together as perfectly normal, as destined, and she began to see how easy it was. Moushumi referred to Nikhil in conversation as "my husband" : "My husband and I have a dinner to go to next Thursday." "My husband's given me this cold."


At home , Nikhil suspected nothing. As usual they had dinner, talked of their days. They cleaned up kitchen together, then sat on the sofa and watched television while she corrected her students' quizzes and exercises. During the eleven o'clock news, they had bowls of Ben and Jerry's, then brushed their teeth. As usual they got into bed, kissed, then slowly they turned away from each other in order to stretch comfortably into sleep. Only Moushumi stayed awake. Each Monday and Wednesday night, she feared that he would sense something, that he would put his arms around her and instantly know. She stayed awake for hours after they had turned out the lights, prepared to answer him, prepared to lie to his face. She had gone shopping, she would tell him if he were to ask, for in fact she had done this on her way home that first Monday, halting her journey back from Dimitri's in midstream, getting out of the subway at 72d street before continuing downtown, stopping in a store she'd never been in, buying a pair of the most ordinary-looking black shoes.     

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 96

                                              (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


          Several minutes passed between his undoing of one button and the next, his eyes closed all the while, his head still on her shoulder, as the bus hurtled down the empty, dark highway. It was the first time in her life a man had touched her. She held herself perfectly still. She was desperate to touch him too, but she was terrified. Finally Dimitri opened his eyes. She felt his mouth near her ear, and she turned to him, prepared to be kissed, at seventeen, for the very first time. But he had not kissed her. He had only looked at her, and said, "You're going to break hearts, you know." And then he leaned back, in his own seat this time, removed his hand from her lap, and closed his eyes once again. She had stared at him in disbelief, angry that he assumed she'd not broken any heart yet, and at the same time flattered. For the rest of the journey she kept her skirt unbuttoned, hoping he would return to the task. But he didn't touch her after that, and in the morning there was no acknowledgment of what had passed between them. At the demonstration he had wandered off, paid   her no attention. On the way back they had sat apart.
          Afterward she returned to the university every day to try to run into him. After some weeks she saw him striding across campus, alone, holding a copy of The Man Without Qualities. They shared some coffee and sat on a bench outside. He had asked her to see a movie, Goddard's Alphaville, and to have Chinese food. She had worn an outfit that still caused her to wince, an old blazer of her father's that was too long for her, over jeans, the sleeves of the blazer rolled up as if it were a shirt, to reveal the striped lining inside. It had been the first date of her life, strategically planned on an evening her parents were at a party. She recalled nothing of the movie, had eaten nothing at the restaurant, part of a small shopping complex off Route 1. And then, after watching Dimitri ate both of their fortune cookies without reading either prediction, she had made her error :  she had asked him to be her date to her senior prom. He had declined, driven her home, kissed her lightly on her cheek in the driveway, and then he never called her again. The evening had humiliated her ; he had treated her like a child. Sometime over the summer she bumped into him at the movies. He was with a date, a tall freckled girl with hair to her waist. Moushumi had wanted to flee, but he'd made a point of introducing her to the girl. "This is Moushumi," Dimitri had said deliberately, as if he'd been waiting for the opportunity to say her name for weeks. He told her he was going to Europe for a while, and from the look on the date's face she realized that she was going with him. Moushumi told him she'd been accepted ar Brown. "You look great," he told her when the date was not listening.
           When she was at Brown, post cards used to arrive from time to time, envelopes plastered with colorful, oversized stamps. His handwriting was minuscule but sloppy, always causing her eyes to strain. Ther was never a return address. For a time she carried these letters in her book bag, to her classes, thickening her agenda. Periodically he sent books he'd read and thought she might like. A few times he called in the middle of the night, waking her, and she spoke to him for hours in the dark, lying in bed in her dorm room, then sleeping through her morning classes. A single call kept her sailing for weeks. "I'll come visit you. I'll take you to dinner," he told her. He never did. Eventually the letters tapered off. His last communication had been a box of books, along with several post cards he'd written to her in Greece and Turkey but not managed to send at the time. . And then she'd moved to Paris.
           She read Dimitri's resume again, then the cover letter. The letter revealed nothing other than earnest pedagogical intent, mentioned a panel Dimitri and the professor to whom it was addressed attended some years ago. She could not bring herself to write down his address, though she didn't want to forget it. In the Xerox room, she made a copy of the resume. She stuck it in the bottom of her bag. The she typed a new envelope and put the original in the professors mailbox. 


At home that night, after dinner, she secretly dialed Dimitri's number, wondering if he would even remember her, listened as the phone rang four times.
          "Hello ?"
           It was his voice. "Hi, Dimitri ?"
           "Speaking. Who's this ?"
           She paused. She could still hang up if she wanted. "It's Mouse."

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 95

                                          (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.
     

ABCDs ; The Cultue-Conflict. 94

                                            (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


            Two days later , a new semester began. It was Moushumi's eighth semester at NYU. She was finished with classes, would never in her life take a class again. Never again would she sit for for an exam. This fact delighted her - finally, a formal emancipation from student-hood. Though she still had a dissertation to write, still had an adviser to monitor her progress, she felt unmoored already, somehow beyond the world that had defined and structured and limited her for so long. This was the third time she'd taught the class. Beginning French, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, a total of three hours a week. All she had had to do was look ahead in her calender and change the date of the class meetings. Her biggest effort would be to learn her students' names. She was always flattered when they assumed herself was French, or half-French. She enjoyed their looks of disbelief when she told them she was from New Jersey, born to Bengali parents.
           Moushumi had been given an eight A.M section, something that had annoyed her at first. But now that she was up, showered, dressed, walking down the street, a latte from the deli on their block in one hand, she was invigorated. Being out at this hour already felt like an accomplishment. When she had left the apartment, Nikhil had been still asleep, undisturbed by the persistent beeping of the alarm. The night before, she had laid out her clothes, her papers, something she had not done since she was a girl preparing for school. She liked walking through the streets so early, had liked rising by herself in semidarkness, liked the sense of promise it lent the day. It was a pleasant change from their usual routine - Nikhil showered, in his suit, flying out the door as she was just pouring herself a first cup of coffee. She was thankful not to have to face her desk in the corner of their bedroom first thing surrounded by by as it was by sacks full of dirty cloths they kept meaning to drop off at the laundry but got around only once a month, when buying new socks and underwear became necessary. Moushumi wondered how long she would live her life with the trappings of student hood in spite of the fact that she was a married woman, that she was as far along in her studies as she was, that Nikhil had a respectable if not terribly lucrative job. It would have been different with Graham ; he had made more than enough money for the both of them. And yet that, too, had been frustrating, causing her to fear that her career was somehow an indulgence, unnecessary. Once she had a job, a real full-time tenure-track job, she reminded herself, things would be different. She imagined where that first job might take her, assumed she would be in some far-flung town in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes she joked with Nikhil about their having to pick up and move, in a few years, to Iowa, to Kalamazoo. Buth they both knew it was out of question for him to leave New York, that she would be the one to fly back and forth on weekends. There was something appealing to her about this prospect, to make a clan start in a place where no one knows her, as she had done in Paris. . It was the one thing about her parents' lives she truly aadmired ; their ability, for better or for worse, to turn their back on their homes.

ABCDS ; The Culture-Conflict. 93

 

                                            (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


            They decided to walk to the restaurant to celebrate the first anniversary, thirty blocks north of their apartment.  Though the evening was pleasantly warm, it was dark already. It had been a Saturday in November, they walked up Fifth Avenue, past the public library. Instead of proceeding to the restaurant they decided to wander up the side walk for a while ; there were still twenty minutes before their reservation. The street was found only with a handful of people. She had once come here with Graham and his father and stepmother to have drinks at the Plaza. They couldn't find the restaurant at first. The address written on a slip of paper in Moushumi's evening bag, led them only to a suite of offices in a town house. They pressed the buzzer, peered through the glass door into the empty, carpeted foyer, at a big vase of flowers at the foot of the stairs.
           "It can't be this," she said. They wandered partway up and down the block, looked on the other side. They returned to the town house, looking up at the darkened windows for signs of life.
            "There it is," he said, noticing a couple emerging from a basement door below the steps. There, in an entry way lit by a single sconce, they found a plaque nailed discretely into the facade of the building bearing the restaurant's name, Antonia. A small fleet gathered to welcome them, to tick their names off a list at a podium, to lead them to their table. The fuss felt unwarranted as they stepped into a stark, sunken dining room. The atmosphere was somber, vaguely abandoned, as the streets had been. There were a few wealthy-looking middle aged couples in suits. A well-dressed elderly gentleman was dining alone. She found suspicious that there were so many empty tables, that no music played. She had been hoping for something more bustling, warmer. Given that it was subterranean, the place seemed surprisingly vast, the ceilings high. The air-conditioning was too strong, chilling her bare legs and arms. She wrapped the pashmina tightly around her shoulders.
           "I'm freezing. Do you think they'd turn down the AC if I asked ?"
           "I doubt that. Would you like my jacket ?" Nikhil offered.
            "No, It's okay." She smiled at him. And yet she felt uncomfortable, depressed. She was depressed by the pair of teen aged Bangladeshi busboys who wore tapestry waistcoats and black trousers, serving them warm bread with silver tongs. It annoyed her that the waiter, perfectly attentive, looked neither of them in the eye as he described the menu, speaking instead to the bottle of mineral water positioned between them. She knew it was too late to change their plans now. But even after they placed their order, a part of her had a nagging urge, felt like standing up, leaving. She'd done something similar a few weeks ago, sitting in the chair of an expensive hair saloon, walking out after the apron had been tied behind her neck, while the stylist had gone to check on another client, simply because something about the stylist's manner, the bored expression on her face as she'd lifted a lock of Moushumi's hair and studied it in the mirror, had felt insulting. She wondered what Donald and Astrid liked about this place, decided it must be the food. But when it arrived, it too disappointed her. The meal, served on square white plates, was fussily arranged, the portions microscopically small.. As usual they traded plates partway through the meal, but this time she didn't like the taste of his so she stuck to her own. She finished her entree of scallops too quickly, sat quiet for a long ttime, watching Nikhil work his way through his quail.
          She was not able to enjoy herself. As they neared the end of the meal, it occurred to her that she was neither very drunk nor full. In spite of two cocktails and the bottle of wine they'd shared she felt distressingly sober and lighted her after-dinner cigarette.
         They were the last of the diners to leave. It'd been wildly expensive, far more than they'd expected. They put down a credit card. Watching Nikhil sign the receipt, she felt cheap all of a sudden, irritated that he'd left such a meager tip.


  

ABCDS ; The Culture-Conflict. 92

                                               (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


           It was in 1999 on the morning of their first anniversary, Moushumi's parents called, waking them, wishing them a happy anniversary before they had had the chance to say to each other. In addition to their anniversary, there was something else to celebrate : Moushumi successfully passed her orals the week before, is now officially ABD ;  The term all but dissertation (ABD) is a mostly unofficial term identifying a stage in the process of obtaining a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degree or equivalent research doctorate (Sc.D., etc.) in the United States and Canada. At this stage the student has completed the preparatory coursework, qualifying examinations, comprehensive examinations, and defended his or her dissertation proposal. To complete the degree, the student must carry out the proposed research which must be original research and write the dissertation that defines a Ph.D. or equivalent research doctorate.
          There was a third thing worth celebrating but which she hadn't mentioned - she had been awarded a research fellowship to work on her dissertation in France for the year. She'd applied for the grant secretly, just before the wedding, simply curious to see if she would get it. It was always  good practice, she had reasoned, to strive for such things. Two years ago she would have said yes on the spot. But it was no longer to fly off to France for the year, now that she had a husband, a marriage, to consider. So when the good news came she decided it was easier to decline the fellowship quietly, to file away the letter, not to bring it up.
           She took the initiative for the evening, making reservations at a place in midtown, which Donald and Astrid had recommended. She felt a bot guilty for all these months of studying, aware that with her exams as an excuse, she had ignored Nikhil perhaps more than necessary. There were nights that she told him she was at her carrel in the library when really she had met Astrid and her baby, Esme, in SoHo, or gone for a walk by herself. Sometimes she would sit in a restaurant alone, at the bar, ordering sushi or a sandwich and a glass of wine, simply to remind herself that she was still capable of being on her own. This assurance was important to her ; along with the sanskrit vows she'd repeated at her wedding, she'd privately vowed that she would never grow fully dependent on her husband, as her mother had. For even after thirty-two years abroad, in England and now America, her mother didn't know how to drive, didn't have a job, didn't know the difference between a checking and savings account. And yet she was a perfectly intelligent woman, was an honors student in philology at Presidency College before she was married off at twenty-two.
          They had both dressed up for the occasion - when she emerged from the bathroom she saw that he was wearing the shirt she'd him, moss-colored with a velvet Nehru collor of slightly darker green. She was wearing a black dress she'd worn the first time he'd come to dinner, the first time they'd slept together, and over it, a lilac pashmina shawl, Nikhil's anniversary present to her. She still remembered their very first date, liking the slightly untamed look of his hair as he'd approached her at the bar, the dark pine stubble on his cheeks, the shirt he'd worn with green stripes and thinner stripes of lavender, the collar beginning to fray. She still remembered her bewilderment, looking up from her book and seeing him, her heart skipping, feeling the attraction instantly, powerfully, in her chest. For she had been expecting an older version of the boy she remembered, distant, quiet, in corduroy jeans and a sweatshirt, few pimples dotting his chin. The day before the date, she hadlunch with Astrid. "I just don't see you with some Indian guy," Astrid had said dismissively over salads at City Bakery. At the time Moushumi had not protested, maintaining apologetically that it was one date. She had been deeply skeptical herself - apart from the young Sashi Kapoor and a cousin in India, she had never until then found herself attracted to an Indian man. But she'd genuinely liked Nikhil. She liked that he was neither a doctor or an engineer. She'd liked that he'd changed his name from Gogol to Nikhil ; though she'd known him all those years, it was a thing that made him somehow new, not the person her mother had mentioned.

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 91

                                          (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


            Of late Gogol found Moushumi enjoying the company of Astrid and Donald, and also recently began to notice that she was gloomy aftermath, as if seeing them served only to remind her that their own lives would never match up. The last time the'd gone home after one of Astrid and Donald's dinner parties, she'd picked up a fight with him as soon as they had walked in the door , complaining about the noise on Third Avenue, and about some of the fittings in their house. He told himself that it was the stress - she'd been studying for her orals, holed up in her carrel at the library until nine O'clock most nights. He remembered how it was studying for his licensing exam, which he failed twice before passing. He remembered the sustained isolation it had demanded, speaking to no one for days at a time, and so he didn't say anything. Tonight he had held out hope that she would use her orals as a reason to decline the invitation to Astrid and Donald's. But by now he had learned that there was never a question of saying no when it comes to them.
           Gogol understood that it was through Astrid and Donald that Moushumi had met her farmer fiance, Graham, Donald had gone to prep school with him, and it was he who introduced Moushumi to Graham when he'd moved to Paris, by giving her number. Gogol didn't like to think about the fact that Moushumi's connection to Graham persists through Astrid and Donald, that through them Moushumi had learned that Graham lived in Toronto now, was married and a father of twins. Back when Moushumi and Graham were together they had made a foursome with Donald and Astrid, renting cottages together in Vermont, time-shared in the Hamptons. They tried to incorporate Gogol into similar plans ; this summer, for example, they were thinking of renting a house on the coast of Brittany. Though Astrid and Donald had welcomed Gogol heartily into their lives, sometimes he'd the feeling that they still think she was with Graham. Once Astrid even called him Graham by mistake. No one had noticed except Gogol.
           Gogol ended up in the kitchen, where Donald was beginning to prepare spaghetti alle vongole.  He was handsome, with patrician features and swept-back, slightly greasy, light brown hair.
           "Hey there," Gogol said. "Need any help ?"
            "Nikhil. Welcome." Donald handed over the parsley. "be my guest. When are you guys moving to this neighborhood ?" he asked
           Gogol shrugged. He'd no interest in moving to Brooklyn, not in such proximity to Donald and Astrid, anyway. "I haven't really considered it. I prefer Manhattan. Moushumi does too."
           Donald shook his head. "You are wrong. Moushumi adores Brooklyn. We practically had to kick her out after the whole Graham thing."
          The mention of the name pricked him, deflated him as it always did.
          "She stayed here with you ?"
         "Right down the hall. She was here for a couple of months. She was a real mess. I've never seen anyone so devastated."
          He nodded. This was something else she'd never told him. He wondered why. He hated the house suddenly, aware that it was here, with Donald and Astrid, that she spent her darkest hour. That it was here she'd mourned for another man.
         "But you are much better for her," Donald concluded
         Gogol looked up, surprised.
          "Don't get me wrong, Graham was a great guy. But they were too alike somehow, too intense together."
          Gogol didn't find this observation particularly reassuring.
          Gogol was sent off with a stack of plates, a bunch of forks and knives. On his way he poked his head into the room down the hall where Moushumi had stayed.It was empty now, a drop cloth on the floor, a tangle of wires poking out of the center of the ceiling. He imagined her here in a bed in the corner, sullen, emaciated, a cloud of smoke over her head.  
   

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 90

                                         (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."

ABCDs ; THE Culture-Conflict. 89

                                                (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.

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 88

                                          (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


           He didn't feel jealous of her past, but it was only that sometimes Gogol wondered whether he represented some sort of capitulation or defeat. He didn't feel this always, just enough to nag at him,settling over his thoughts like a web. He looked round the apartment for reassurance, reminding  himself of the life they'd set up together and shared.


In March they went to Paris, Moshumi was invited to give a paper at a conference at the Sorbonne, and they decided to make a vacation out of it, Gogol arranged to take the week off from work.  Instead of staying in a hotel, they stayed in an apartment in the Bastille which belonged to a friend of Moushumi's, a male friend named Emanuel, a journalist, who was on holiday in Greece. The apartment was barely heated, minuscule, at the top of six steep flights of stairs, with a bathroom the size of a phone. There was a loft bed just inches from the ceiling, so that sex was a serious hazard. An espresso pot nearly filled  the narrow two-burner stove. Apart from two chairs at the dining table, there was no place to sit. The weather was raw, cheerless, the sky white, the Sun perpetually hidden from view. Paris is famous for such weather, Moushumi told him. He felt hidden himself ; men on the streets stared at Moushumi constantly, their glances lingering plainly, in spite of the fact that Gogol was at her side.
           It was his first time in Europe. The first time he saw the sort of architecture he'd read about for so many years, admired only in the pages of books and slides. For some reason, in Moushumi's company, he felt more apologetic than authentic. Though they journeyed together one day to Chartres, and another to Varsailles, he had the feeling she would rather be meeting friends for coffee, attending panels at the conference, eating at her favorite bistros, shopping at her favorite stores. From the beginning he felt useless. Moushumi made all the decisions, did all the talking. He was mute in the brasseries where they ate their lunches, mute in the shops where he gazed at beautiful belts, ties, paper, pens ; mute on the rainy afternoon they spent together at the d'Orsay. He was particularly mute when he and Moushumi had get together for dinners with groups of her French friends, drinking Pernods and feasting on couscous or choucroute, smoking and arguing around paper-covered tables. He struggled to grasp the topic of conversation ; the euro, Monica Lewinsky, Y2K - but everything else was a blur, indistinguishable from the clatter of plates, the drone of echoing, laughing voices. He watched them in the giant gilt-framed mirrors on the walls, their dark heads leaning close.
         Part of him knew it was a privilege, to be here with her who knew the city so well, but the part of him wanted simply to be tourist, looking at all the buildings in his list, getting lost. When he confessed his wish to her one night as they were walking back to the apartment, she said, "Why didn't you tell me that in the first place ?" and the next morning she instructed him to walk to the Metro station, had his photo taken in a booth, got a Carte Orange.. And so Gogol went sight  seeing alone, while she was off at her conference. His only companion was her Plan de Paris, a small guide, with a folded map attached to the back cover. And she warned him as was walking out the door, "Avoid ordering a cafe creme unless it's morning. The French never do that."
        It was quite cold outside, brisk air stinging his ears. He remembered his first lunch with Moushumi, the afternoon she'd dragged him to the hat store. He saw a young couple standing in a patch of sunlight on the side walk, clinging to each other for warmth. Suddenly he wanted to go back to the apartment, climb into the loft bed and forget about sightseeing, hold Moushumi in his arms. He wanted to lie with her for hours, as they did at the beginning, skipping meals, then wandering the streets at odd hours, desperate for something to eat. But he knew that she was seriously preparing for her paper presentation at the end of the week, and he knew she would not be roused from her task. He consulted his map, wandered along the famous boulevards, through the Marais, arrived at the Picasso Museum, after many wrong turns. He sat on a bench and sketched the town houses in the Place des Vosges, walked along the desolate gravel paths in the Luxembourg Gardens. He photographed the narrow sidewalks, the dark cobblestone streets, the mansard roofs, the ancient shuttered buildings of pale beige stone. All of it he found beautiful beyond description, and yet at the same time it depressed him that none of it was new to Moushumi, that she'd seen it all hundreds of times. He understood why she lived for so long as she did, away from her family, away from anyone she knew. Her French friends adored her, waiters and shopkeepers adored her.She both fitted in perfectly and yet remained slightly novel. Here Moushumi had reinvented herself, without misgivings, without guilt. He admired her, even resented her a little, for having moved to another country and made a separate life. He realized that this was what their parents had done in America. What he, in all likelihood, would never do. 

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 87

                                              (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


            The nuptial night formalities and procedures were ignored before they completed the first official lovemaking. Afterward they opened up champagne and sat together on the bed, going through the large shopping bag full of cards with personal checks inside them. The checks had been given to them by their parents' hundreds of friends. They registered the gifts on numerous sheets of hotel stationery. Most of the checks had been written out to Mr. and Mrs. Nikhil and Moushumi Ganguli. Some were written to Gogol and Moushumi Gogol. The amounts were for one hundred and one dollars, two hundred and one dollars, occasionally three hundred and one dollars, as Bengalis consider it inauspicious to give round figures. Gogol added up the the subtotals on each page, "Seven thousand thirty-five," he annonced.
          "Not bad, Mr.Ganguli."
          "I would say we've made a killing, Mrs.Ganguli."
           Only she was not Mrs.Ganguli, Moushumi had kept her last name. She didn't adopt Ganguli, not even with a hyphen. Her own last name, Mazoomdar, was already a mothful. With a hyphenated surname, she would no longer fit into the window of a business envelope. Besides, by now she had begun to publish under Moushumi Mazoomdar, the name printed at the top of footnoted articles on French feminist theory in a number of prestigious academic journals that always managed to give Gogol a paper cut when he tried to read them. Though he'd not admitted this to her, he'd hoped, the day they'd filled out the application for their marriage licence, that she might consider otherwise, as a tribute to his father if nothing else. But the thought of changing her last name to Ganguli had never crossed Moushumi's mind. When relatives from India continued to address letters and cards to "Mrs.Moushumi Ganguli," she would shake her head and sigh.


They put the money toward a security deposit for a one-bedroom apartment in the Twenties, off Third Avenue. It was slightly more than they could comfortably afford, but they were won over by the maroon awning, the part-time doorman, a lobby paved with pumpkin-colored tiles. They were not thinking of children until Moushumi finished her dissertation. In their new home, they entertained together on occasion, throwing the sorts of parties their parents never had, mixing martinis in a stainless-steel shaker for a few of the architects at Gogol's work or Moushumi's graduate student friends at NYU.. He transferred the money in his bank account over to hers, and had common account with both their names printed on checks. The pass code they decided on for their ATM card, Lulu, was the name of French restaurant where they had their first meal together. They ate most nights side by side on the stools at the kitchen counter or at the coffee table, watching TV. They made Indian food infrequently ; usually it was pasta or broiled fish or take-out from the Thai restaurant down the block. But sometimes, on a Sunday, they took train out to Queens and had brunch at Jackson Diner, piling their plates with tandoori chicken and pakoras and kabobs, and shop afterward for basmati rice and the spices that needed replenishing. Sometimes they went to one of the hole-in-the-wall tea shops to drink tea or to to eat sweet yogurt or haleem, served by Bengali waitress. After dinner they watch TV, as Moushumi wrote out thank-you cards to all their parents' friends for the gifts. These were the things that made him feel married. Otherwise it was the same, only now they were always together. At night she slept beside him, always rolling onto her stomach, waking up every morning with a pillow pressed over her head.
          Occasionally, in the apartment, he found odd remnants of her life before he had appeared in it, her life with Graham ; the inscription to the two of them in a book of poems, a post card from Provence stuffed into the back of a dictionary, addressed to the apartment they'd secretly shared. Once, unable to stop himself, he'd walked to this address during his lunch break, wondering what her life had been like back then.
  

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 86

                                           (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahir


             Gogol had proposed to her on her birthday, giving her a diamond solitaire in addition to the hat he had bought for her after their second date, by taking her to a country inn for the weekend. She had been overwhelmed that he remembered it all time. "I can't believe the store still had it," she said. From the very beginning it was safely assumed by their families, and soon enough by themselves, that as longs as they liked each other their courtship would not lag and they would surely wed.
           She emerged out of the bathroom in a snow-white terry-cloth hotel robe. She had taken off her make-up and her jewels, the vermilion which she had stained her part at the end of the ceremony had been rinsed from her hair. Her feet were free of three-inch heels she'd worn as soon as the religious part of the wedding was over. This was the way he found her most ravishing, unadorned, that she was willing to look for no one but him. She sat on the edge of the mattress, applied some blue cream from a tube to her calves and the bottom of her feet. She had massaged the cream onto his own feet once, the day they'd walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, causing them to tingle and go cold. And then she lied against the pillows, and looked at him, and put out a hand. Underneath the robe he expected to find some lingerie. But she was naked, her skin smelling, a little too intensely, of some sort of berry. He kissed the dark hair on her forearms, the prominent collarbone, which she'd once confessed to him was her favorite part of her body. They made love in spite of exhaustion, her damp hair limp and cool against his face, the rose petals sticking on to their elbows and shoulders and calves. He breathed in the scent of her skin, still unable to fathom that they were husband and wife. When would it sink in ? Even then he didn't feel fully alone with her, half waiting someone to knock on the door and tell them how to go about things. And though he desired her as much as ever, he was relieved when they were through, lying naked side by side, knowing that nothing else was expected of them, that finally they could relax.