(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
It was the day before Christmas. Ashima Ganguli sat at her kitchen table, making mincemeat croquettes for a party she was throwing that evening. There were one of her specialties, something her guests had come to expect, handed to them on small plates within minutes of their arrival. Alone, she managed an assembly line of preparation. First she forced warm boiled potatoes through a ricer. Carefully she shaped a bit of potato around a spoonful of cooked ground lamb, as uniformly as the white of a hard-boiled egg encased its yolk. She dipped each of the croquettes, about the size and shape of a billiard ball, into a bowl of beaten eggs, then coated them on a plate of bread crumbs, shaking off the excess in her cupped palms. Finally she stacked the croquettes on a large circular tray, a sheet of wax paper between each layer. She stopped to count how many she'd made so far. She estimated three for each adult, one or two for each of the children. She reviewed the exact number of guests once more, saw that an extra dozen of them arranged on the plate, to be safe. She poured a fresh heap of bread crumbs on the plate, their color and texture reminding her of sand on a beach. She remembered Gogol and Sonia helping her on such occasions, when they were children.
This would be the last party Ashima would host at Pemberton Road, the first since her husband's funeral. The house in which she had lived for the past twenty-seven years, which she had occupied longer than any other in her life, had been recently sold, a Realtor's sign stuck into the lawn. The buyers were an American family, the Walkers, a young professor new to the university where her husband used to work, and a wife and daughter.. The Walkers were planning renovations. Listening to their plans of renovation, Ashima had felt a moment's panic, a protective instinct, wanting to retract her offer, wanting the house to remain as it had always been, as her husband had last seen it. But this had been sentimentality speaking. It was foolish for her to hope that the golden letters spelling GANGULI on the mailbox would not be peeled off, replaced. That Sonia's name, written in Magic Marker on the inside of her bedroom door, would not be sanded, restained. That the pencil makings on the wall by the linen closet, where Askoke used record his children's height on their birthdays, would not be painted over.
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