ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 32

                                            (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


             They were surprised, in the summer, to learn that their father had planned a trip for them, first to Delhi to visit an uncle, and then to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. It would be Gogol and Sonia's first journey outside of Calcutta, their first time on an Indian train. They departed from Howrah, that immense, soaring, echoing station, where barefoot coolies in red cotton shirts piled the Ganguli's Samsonite luggage on their heads, where entire families slept, covered, in rows on the floor. Gogol was aware of the dangers involved ; his cousins had told him about the bandits that lurk in Bihar, so that his father wore a special garment under his shirt, with hidden pockets to carry cash, and his mother and Sonia remove their gold jewels. On the platform they walked from compartment to compartment, looking for their four names on the passenger list pasted outside wall of the train.. they settled on their blue berths, the top two swinging down from the walls when it was time to sleep and held in place by sliding latches during the day.A conductor gave them their bedding, heavy white cotton sheets and thin woolen blankets. In the morning they looked at the scenery through the tinted window of their air-conditioned car. As a result, the view, no matter how bright the day, was gloomy and gray.


          They were unaccustomed, after all these months, to being just four of them. For a few days, in Agra, which was as foreign to Ashima and Ashoke as it was to Gogol and Sonia, they were tourists, staying at a hotel with a swimming pool, sipping bottled water, eating in restaurants with forks and spoons, paying by credit card. Ashima and Ashoke spoke in broken Hindi, and when young boys approached to sell postcards or marble trinkets Gogol and Sonia were forced to say, "English, please." Gogol noticed in certain restaurants that they were the only Indians apart from the serving staff. For two days they wandered around the marble mausoleum that glows gray and yellow and pink and orange depending on the light. They admired its perfect symmetry and posed for photographs beneath the minarets from which tourists used to leap to their deaths. "I want a picture here, but the two of us," Ashima said to Ashoke as they wandered around the massive plinth, and so under the blinding Agra sun, overlooking the dried-up Yamuna, Ashoke taught Gogol how to use the Nikon, how to focus and advance the film. A tour guide told them that after the Taj was completed, each of the builders, twenty-two thousand men, had his thumbs cut off so that the structure could never be built again. That night in the hotel Sonia woke up screaming that her own thumbs were missing. "I's just legend," her parents told her. But the idea of it haunted Gogol as well. No other building they'd seen had affected him so powerfully.  Their second day at the  Taj he attempted to sketch the dome and a portion of the facade, but that building's grace eluded him and he threw the attempt away. Instead, he immersed himself in the guidebook, studying the history of Mughal architecture, learning the succession of emperors' names ; Babur, Humayun, Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, Aurangzeb. At Agra Fort he and his family looked through the window of the room where Shah Jahan was imprisoned by his own son. At Sikandra, Akbar's tomb, they gazed at gilded frescoes in the entry way, chipped, ransacked, burned, the gems gouged out with penknives, graffiti etched in to the stone. At Fatehpur Sikri, Akbar's abandoned sandstone city, they wandered among courtyards and cloisters as parrots and hawks flew overhead, and in Salim Chishti's tomb Ashima tied red threads for good luck to a marble lattice screen.

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 31

                                             (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


           From the airport they were ushered into waiting taxis and down VIP Road, past a colossal landfill and into the heart of North Calcutta. Gogol was accustomed to the scenery, yet he still stared, at the short, dark men pulling the rickshaws and the crumbling buildings side by side with fretwork balconies, hammers and sickles painted on their facades. He stared at the commuters who cling precariously to trams and buses, threatening at any moment to spill on to the street, and at the families who boiled rice and shampooed  their hair on the side walk. At his mother's flat on Amherst Street, where his uncle's family lived now, neighbors looked from their windows and roofs as Gogol and his family emerged from the taxi. They stood out in their bright, expensive sneakers, American haircuts, backpacks slung over one shoulder. Once inside, he and Sonia were given cups of Horlick's, plates of syrupy, spongy rossogollas for which they had no appetite but which they dutifully ate. They had their feet traced onto pieces pf paper, and a servant was sent to Bata to bring back rubber slippers for them to wear indoors. The suitcases were unlocked and unbound and all the gifts were unearted, admired and tried on for size.


          In the days that followed they adjusted once again to sleeping under a mosquito net, bathing by pouring tin cups of water over their heads. In the morning Gogol watched his cousins put on their white and blue school uniforms and strap water bottles across their chests. His aunt, Uma Maima, preside in the kitchen all morning, harassing the servants as they squat by the drain scouring the dirty dishes with ash, or pound heaps of spices on slabs that resemble tombstones. At the Ganguli's house in Alipore, he saw the room in which they would have lived had his parents remained in India, the ebony four-poster bed on which they would have slept all together, the armoire in which they would have stored their clothes.


         Instead of renting an apartment of their own, they spent eight months with their various relatives, shuttling from home to home. They stayed in Ballygunge, Tollygunge, Salt Lake, Budge Budge, ferried by endless bumpy taxi rides back and forth through the city. Every few weeks there was a different bed to sleep in, another family to live with, a new schedule to learn. Depending on where they were, they ate sitting on red clay or cement or terrazzo floors, or at marble-topped tables too cold to rest their elbows on. Their cousins and aunts and uncles asked them about life in America, about what they eat for breakfast, about their friends at school. They looked at the pictures of their house at Pemberon Road. "Carpets in the bathroom," they wondered. His father kept busy with his research, delivering lectures at Jadavpur University. His mother shopped in the New Market and went to movies and saw her old school friends. For eight months she did not set her foot in a kitchen. She wandered freely around a city in which Gogol, in spite of his many visits, had no sense of direction. Within three months Sonia had read of each of her Laura Ingalls Wilder books a dozen times. Gogol occasionally opened up one of his textbooks. Though he had brought his sneakers with him, hoping to keep his cross-country training, it was impossible, on those cracked, congested, chock-a-block streets, to run. The one day he tried, Uma Maima, watching from the rooftop, sent a servant to follow him so that Gogol did not get lost.


         On Armhest street, on the roof one day, with its view of Howrah Bridge in the distance, Gogol smoked a bidi tightly rolled in olive green leaves with one of the servants. Of all the people who surrounded them at practically all times, Sonia was his only ally, the only person to speak and sit and see as he did. While the rest of the household slept, he and Sonia fought over Walkman, over the melting collection of tapes Gogol recorded back in his room at home. From time to time, they privately admitted to excruciating cravings, for hamburgers or a slice of pepperoni pizza or a cold glass of milk. 

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 30

                                               (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


                  After barely four months of tenth class, after an early supper of rice and boiled potatoes and eggs that his mother insisted they ate even though they would be served another supper on the plane, he was off, geometry and U.S. history books packed into his suitcase, which was locked, along with the others, with padlocks and bound with ropes, labeled with address slips of his father's house in Alipore. Gogol always found labels unsettling, the sight of them making him feel that his family didn't live in Pemberton Road. They departed Christmas Day, driving with their massive collection of  luggage to Logan when they should be home opening gifts. Sonia was morose, running a slight fever from her typhoid shot, still expecting, when she entered the living room in the morning, to see a tree trimmed with lights. But the only thing in the living room was debris : the price tags of all the gifts that they had packed for their relatives, plastic hangers, cardboard from shirts. They shivered as they left home, without coats or gloves, they wouldn't need them where they were going, and it would be August by the time they return. The house had been rented to some American students his father had found through the university, an unmarried couple named Barbara and Steve. In the airport Gogol stood in the check-in line with his father. "Four in the family," his father said when it was their turn, producing two U.S. passports and two Indian ones. "Two Hindu meals please."


           On the plane Gogol was seated several rows behind his parents and Sonia, in another section altogether. His parents were distressed by this, but Gogol was secretly pleased to be on his own. When the stewardess approached with her cart of beverages he tried his luck and asked for a Bloody Mary, tasting the metallic bite of alcohol for the first time in his life. They flew first to London, and then to Calcutta via Dubai. When they flew over the Alps, his father got out of seat to take pictures of the snow-capped peaks through the window. On past trips, it used to thrill Gogol that they were flying over so many countries ; again and again he would trace their itinerary on the map in the seat pocket below his tray and felt adventurous. But this time it frustrated him that it was to Calcutta that they always went. Apart from visiting his relatives there was nothing to do in Calcutta. He'd already been to the  planetarium and the Zoo Gardens and the Victoria Memorial a dozen times. They had never been Disneyland or the Grand Canyon. Only once, when their connecting flight in London was delayed, did they leave the Heathrow  and took a double-decker bus tour of the city.


            On the final leg of the trip there were only a few non-Indians left on the plane. Bengali conversations filled the cabin, his mother had already exchanged addresses with the family across the aisle. Before landing she slipped into the bathroom and changed, miraculously in that minuscule space, into a fresh sari. A final meal was served, an herbed omelette topped with a slice of grilled tomato. Gogol savored each mouthful, aware that for the next eight moths nothing would taste quite the same. The wheels touched the ground, the aircraft was sprayed with disinfectant, and they descended onto the tarmac of Dum Dum Airport, breathing in the sour, stomach-turning, early morning air. They stopped to wave back at the row of relatives waving madly from the observation deck, little cousins propped up on the uncles' shoulders. As usual the Gangulis were relieved to learn that all their luggage had arrived, together and unmolested, and relieved further still when the customs didn't make a fuss. Once they were officially there, no longer in transit, swallowed by hugs and kisses and pinched cheeks and smiles. There were endless names Gogol and Sonia must remember to say, not aunt this and uncle that but terms far more specific : mashi and pishi, mama and maima, kaku and jethu, to signify whether they were related to their mother's or their father's side, by marriage or by blood. Ashima, now Monu, wept with relief, and Ashoke, now Mithu, kissed his brothers on both cheeks, held their heads in his hands. Gogol and Sonia knew these people, but they didn't feel close to them as their parents did. Within minutes, before their eyes Ashoke and Ashima slipped into bolder, less complicated versions of themselves, their voices louder, their smiles wider revealing a confidence Gogol and Sonia never saw on Pemberton Road. "I'm scared, Goggles," Sonia whispered to her brother in English, seeking his hand and refusing to let go.  

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 29

                                                 (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


             From the little he knew about Russian writers, it dismayed him that his parents chose the weirdest namesake. Leo or Anton, he could have lived with. Alexander, shortened to Alex, he would have greatly preferred. But Gogol sounded ludicrous to his ears, lacking dignity or gravity. What dismayed him most was the irrelevance of it all. Gogol, he was tempted to tell his father on more than one occasion, was his father's favorite author, not his. Then again, it was his own fault. He could have been known, at school at least, as Nikhil. That one day, that first day of kindergarten, which he no longer remembered, could have changed every thing. He could have been Gogol only fifty percent of the time. Like his parents when they went to Calcutta, he could have an alternative identity, a B-side to the self. "We tried," his parents explained to friends and relatives who asked why their son lacked a good name, "but he would only respond to Gogol. The school insisted." His parents would add, "we live in a country where a president is called Jimmy. Really, there was nothing we could do."


         "Thanks again," Gogol told his father now. He shut the cover and swings his legs over the edge of the bed, to put the book away on his shelves. But his father took the opportunity to sit beside him on the bed. For a moment he rested a hand on Gogol's shoulder. The boy's body , in recent months, had grown tall, nearly as tall as Ashoke's. The childhood pudginess had vanished from his face. The voice had begun to deepen, was slightly husky now. It occurred to Ashoke that he and son probably wore the same size shoe. Ashoke noticed a scattered down emerging on his son's upper lip. An Adam's apple was permanent on his neck. The pale hands, like Ashima's, are long and thin. Ashoke wondered how closely Gogol resembled himself at this age. But there were no photographs to document Ashoke's childhood ; not until his passport, not until his life in America, did visual documentation exist.


          The following year Ashoke was up for a sabbatical, and Gogol and Sonia were informed that they would be going to Calcutta for eight months. When his parents told him, one evening after dinner, Gogol thought they're joking. But then they told them that the tickets had already been booked, the plans already made. "Think of it as a long vacation," Ashoke and Ashima said to their crestfallen children. But Gogol knew that eight months was no vacation. He dreaded the thought of eight months without a room of his own, without his records and his stereo, without friends. In Gogol's opinion, eight months in Calcutta was practically like moving there, a possibility that, until now, had never even remotely crossed his mind. Besides, he was a sophomore now. "What about school ?" he pointed out. His parents reminded him that in the past his teachers had never minded Gogol missing his school now and again. They had given him math and language workbooks that he'd ignored, and when he returned, a month or two later, they praised him for keeping up with things. But Gogol' guidance counselor expressed concern when Gogol informed him that he would be missing the entire second half of his tenth grade. A meeting was called with Ashima and Ashoke to discuss the options. The guidance counselor asked if it was possible to enroll Gogol in an international school.But the nearest one was in Delhi, over eight hundred miles from Calcutta. The guidance counselor suggested that perhaps Gogol could join his parents later, after the school year ended, stayed with a relative until June. "We have no relatives in this country," Ashima informed the guidance counselor. "That is why we are going to India in the first place."


    

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 28

                                                     (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


             The presents of the birthday party were opened when the guests were gone. Gogol received several dictionaries, several calculators, several Cross pen-and-pencil sets, several ugly sweaters. His parents gave him an Instamatic camera, a new sketchbook, colored pencils and the mathematical pen he'd asked for, and twenty dollars to spend as he wished. Sonia had made him a card with Magic Markers, on paper she'd ripped out of one of his own sketchbooks, which said "Happy birthday Goggles," the name she insists on calling him instead of Dada. His mother set aside the things he didn't like, which was most everything, to give to his cousins the next time they went to India. Later that night he was alone in his room, listening to side 3 of the White Album on his parents' cast-off RCA turntable. The album was a present from his American birthday party, given to him by one of his friends at school. Born when the band was near death, Gogol was a passionate devotee of John, Paul, George, and Ringo. In recent years he had collected nearly all their albums, and the only thing tacked to the bulletin board on the back of his door was Lennon's obituary, already yellow and brittle, clipped from the Boston Globe. He sat cross-legged on the bed, hunched over the lyrics, when he heard a knock on the door.


           "Come in," he hollered, expecting to be Sonia in her pajamas, asking if she could borrow his Magic 8 Ball or his Rubik's Cube. He was surprised to see his father, standing in stocking feet, a small potbelly visible beneath his oat-colored sweater vest, his mustache turning gray. Gogol was especially surprised to see a gift in his father's hands. His father had never given him birthday presents apart from whatever his mother bought, but this year, his father said, walking across the room to where Gogol was sitting, he had something special.The gift was covered in red-and-green-and-gold-striped paper left over from Christmas the year before, taped awkwardly at the seams. It was obviously a book, thick, hardcover, wrapped by his father's own hands. Gogol lifted the paper slowly, but in spite of that the tape left a scab. The Short Stories of Nikolai Gogol, the jacket said. Inside, the price had been snipped away on the diagonal.


           "I ordered it from the bookstore, just for you," his father said, his voice raised in order to be heard over the music. "It's difficult to find in hardcover these days. It's a British publication, a very small press. It took four months to arrive. I hope you like it."


          Gogol leaned over toward the stereo to turn the volume down a bit. He would have preferred The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or even another copy of The Hobbit to replace the one he lost last summer in Calcutta, left on the rooftop of his feather's house in Alipore and snatched away by crows. In spite of his father's occasional suggestions, he had never been inspired to read a word of Gogol, or any Russian writer, for that matter. He had never been told why he was really named Gogol. 


         "Thanks , Baba," Gogol said, eager to return to his lyrics. Lately he'd been lazy, addressing his parents in English though they continued to speak to him in Bengali. His father was still standing there in his room, watching expectantly, so Gogol flipped through the book. He looked at the picture at the front, on a smoother paper, a pencil drawing of the author. He couldn't find any resemblance of himself with the picture on the book, Nikolai Gogol.  


         For by then, he had come to hate questions pertaining to his name, hated having constantly to explain that his name did not mean anything "in Indian." He also hated having to wear a name-tag on his sweater at Model United Nations Day at school. He hated even signing his name at the bottom of his drawings in art class. He hated that his name was both absurd and obscure, that it was neither Indian nor American but of all things Russian. At times his name, an entirely shapeless and weightless, managed to distress him physically, like the scratchy tag of a shirt he had been forced permanently to wear. At times he wished he could disguise it, shorten it somehow, the way the other Indian boy in his school, Jayadev, had gotten people to call him Jay. But Gogol, already short and catchy, resisted mutation. Other boys his age had begun to court girls already, asking them to go to the movies or the pizza parlor, but he could not imagine saying, "Hi, it's Gogol" under potentially romantic circumstances. He couldn't imagine this at all.
 

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 27

                                             (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


            It was Gogol's fourteenth Birth day that they celebrated in 1982 ; it was another occasion for his parents to throw a party to their Bengali friends. His own school friends were invited the previous day, a tame affair, with pizzas that his father had picked upon his way home from work. Gogol watched a basketball game along with his friends on television. for the first time in his life he had said no to the frosted cake, the box of harlequin ice cream, the hot dogs in buns, the balloons and streamers taped on the walls. The other celebration, the Bengali one, was held on the closest Saturday to the actual date of his birth. As usual his mother cooked days beforehand, cramming the refrigerator with stacks of foil-covered trays. She made sure to prepare his favorite things : lamb curry with lots of potatoes, luchis, thick channa dal with swollen brown raisins, pineapple chutney, sandeshes molded out of saffron-tinted ricotta cheese. All this was less stressful to her than the task of feeding a handful of American children, half of whom always claimed they were allergic to milk, all of whom refused to eat the crusts of their bread.


          Close to forty guests came from three different states. Women were dressed in saris far more dazzling than the pants and polo shirts their husbands wore. A group of men sat in a circle on the floor and immediately started a game of poker. These were his mashis and meshos, his honorary aunts and uncles. They all brought their children, his parents' crowd did not believe in baby-sitters. Gogol was the oldest  child in the group ; he was too old to be playing hide-and-seek with eight year-old Sonia and her pony-tailed , gap-toothed friends, but not old enough to sit in the living room and discuss Reaganomics with his father and rest of the husbands, or to sit around the dining room table, gossiping, with his mother and the wives. The closest person to him in age was a girl named Moushumi, whose family recently moved to Massachusetts from England, and whose thirteenth birthday was celebrated in a similar fashion a few months ago. But Gogol and Moushumi had nothing to say each other. Moushumi sat cross-legged on the floor, in glasses with maroon plastic frames and a puffy polka-dotted headband holding back her thick, chin-length hair In her lap was a kelly green Bermuda bag with pink piping and wooden handles ; inside the bag was a was a tube of 7UP-flavored lip balm that she drew from time to time across her mouth. 
She was reading a well-thumbed paperback copy of Pride and Prejudice while the other children, Gogol included, watch The Love Boat and Fantasy Island, piled together on top and around the sides of his parents' bed. Occasionally one of the children asked Moushumi to say something, anything, in her English accent. Sonia asked if she'd ever seen Princess Diana on the street. "I detest American television," Moushumi eventually declared to every one's delight, then wandered into the hallway to continue her reading.    

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 26

                                                           (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)

             Gogol's family made it a point of driving into Cambridge with the children when the Apu Trilogy played at the Orson Welles, or when there was a Kathakali dance performance or a sitar recital at Memorial Hall. 
           when Gogol was in the third grade, they sent him to Bengali language and culture lessons every other Saturday, held in the home of one of their friends. For Ashima and Ashoke it sounded strange that their children were conversing in a language that still at times confounded them, in accents they were accustomed not to trust. In Bengali classes, the children were not showing much interest to learn instead they preferred to attend a ballet or softball practice. Gogol hated it because it kept him from attending every other session of Saturday-morning  drawing classes he'd enrolled in, at the suggestion of his art teacher.


           As a young boy he did not mind his name. He recognized pieces of himself in road signs : GO LEFT, GO RIGHT, GO SLOW. He was told that he was named after a famous Russian author born in the previous century. The substitute teachers always paused, looking apologetic when they arrived at his name on the roaster, forcing Gogol to call out, before even being summoned, "That's me," teachers in the school system knew not to give it a second thought. After a year or two, the students no longer teased him saying "Giggle" or "Gargle" "Gogol is an outstanding student, curious and cooperative," his teachers wrote year after year on report cards.


         As for his last name, Ganguli, by the time he was ten he had been to Calcutta three more times, twice in summer and once during Durga pujo, and from the most recent trip he still remembered the sight of it etched respectably into the white-washed exterior of his paternal grandparents' house. He was astonished to see six pages full of Gangulis, three columns to a page, in the Calcutta telephone directory.  On taxi rides through the city, went to visit the various homes of his relatives, his father had pointed  out the name, Ganguli, on the awnings of confectioners, and stationers, and opticians. He had told Gogol that Ganguli was a legacy of the British, an anglicized way of pronouncing his real surname, Gangopadhyay.


       Back home on Pemberton Road, he helped his father paste individual golden letters from a rack in the hardware store, spelling out GANGULI on one side of their mail box. One morning, the day after Halloween, Gogol discovered, on his way to the bus stop, that it had been shortened to GANG, with the word GREEN scrawled in pencil following it. His ears burnt at the sight, and he ran back into the house, sickened, certain of the insult his father would feel. Though it was his last name, too, something told Gogol that the desecration was intended for his parents more than Sonia and him. For by now he was aware, in stores, of cashiers smirking at his parents' accents, and of salesmen who preferred to direct their conversation to Gogol, as though his parents were either incompetent or deaf. But his father was unaffected at such moments, just as he was unaffected by the mailbox. "It's only boys having fun," he told Gogol, flicking the matter away with the back of a hand, and that evening they drove back to the hardware store, to buy the missing letters again.