ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 39

                                              (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


             At the appointed time, his case was called. He entered a room and sat on an empty wooden bench at the back. The judge, a middle-aged, heavyset black woman wearing half-moon glasses, sat opposite, on a dais. The clerk, a thin young woman with bobbed hair, asked for his application, reviewing it before handing it to the judge. There was nothing decorating the room apart from the Massachusetts state and American flags and an oil portrait of a judge. "Gogol Ganguli," the clerk said, motioning for Gogol to approach the dais, and as eager as he was to go through with it, he was aware, with a twinge of sadness, that this was the last time in his life he would hear the name uttered in an official context. In spite of his parents' sanction he felt that he was overstepping them, correcting a mistake they've made.
          "What is the reason you wish to change your name, Mr.Ganguli ?" the judge asked.
          The question caught him off-guard, and for several seconds he had no idea what to say her "Personal reasons," he said eventually.
          The judge looked at him, leaning forward, her chin cupped in her hand. "Would you care to be more specific ?"
          At first he said nothing, unprepared to give any further explanation. He wondered whether to tell the judge the whole convoluted story that his parents couldn't get the good name as was to be proposed by their grand parents in-time, to be furnished in his birth-certificate, and about pet names and good names, about what had happened on the first day of kindergarten. But instead he took a deep breath and told the people in the courtroom what he had never dared admit to his parents. "I hate the name Gogol," he said. "I've always hated it."
           "Very well," the judge said, stamping and signing the form, then returning it to the clerk. He was told that the notice of the new name must be given to all other agencies, that it was his responsibility to notify the Registry of Motor Vehicles, banks, schools. He ordered three certified copies of the name change decree, two for himself, and one for his parents to keep in their safe-deposit box. No one accompanied him on this legal rite of passage, and when he stepped out of the room no one was waiting to commemorate the moment with flowers and Polaroid snapshots and balloons. He emerged into the muggy afternoon, perspiring, still partly convinced it was a dream. He took  the T across the river to Boston. He walked with his blazer clasped by a finger over his shoulder, across the Common, through the Public Garden, over the bridges and along the curving paths that rim the lagoon.
             He wondered if this was how an obese person  to become thin, for a prisoner to walk free. "I'm Nikhil," he wanted to tell the people who were walking their dogs, pushing their children in strollers. He wandered up Newbury Street as rain drops began to fall. He dashed into Newbury Comics, bought himself London Calling and Talking Heads : 77 with his birthday money, a Che poster for his dorm room. He pocketed an application for a student American Express card, grateful that his first credit card would not say Gogol in raised letters at the bottom. "I'm Nikhil," he was tempted to tell the attractive, nose-ringed cashier with dyed black hair and skin as pale as paper. The cashier handed him his change and looked past him to the next customer, but it didn't matter ; instead he thought of how many more women he could now approach, for the rest of life, with this same unobjectionable, uninteresting fact. Still, for the next three weeks, even though his new driving licence says "Nikhil," he was aware that every one he knew in the world still call him Gogol.

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 38

                                               (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


                That night at the dinner table, Gogol brought it up with his parents. It was one thing for Gogol to be the name penned in calligraphy on his high school diploma, and printed  below his picture  in the year book, he'd begun. It was one thing, even for it to be typed on his applications to five Ivy League colleges, as well as to Stanford and Berkeley. But engraved, four years from now, on a bachelor of arts degree ? Written at the top of resume ? Centered on a business card ? It would be the name his parents picked out for him, he assured them, the good name they'd chosen for him when he was five.
           "What's done is done," his father had said. "It will be a hassle. Gogol has, in effect, become your good name."
            "It's too complicated now," his mother said, agreeing. "you're too old."
             "I'm not," he persisted. "I don't get it. Why did you have to give me a pet name in the first place ? What's the point ?"
            "It's our way, Gogol," his mother maintained. "It's what Bengalis do."
             "But it's not even a Bengali name."
            He told his parents what he'd learned in Mr. Lawson's class, about Gogol's lifelong unhappiness, his mental instability, about how he had starved himself to death. "Did you know all this stuff about him ?" he asked.
           "You forgot to mention that he was also a genius," his father added.
            "I don't get it. How could you guys name me after someone so strange ? No one takes me seriously," Gogol said.
             "Who ? Who does not take you seriously ?" his father wanted to know, lifting his finger from his plate, looking up at him.
              "People," he said, lying to his parents. For his father had a point, the only person who didn't take Gogol seriously, the only person who tormented him, the only person chronically aware of and afflicted by the embarrassment of his name, the only person who constantly questioned it and wished it were otherwise, was Gogol. And yet he'd continued, saying that they should be glad, that his official name would be Bengali, not Russian.
             "I don't know, Gogol," his mother had said, shaking her head. "I really don't know." She got up to clear the dishes. Sonia slinked away, up to her room. Gogol remained at the table with his father. They sat there together while his mother was washing the plates.
             "Then change it," his father said simply, quietly, after a while.
             "Really ?"
             "In America anything is possible. Do as you wish."
             And so he had obtained a Commonwealth of Massachusetts change-of-name form, to submit along with a certified copy of his birth certificate and a check to the Middlesex Probate and Family court. He'd brought form to his father, who had glanced at it only briefly before signing his consent, with the same resignation with which he signed a check or a credit card receipt, his eyebrows slightly raised over his glasses, inwardly calculating the loss. He'd filled out the rest of the form in his own room, late at night when his family was asleep. He wrote in the new name he wished to adopt, then signed the form with his old signature. Only one part of the form had given him pause : in approximately three lines, he was asked to provide a reason for seeking the change. For nearly an hour he had sat there, wondering what to write. He'd left it blank in the end.

           

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 37

                                               (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


           Plenty of people changed their names : actors, writers, revolutionaries, transvestites,. In history class, Gogol had learned that European immigrants had their names changed at Ellis Island, that slaves renamed themselves once they were emancipated. Though Gogol did not know it, even Nikolai Gogol renamed himself, simplifying his surname at the age of twenty-two from Gogol-Yanovsky to Gogol upon publication in the Literary Gazette. (He had also published under the name  Yanov, and once signed his work "OOOO" in the honor of four o's in his full name.)
          One day in the summer of 1986, in the frantic weeks before moving away from his family, before his freshman year at Yale was about to begin, Gogol Ganguli did the same. He rode the commuter rail into Boston, switching to the Green Line at North Station, getting out at Lechmere. The area was somewhat familiar ; he had been to Lechmere countless times with his family, and he had been to the Museum of science on field trips from school. But he had never been to this neighborhood on his own, and in spite of the directions he'd written on a sheet of paper he got briefly lost on his way to the Middlesex Probate and Family Court. He wore a blue oxford shirt, khakis, a camel-colored corduroy blazer bought for his college interviews that was too warm for the sultry day. Knotted around his neck was his only tie, maroon with yellow stripes on the diagonal. By now Gogol was just shy of six feet tall, his body slender, his thick brown-black hair slightly in need of cut. His face was lean, intelligent, suddenly handsome, the bones more prominent, the pale gold skin clean-shaven and clear He had inherited Ashima's eyes, large, penetrating, with bold, elegant brows, and shared with Ashoke the slight bump at the top of his nose.
         The courthouse was an imposing, old, pillared brick building occupying a full city block, but the  entrance was off to the side, down a set of steps. Inside, Gogol emptied his pockets and stepped through a metal detector, as if he were at an airport, about to embark on a journey. He was soothed by the chill of the air-conditioning, by the beautifully carved plaster ceiling, by the voices that echo pleasantly in the marbled interior. This was a place, he gathered, that people come to seek divorces, dispute wills. A man at the information booth told him to wait upstairs, in an area filled with round tables, where people sat eating their lunch. Gogol sat impatiently, one long leg jiggling up and down. He had forgotten to bring a book to read and so he picked up a discarded section of the Globe, skimming an article in the "Arts" section about Andrew Wyeth's Helga paintings. Eventually he began to practice his new signature in the margins of the paper. He tried it in various styles, his hand unaccustomed to the angles of the N, the dotting of the two i's. He wondered how many times he had written his old name, at the tops of how many tests and quizzes, how many homework assignments, how many yearbook inscriptions to friends. How many times does a person write his name in a life time ; a million ? Two million ?
          The idea to change his name had first occurred ti him a few months ago. He was sitting in the waiting room of his dentist, flipping through an issue of Reader's Digest. He'd been turning the pages at random until he came to an article that caused him to stop. The article was called "Second Baptism." "Can you identify the following famous people ?" was written beneath the headlines. A list of names followed and, at the bottom of the page, printed in tiny letters upside down, the famous personalities they corresponded to. The only one he guessed correctly was Robert Zimmerman, Bob Dylan's real name. He had no idea that Leon Trotsky was born Lev  Davidovich Bronstein. That Gerald Ford's name was Leslie Lynch King, Jr. ; they had all renamed themselves, the article said, adding that it was a right belonging to every American citizen. He read that tens of thousands of Americans had their names changed each year. All it took was a legal petition, the article had said. And suddenly he envisioned "Gogol" added to the list of names, "Nikhil" printed in tiny letters up side down.    

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 36

                                                     (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


            Gogol did not date anyone in high school. He suffered quiet crushes, which he admitted to no one, on this girl or that girl with whom he was already friends. He did not attend dances or parties. He and his group of friends, Colin and Jason and Marc, preferred  to listen to records together, to Dylan and Clapton and The Who, and read Nietzsche in their spare time. His parents did not find it strange that their son didn't date, did not rent a tuxedo for his junior prom. They had never been on a date in their lives and therefore they saw no reason to encourage Gogol, certainly not at his age. Instead they urged him to join the math team and maintain his A average. His father pressed him to pursue engineering, perhaps at MIT. Assured by his grades and his apparent indifference to girls, his parents did not suspect Gogol of being, in his own fumbling way, an American teenager. They didn't suspect him, for instance, of smoking pot, which he did from time to time when he and his friends get together to listen to records at one another's homes. They didn't suspect him, when he went to spend the night at a friend's house, of driving to a neighboring town to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show, or into Boston to see bands in Kenmore Square.
           One Saturday, soon before he was scheduled to take the SAT, his family drove to Connecticut for the weekend, leaving Gogol at home alone overnight for the first time in his life. It never crossed his parents' minds that instead of taking timed practice tests in his room, Gogol would drive with Colin and Jason and Marc to a party. They were invited by Colin's older brother, who was a freshman at the university where Gogol's father teaches. He dressed for the party as he normally did,  in Levi's and boat shoes and a checkered flannel shirt. For all the times he'd been to the campus, to visit his father at the engineering department, he had never been in a dorm before. They approached nervously, a bit giddy, afraid to be caught. "If anyone asks, my brother said to say we're freshmen at Amherst," Colin advised them in the car.
         The party occupied an entire hallway, the doors of the individual rooms all open. They entered the first room they could manage to, crowded, dark, hot. No one noticed as Gogol and his three friends made their way across the room to the keg. For a while, they stood in a circle, holding their plastic cups of beer, shouting over the music in order to be heard. But then Colin saw his brother in the hallway, and Jason needed to find a bathroom, and Marc needed another beer already. Gogol drifted into the hallway as well. Everyone seemed to know everyone else, embroiled in conversations that were impossible to join. Music playing from the different rooms mingled unpleasantly in Gogol's ears. He felt too wholesome in this ripped jeans and T-shirt crowd, feared his hair was too recently washed and was too neatly combed. And yet it didn't seem to matter, no one seemed to care. At the end of the hallway, he climbed a set of stairs, and at the top there was another hallway, equally crowded and loud. In the corner he saw a couple kissing, pressed up against the wall. Instead of pushing his way through to the other end of the hallway, he decided to climb another set of stairs. This time the hallway was deserted, an expanse of dark blue carpeting and whiten wooden doors. The only presence in the space was the sound of muffled music and voices coming from below. He was about to turn back down the staircase when one of the doors opened and a girl emerged, a pretty, slender girl wearing a buttoned-up polka-dotted thrift store dress and scuffed Doc Martens. She had short, dark brown hair, curving in toward her cheeks and cut in a high fringe over her brows. Her face was heart-shaped, her lips painted a glamorous red.
           "Sorry," Gogol said. "Am I not supposed to be up here ?"
           "Well, it's technically a girl's floor," the girl said. "But that's never stopped a guy before." She studied him thoughtfully, as no other girl had looked at him. "You don't go here, do you ?"
           "No," he said, his heart pounding. And then he remembered his surreptitious identity for the evening : "I'm a freshman at Amherst."
          "That's cool," the girl said, walking toward him. "I'm Kim."
          "Nice to meet you." He extended his hand, and Kim shook it, a bit longer than necessary. For a moment she looked at him expectantly, then smiled, revealing two front teeth that were slightly overlapping.
          "Come on," she said. "I can show you around." They walked together down the staircase. She lead him to a room where she got herself a beer and he poured himself another. He stood awkwardly at her side as she paused to say hello to friends. They worked their way to a common area where there was a television, a Coke machine, a shabby sofa, and an assortment of chairs. They sat on the sofa, slouching, a considerable space between them. Kim noticed a stray pack of cigarettes on the coffee table and lighted one.
         "Well ?" she said , turning back to him, somewhat suspiciously this time.
         "What ?"
         "Aren't you going to introduce yourself to me ?"
         "Oh," he said. "Yeah." But he didn't want to tell Kim his name. He didn't want to endure her reaction, to watch her lovely blue eyes grow wide. He wished there were another name he could use, to get him through the evening. It wouldn't be so terrible. He'd lied to her already, about being at Amherst. There were a million names to choose from. But then he realized there was no need to lie. Not technically. He remembered the other name that had once been chosen for him, the one that should have been.
          "I'm Nikhil," he said for the first time in his life. He said it tentatively, his voice sounding strained to his ears. He looked at Kim, his eyebrows furrowed, prepared for her to challenge him, to correct him, to laugh in his face. He held his breath. His face tingled, whether from triumph or terror he wasn't sure.
         But Kim accepted gladly. "Nikhil," she said, blowing a thin plume of smoke toward the ceiling. Again she turned to him and smiled. "Nikhil," she repeated. "I've never heard that before. That's a lovely name."
         They sat awhile longer, the conversation continuing, Gogol stunned at how easy it was. His mind floated ; he only half listened as Kim talked about her classes, about the town in Connecticut where she was from. He felt at once guilty and exhilarated, protected as if by an invisible shield. Because he knew he would never see her again, he was brave that evening, kissing her lightly on the mouth as she was talking to him, his leg pressing gently against her leg on the sofa, briefly running a hand through her hair. It was the first time he'd kissed anyone, the first time he'd felt a girl's face and body and breath so close to his own. "I can't believe you have kissed her, Gogol," his friends exclaimed as they drove home from the party. "It wasn't me," he nearly said. But he didn't tell them that it had not been Gogol who'd kissed Kim. That Gogol had had nothing to do with it.

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 35

                                                (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


             The real life story of 'Nikolai Gogol' made warmth spread from the back of Gogol's neck to his cheeks and his ears. Each time the name was uttered, he quietly winced. His parents had never told him any of this. He looked at his classmates, but they seemed indifferent, obediently copying down the information as Mr. Lawson continued to speak, looking over one shoulder, his sloppy handwriting filling up the board. He felt angry at Mr. Lawson suddenly. Somehow he felt betrayed.


           "Gogol's literary career spanned a period of about eleven years, after which he was more or less paralyzed by writer's block. The last years of his life were marked by physical deterioration and emotional torment," Mr. Lawson said. :Desperate to restore his health and creative inspiration, Gogol sought refuge in a series of spas and sanatoriums. In 1848 he made a pilgrimage to Palestine. Eventually he returned to Russia. In 1852, in Moscow, disillusioned and convinced of his failure as a writer, he renounced all literary activity and burned the manuscript to the second volume of Dead Souls. He then pronounced  a death sentence on himself, and proceeded to commit slow suicide by starvation."
         "Gross," someone said from the back of the classroom. "Why would someone want to do that to himself ?"
          A few people glanced at Emily Gardener, rumored to have anorexia. 
         Mr. Lawson, holding up a finger, went on. "In attempts to revive him on the day before his death, doctors immersed him in a bath of broth while ice water was poured over his head, and then affixed seven leeches to his nose. His hands were pinned down so that he could not tear the worms away."
        The class, all but one, began to moan in unison, so that Mr. Lawson had to raise his voice considerably in order to be heard. Gogol stared at his desk, seeing nothing. He was convinced that the entire school was listening to Mr. Lawson's lecture. That it was on the PA. He lowered his head over his desk, discretely pressed his hands against his ears. It was not enough to block out Mr. Lawson : "By the following evening he was no longer fully conscious, and so wasted that his spine could be felt through his stomach." Gogol shut his eyes. Please, stop, he wished he could say to Mr. Lawson. Please stop, he said, mouthing the words. And then, suddenly, there was silence. Gogol looked up, saw Mr. Lawson dropped his chalk on the blackboard ledge.
         "I'll be right back," he said, and disappeared to have a cigarette. The students, accustomed to this routine, began talking among themselves. They complained about the story, saying that it's too long. They complained that it was hard to get through. There was talk of the difficulty of Russian names, students confessing merely to skimming them. Gogol said nothing. He had not read the story himself. He had never touched the Gogol book his father gave him on his fourteenth birthday. And yesterday, after class, he'd shoved the short story anthology deep into his locker, refusing to bring it home. To read the story, he believed, would mean paying tribute to his namesake, accepting it somehow. Still, listening to his classmates complain, he felt perversely responsible, as if his own work were being attacked.
          Mr. Lawson returned, sitting once more on his desk. Gogol hoped that perhaps the biographical portion of the lecture was over. What else could he possibly had left to say ? But Mr. Lawson picked up Divided Soul. "here is an account of his final moments," he said, and, turning toward the end of the book, he read :
          "His feet were icy. Tarasenkov slid a hot-water bottle into the bed, but it had no effect ; he was shievering. Cold sweat covered his emaciated face. Blue circles appeared under his eyes. At midnight Dr. Klimentov relieved Dr. Tarasenkov. To ease the dying man, he administered a dose of calomel and placed loaves of hot bread around his body. Gogol began to moan again. His mind wandered, quietly, all night long. "Go on !" he whispered. "Rise up, charge, charge the mill !" Then he became still weaker, his face hollowed and darkened, his breathing became imperceptible. He seemed to grow calm ; at least he was no longer suffering. At eight in the morning of February 21, 1852, he breathed his last. He was not yet forty-three years old."     

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 34

                                          (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


              In September, Gogol returned to school to begin his junior year : honors biology, honors U.S. history, advanced trigonometry, Spanish, honors English. In his English he read Ethan Frome, The Great Gatsby, The Good earth, The Red Badge of Courage. He took his turn at the podium and recited the "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" speech from Macbeth, the only lines of poetry he would know by heart for the rest of his life. His teacher, Mr. Lawson, was a slight, wiry, shamelessly preppy man with a surprisingly deep voice, reddish blond hair, smallish but penetrating green eyes, horn-rimmed glasses. He was the subject of school-wide speculation, and slight scandal, having once been married to Ms. Sagan, who teaches French. He used to wear khakis and Shetland sweaters in bright solid colors, kelly green and yellow and red, sips black coffee continually from the same chipped blue mug, cannot survive the fifty-minute class without excusing himself to go to the teachers' lounge for a cigarette. In spite of his diminutive stature he had a commanding, captivating presence in the room. His handwriting was famously illegible ; student compositions were regularly returned stamped with tan rings of coffee, sometimes golden rings of scotch. Every year gave everyone either a D or an F on the first assignment, an analysis of Blake's "The Tiger." A number of girls in the class insist that Mr. Lawson was indescribably sexy and had raging crushes on him.


            Mr. Lawson was the first of Gogol's teachers to know and to care about Gogol the author. The first day of class ha had looked up from the podium when he came to Gogol's name on the roster, an expression of benign amazement on his face. Unlike other teachers he did not ask, Was that really his name, was that he last name, was it short for something else ? He did not ask, as many foolishly did, "Wasn't he a writer ?" Instead he called out the name in a perfectly reasonable way, without pause, without doubt, without a suppressed smile, just as he had called out Brian and Erica and Tom. And then : "Well, we are going to have to read 'The Overcoat.' Either that or 'The Nose.' "


          One day, Mr. Lawson wrote on the board, "Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol" in capital letters, drew a box around it, then wrote the dates of the author's birth and death in parentheses. Gogol opened the binder on his desk, reluctantly copied the information down. Mr. Lawson started with a brief history of the author he intended to make the class learn : Born 1809 in a province of Poltava to a family of Ukrainian Cossack gentry. Father a small landowner who also wrote plays, died when Gogol was sixteen. Studied at the Lyceum of Nezhin, went to St. Petersburg in 1828 where he entered, in 1829, the civil service, in the department Public Works for the Ministry of the Interior. From 1830 to 1831, transferred to the Court Ministry in the Department of Royal Estates, after which time he became a teacher, lecturing on history at the Young Ladies' Institute, and later at the University of St. Petersburg. At the age of twenty-two, established a close friendship with Alexander Pushkin. In 1830, published his first short story. In 1836, a comic play, The Government Inspector, was produced in St. Petersburg. Dismayed by the play's mixed reception, left Russia. For the next twelve years lived abroad, in Paris, Rome,and elsewhere, composing the first volume of Dead Souls, the novel considered to be his finest work.


         "Not your ordinary guy, Nikolai Gogol," Mr. Lawson said. "He was celebrated today as one of Russia's most brilliant writers. But during his life he was understood by no one, least of all himself. One might say he typified the phrase 'eccentric genius.' Gogol's life, in a nutshell, was a steady decline into madness. The writer Ivan Turgenev described him as an intelligent, queer,, and sickly creature. He was reputed to be a hypochondriac and a deeply paranoid, frustrated man. He was, in addition, by all accounts, morbidly melancholic, given to fits of severe depression. He had trouble making friends. He never married, fathered no children. It's commonly believed he died a virgin."          

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 33

                                           (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


            Bad luck trailed them on the trip back to Calcutta. At Benares station, Sonia asked her father to buy her a slice of jackfruit, which made her lips itch unbearably, then swelled to three times their size. Somewhere in Bihar, in the middle of the night, a businessman in another compartment was stabbed in sleep and was robbed of three hundred thousand rupees, and the train stopped for five hours while the local police investigatd. The Gagulis learned the cause of the delay the following morning, as breakfast was being served, the passengers agitated and horrified, all speaking of the same thing. "Wake up. Some guy on the train got murdered," Gogol said to Sonia from his top berth to hers. No one was more horrified than Ashoke.


         Upon morning in Calcutta, Gogol and Sonia both got terribly ill. It was the air, the rice, the wind, their relatives casually remarked ; they were not made to survive in a a poor country, they said. They had constipation followed by the opposite. Doctors came to the house in the evening with stethoscopes in black leather bags. They were given a course of Entroquinol, ajowan water that burned their throats. And once they'd recovered it was time to go back : the day they were convinced would never come was just two weeks away. Kashmiri pencil cups were bought for Ashoke to give to give to his colleagues at the university. Gogol bought Indian comic books to give to his American friends. On the evening of their departure he watched his parents standing in front of framed pictures of his dead grandparents on the walls, heads bowed, weeping like children. And then the caravan of taxis came to whisk them one last time across the city. Their flight was at dawn and so they must leave in darkness, driving through the streets so empty they were unrecognizable, a tram with its small single headlight the only the other thing that moved. At the airport the row of people who had greeted them, had hosted and fed and fawned over them for all these months, those with whom he shared a name if not his life, assembled once more on the balcony, to wane good-bye. Gogol knew that his relatives would stand there until the plane had drifted away, until the flashing lights were no longer visible in the sky. As they journeyed back to Boston Gogol felt relieved, and with relief he peeled back the foil covering his breakfast and asked the British Airways stewardess for a glass of orange juice. With relief he put on his headset to watch The Big Chill and listen to top-forty songs all the way home.


          Within twenty-four hours he and his family were back on Pemberton Road, the late August grass in need of trimming, a quart of milk and some bread left by their tenants in the refrigerator, four grocery bags on the staircase filled with mail. At first Gangulis slept most of the day and were wide awake at night, gorging themselves on toast at three in the morning, unpacking the suitcases one by one.  Though they were home they were disconcerted by the space, by the uncompromising silence that surrounded them. They still felt somehow in transit, still disconnected from their lives, bound up in an alternate schedule, an intimacy only four of them share. But by the end of the week, after his mother's friends came to admire her new gold and saris, after the eight suitcases had been aired out on the sun deck and put away, after the chanachur was poured into Tupperware and the smuggled mangoes eaten for breakfast with cereal and tea, it was as if they had never gone. "How dark you've become," his parents' friends said regretfully to Gogol and Sonia. They retreated to their three rooms, to their three seperate beds, to their thick mattresses and pillows and fitted sheets. After a single trip to their supermarket, the refrigerator and the cupboards filled with familiar labels : Skippy, Hood, Bumble Bee, Land O' Lakes. His mother entered the kitchen and prepared their meals once again ; his father drove the car and mowed the lawn and returned to the university. Gogol and Sonia slept for as long as they wanted, watched television, made themselves peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at any time of day. Once again they were free to quarrel, to tease each other, to shout and holler and say shut up. They took hot showers, spoke to each other in English, rode their bicycles around the neighborhood. They called up their American friends, who were happy enough to see them but asked them nothing about where they'd been. And so the eight months were put behind them, quickly shed, quickly forgotten, like clothes worn for a special occasion, or for a season that had passed, suddenly cumbersome, irrelevant to their lives.