ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 54

                                          (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


              From the very beginning Gogol felt effortlessly incorporated into the family of Maxine. It was different brand of hospitality from what he was used to ; for though the Ratliffs were generous, they were people who didn't go by their way to accommodate others, assured, in his case correctly, that their life would appeal to him. Gerald and Lydia, busy with their own engagements, kept out of the way. Gogol and Maxine came and went as they pleased, from movies and dinners out. He went shopping with her on Madison Avenue at stores they must be buzzed into, for cashmere cardigans and outrageously expensive English colognes that Maxine bought without deliberation or guilt. They went to darkened humble-looking restaurants downtown where the tables were tiny, the bills huge.  Almost without fail they wound up back at parents' place. There was always some delicious cheese or pate to snack  on, always some good wine to drink. It was in her claw-footed tub that they soaked together, glasses of wine, or single-malt scotch on the floor. At night he slept with her in the room she grew up in, on a soft, sagging mattress, holding her body, as warm as a furnace, through the night, making love to her in a room just above the one in which Gerald and Lydia lie. On nights he had to stay late at work he simply came over ; Maxine kept dinner waiting for him, and then they went upstairs to bed. Lydia and Gerald thought nothing, in the mornings, when he and Maxine join them downstairs in the kitchen, their hair uncombed seeking bowls of cafe au lait and toasted slices of French bread and jam. The first morning he had slept over he'd been mortified to face them,  showering beforehand, putting on his wrinkled shirt and trousers from the day before, but they'd merely smiled, still in their bathrobes, and offered him warm sticky buns from their favorite neighborhood bakery and sections of the paper.
           Gogol fell in love with Maxine, the house, and Gerald and Lydia's manner of living , for to know and love her was to know and love all these things. He loved the mess that surrounded Maxine, her hundreds of things always covering her floor and her bedside table, her habit, when they were alone on the fifth floor, of not shutting the door when they went to bathroom. Her unkempt ways, a challenge to his increasingly minimalist taste, charmed him. He learned to love the food she and her parents ate, the polenta and risotto, the bouillabaisse and osso buco, the meat baked in parchment paper. He came to expect the weight of their flatware in his hands, and to keep the cloth napkin, still partially folded, on his lap. He learned that one did not grate Parmesan cheese over pasta dishes containing seafood. He learned not to put wooden spoons in the dishwasher, as he had mistakenly done one evening when he was helping to clean up. The nights he spent there, he learned to wake up earlier than he was used to, to the sound of Silas barking downstairs, wanting to be taken for his morning walk. He learned to anticipate, every evening the sound of a cork emerging from a fresh bottle of wine.

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 53

                                             (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


             Gerald remembered a bar of French chocolate he he bought on his way home, and this was unwrapped, broken apart, and passed around the table. Eventually the talk turned to India. Gerald asked the questions about the recent rise of Hindu fundamentalism, a topic Gogol knew little about. Lydia talked at length about Indian carpets and miniatures, Maxine about a college class she'd once taken on Buddhist stupas. They had never known a person who had been to Calcutta. Gerald had an Indian colleague at work who just went to India for his honeymoon. He'd brought back spectacular photographs, of a place built on a lake. Was that in Calcutta ?
          "That's Udaipur," Gogol told them. "I've never been there. Calcutta's in the east, closer to Thailand."
           "What's Calcutta like ? Is it beautiful ?" asked Lydia, fishing out a stray piece of lettuce and eating it with her fingers.
            He was surprised with the question. He was accustomed to people asking about the poverty, about the beggars and the heat. "Parts of it are beautiful," he told her. "There's a lot of lovely Victorian architecture left over from the British. But most of it's decaying."
          "That sounds like Venice," Gerald said, "Are there canals ?"
           "Only during monsoons. That is when streets flood. I guess that is the closest it comes to resembling Venice."
            "I want to go to Calcutta," Maxine said , as if this had been a thing denied to her all her life.She got up and walked over to the stove.."I feel like tea. who wants tea ?"
             But Gerald and Lydia decided against tea tonight, there was an I, claudius video they wanted to watch before bed. Without tending to the dishes they stood up, Gerald taking their two glasses and the rest of the wine. "Good night, dear," Lydia said, kissing Gogol lightly on the cheek and went up the stairs.
            "I suppose you've never been subjected to someone's parents on the first date before," Maxine said once they were alone,  sipping milky cups of Lapsang Souchong from heavy white mugs. 
           "I enjoyed meeting them. They're charming."
            "That's one way of putting it."
           They remained awhile at the table, talking, the sound of the rain echoing in the enclosed space behind the house. The candles shrink to stubs. Silas, who had been softly pacing on the   floor, came and pressed his head against Gogol's leg, looking up at him, wagging his tail. Gogol bent over, patted him tentatively.
           "You've never had a dog, have you ?" Maxine asked, observing him.
           "No."
           "Didn't you ever want one ?"
            "When I was a kid. But my parents never wanted the responsibility. Plus we had to go to India every couple of years."
           He realized it was the first time he'd mentioned his parents to her, his past. He wondered if perhaps she would ask him more about these things. Instead she said, "Silas likes you. He is very picky."
         He looked at her, watching as she undid her hair, letting it hang loose for a moment over her shoulders before wrapping it thoughtlessly around her hand. She looked back at him, smiling. Once again he was aware of her nakedness beneath the cardigan.
        "I should go," he said. But he was glad that she accepted his offer to help her clean up before leaving. They loitered over the task, loading the dishwasher, wiping down the table and the butcher-block island, washing and drying the pots and pans. They agreed to go to the Film Forum on Sunday afternoon, to see the Antonioni double feature that Lydia and Gerald had recently been to and recommended over dinner.
         "I'll walk up to the subway," Maxine said when they were finished, putting a leash around Silas., "He needs to go out." They went up to the parlor level, put on their coats. He heard the the sound of a television faintly through the ceiling. He paused at the foot of the stairs. "I forgot to thank your parents," he said.
         "For what ?"
         "For having me over. For dinner."
          She linked elbows with him. "You can thank them next time."

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 52

                                             (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


              Gogol sat with Maxine on the fainting couch, leafing through a coffee table book she'd helped to edit on eighteenth-century French wallpapers, one side of the book resting on each of their knees.  She told him this was the house she'd grown up in, mentioning casually that she'd moved back six months ago after living with a man in Boston, an arrangement that had not worked out. When he asked if she planned to look for a place of her own she said it hadn't occurred to her. "It's such a bother renting a place in the city," she said. "Besides, I love this house. There's really nowhere else I'd  rather live." For all her sophistication he found the fact that she'd moved back with her parents after a love affair had soured endearingly old-fashioned, it was something  he couldn't picture himself doing at this stage in his life.
            At dinner he met her father, a tall, good-looking man with luxuriant white hair, Maxine's pale green eyes, thin rectangular glasses perched halfway down his nose. "How do you do. I'm Gerald," he said, nodding, shaking Gogol's hand. Gerald gave him a bunch of cutlery and cloth napkins and asked him to set the table. Gogol did as he was told, aware that he was touching the everyday possessions of a family he barely knew. "You'll sit here, Nikhil," Gerald said, pointing to a chair once the silver ware was laid. Gogol took his place on one side of  the table, across from Maxine. Gerald and Lydia were at either end.  Gogol had skipped lunch that day in order to leave the office in time for the date with Maxine, and already the wine, at once heavier and smoother than what he was used to drinking,  had gone to his head. He felt a pleasant ache at his temples, and a sudden gratitude for the day and where it had brought him. Maxine lighted a pair of candles. Gerald topped off the wine. Lydia served the food on broad white plates : a thin piece of steak rolled into a bundle and tied with string, sitting in a pool of dark sauce, the green beans boiled so that they were still crisp. A bowl of small, round, roasted red potatoes was passed around, and afterward a salad. They ate appreciatively, commenting on the tenderness of the meat, the freshness of the beans. His own mother would never have served so few dishes to a guest. She would have kept her eyes trained on Maxine's plate, insisting she had seconds and then thirds. The table would have been lined with a row of serving bowls so that people could help themselves. But Lydia paid no attention to Gogol's plate. She made no announcement indicating that there was more. Silas sat at Lydia's feet as they ate, and at one point Lydia sliced off a generous portion of her meat and fed it to him off her palm.
         The four of them went quickly through two bottles of wine, then moved on to a third. The Ratliffs were vociferous at the table, opinionated about things his own parents were indifferent to : movies, exhibits at museums, good restaurants, the design of everyday things. They spoke of New York, of stores and neighborhoods and buildings they either despise or love, with an intimacy and ease that made Gogol felt as if he barely knew the city. Gogol was unaccustomed  to this sort of talk at mealtimes, to that indulgent ritual of the lingering meal, and the pleasant aftermath of bottles and crumbs and empty glasses that clutter the table. Something told him that none of this was for his benefit, that this was the way the Ratliffs ate every night. Gerald was a lawyer, Lydia was a curator textiles at the Met. They were at once satisfied and intrigued by his background, by his years at Yale and Columbia, his career   as an architect, his Mediterranean looks. "You could be Italian," Lydia remarked at one point during the meal, regarding him in the candle's glow

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 51

                                             (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


           The next morning Maxine called, waking Gogol up, at ten on a Sunday he was still in bed, his head aching from the scotch and sodas he'd consumed throughout the evening. He answered gruffly, a bit impatiently, expecting it to be his mother calling to ask how his week had been. He had the feeling, from the tone of Maxine's voice, that she'd been up for hours, that her breakfast had already been eaten. "It's Maxine. From last night," she said, not bothering to apologize for waking him.She told him she'd found his number in the phone book, though he didn't remember telling her his last name. "Good, your apartment's noisy," she remarked. Then, without awkwardness or pause, she invited him to dinner at her place. She specified the evening, a Friday, told him the address, somewhere in Chelsea. He assumed it would be a dinner party, asked if there's anything he can bring, but she said no, it would be just him.
           "I should probably warn you that I live with my parents," she added.
           "Oh." This unexpected piece of information deflated him, confused him. He asked if her parents would mind his coming over, if perhaps they should meet at a restaurant  instead.
           But she laughed at this suggestion in a way that made him feel vaguely foolish. "Why on earth would they mind ?"
          He took a cab from his office to her neighborhood, getting out at a liquor store to buy a bottle of wine. It was a cool evening in September, raining steadily. He turned onto a remote, tranquil block Ninth and Tenth Avenue. It was his first date in a long time, with the exception of a few forgettable affairs at Columbia he'd been with no one seriously since Ruth. He didn't know what to make of the whole arrangement with Maxine, but as odd as the terms of invitation seemed he'd been unable to refuse. He was curious about her, attracted, flattered by the boldness of her pursuit.
           He was stunned by the house, a Greek revival, admiring it for several minutes like a tourist before opening the gate. He noted the pedimented window lintels, the Doric pilasters, the bracketed entablature,, the black cruciform paneled door. He climbed a low stoop with cast-iron railings. The name below the bell was Ratliff. Several minutes after he pressed it, enough to make the double-check the address on the scrap of paper in his jacket pocket, Maxine arrived. She kissed him on the cheek, leaning toward him on one foot, the other leg extended, slightly raised behind her. She was barefoot, wearing flowing black wool pants and a thin beige cardigan. As far as he could tell she wore nothing under the cardigan apart from her bra. Her hair was done up in the same careless way. His raincoat was draped on a coat rack, his folding umbrella dropped into a stand. He glimpsed himself quickly in a mirror in the foyer, smoothing his hair and his tie.
          She lead him down a flight of stairs to a kitchen that appears to occupy an entire floor of the house, with a large farm-house table at one end, and beyond that French doors leading to a garden. A woman stood at a butcher-block island by the appliances, snipping the ends of a pile of green beans with a pair of scissors.
         "This is my mother Lydia," Maxine said. "And this is Silas," she told him, pointing to a reddish brown cocker spaniel dozing under the table.
          Lydia was tall and slender like her daughter, with straight  iron-colored hair cut youthfully to frame her face. She was carefully dressed, with gold jewelry at her ears and throat, a navy apron wrapped around her waist, gleaming black leather shoes. Though her face was lined and her complexion a bit splotchy, she was more beautiful even than Maxine, her features more regular, the cheekbones higher, the eyes more elegantly defined.
           "Lovely to meet you, Nikhil," she said, smiling brightly, and though she looked at him with interest, she didn't pause in her work or offered to shake his hand.
             Maxine poured him a glass of wine, not asking if perhaps he might prefer something else. "Come on," she said, "I'll show you the house." She lead him up five flights of uncarpeted stairs that creaked noisily beneath their combined weight. The plan of the house was simple, two immense rooms per floor. Politely he admired the house, things he knew how to speak intelligently and at length about. Along the hallways in every floor shelves ascended to he ceiling, crammed with all novels one should read in a life time, biographies, massive monographs of every artist, all the architecture books Gogol had ever coveted
          Maxine had the top floor to herself : a peach-colored bedroom with a sleigh bed at the back, a long black and red bath room. The shelf above the sink was full of different creams for her neck, her throat, her eyes, her feet, daytime, nighttime, sun and shade. Though the bedroom was a gray sitting room she treated as a closet, her shoes and handbags and clothes scattered across the floor, spilling over the backs of chairs

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 50

                                         (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


            One night, Evan, one of the draftsmen at work with whom he was friendly, talked him into going to a party. Evan told Gogol that it's an apartment worth seeing, a Tribeca loft that happened to have been designed by one of the partners at the firm. The host of the party, Russel, an old friend of Evan, worked for for the UN and had spent several years in Kenya, and as a result the loft was filled with impressive collections of African furniture and sculpture and masks. Gogol imagined that it would be party of hundreds filling up a vast space, the sort of party where he might arrive and leave undetected. But by the time Gogol and Evan got there, the party was nearly over, and there were only a dozen or so people sitting around a low coffee table surrounded by cushions, eating picked-over grapes and cheese. Gogol found a lady arguing with a man on the other side of the table about a movie. She had dirty blond hair gathered sloppily into a bun, strands falling randomly, attractively,  around her face. Her forehead was high and smooth, her jawbones sloping and unusually long. Her eyes were greenish, the irises encased by thin rings of black. She was dressed in silk capri pants and a sleeveless white shirt that showed off her tan. She was little bit drunk, strident and flirtatious. When she tried to involve Gogol into the discussion about the movie that she was talking about, he said that  he hadn't seen the movie.
           She approached him again as he was standing idle, started explaining looking up at an imposing wooden mask that hung above a suspended metal staircase. The way she was explaining made him wonder if she spoke from experience, if she was Russel's lover, or ex-lover, if that was what she was implying.
          Her name was Maxine. She asked him about the program at Columbia, mentioning that she'd gone to Bernard for college, majoring in art history. She leaned back against a column as she spoke, smiling at him easily, drinking a glass of champagne. At first he assumed she was older than he was, closer to thirty than twenty. He was surprised to learn that she'd graduated from college the year after he started graduate school, that for a year they overlapped at Columbia, living just three blocks away from each other, and they had in all likelihood crossed paths on Broadway or walking up the steps of Low Library or in Avery. It reminded him of Ruth, of the way they, too, had once lived in such close proximity as strangers. Maxine told him she worked as an assistant editor for a publisher of art books. Her current project was a book on Andrea Mantegna, and he impressed her, remembering correctly that his frescoes were in Mantua, in the Palazzo Ducale. Maxine had, however, a way of focusing her attention on him completely, her pale, watchful holding his gaze, making him feel, for those brief minutes, the absolute center of her world.

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 49

                                      (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


           
          Gogol graduated from the architecture program at Columbia in May 1994 and started living in  New York working for a firm in midtown, with celebrated large-scale commissions to its name. It was not the sort of job he'd envisioned for himself as a student ; designing and renovating private residences was what he wanted to do. That might come later, his advisers had told him ; f or now, it was important to apprentice with the big names. And so, facing the tawny brick wall of a neighboring building across the air shaft, he worked with a team on designs for hotels and museums and corporate headquarters in cities ha'd never seen : Brussels, Buenos Aires, Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong. His contributions were incidental, and never fully his own : a stairwell, a skylight, a corridor, an air- conditioning duct. Still, he knew that each component of a building, however small, is nevertheless essential, and he found it gratifying that after all his years of schooling, all his crits and unbuilt projects, his efforts were to have some practical end. He typically worked late into his evenings, and on most of weekends, drawing designs on the computer, drafting plans, writing specifications, building Styrofoam and cardboard models to scale. He went home to a studio in Morningside Heights, with two windows facing west, on Amsterdam Avenue. It was the first apartment he had to himself, after an evolving chain of roommates all through college and graduate school. There was so much street noise that when he was on the phone and windows were open, people often asked if he  was calling from a pay phone. The kitchen was built into what should have been an entryway, a space so small that the refrigerator stood several feet away, over by the bathroom door.
            His parents were distressed by how little money he made, and occasionally his father sent him checks in the mail to help him with his rent, his credit card bills. They had been disappointed that he had been to Columbia. They 'd hoped he would choose MIT, the other architecture program to which he'd been accepted. But after four years in New Haven he didn't want to move back to Massachusetts, to the one city in America his parents knew. He didn't want to attend his father's alma mater, and live in the apartment in Central Square as his parents once had, and revisit the streets about which his parents spoke nostalgically. He didn't want to go home on the weekends, to go with them to pujos and Bengali parties, to remain unquestionably in their world.
             He preferred, New York, a place his parents didn't know well. whose beauty they were blind to, which they feared. He had come t o know this city slightly during his years at Yale, on visits with architecture classes. He had been to a few parties at Columbia. Sometimes he and Ruth rode in on Metro-North, and they went to museums, or to the village, or to browse for books at the Strand.

ABCDs ; Th Culture-Conflict. 48

                                       (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


               Thanksgiving of his senior year Gogol took the train, alone, up to Boston. He and Ruth were no longer together. Instead of coming back from Oxford after those twelve weeks, she'd stayed on to do a summer course, explaining that a professor she admired would be retiring after that. Gogol had spent the summer on Pemberton Road. He had had an unpaid internship at a small architecture firm in Cambridge, where he had run errands at Charrette for the designers, been sent to photographs nearby sites, lettered a few drawings. To make money he worked nights washing dishes at an Italian restaurant in his parents' town. Late in August he'd gone to Logan to welcome Ruth home. He had waited for her at the arrival gate, taken her to a hotel for one night, paying for it with the money he'd made at the restaurant. The room overlooked the Public Garden, its walls covered with thickly striped pink-and-cream paper. They'd made love for the fist time in a double bed. They'd gone out for their meals, neither of them able to afford the items on the room service menu. They walked up Newbury Street and went to a Greek restaurant with tables on the sidewalk. Gogol found Ruth looked different with her speech peppered with words and phrases she'd picked up in England, like "I imagine" and "I suppose" and "presumably." She spoke of her semester and how much she'd liked England, the travelling she'd done in Barcelona and Rome. She wanted to go back to England for graduate school, she said. "I imagine they've got good architecture schools," she'd added. "You could come as well." The next morning he'd put her on the bus to Maine. But within days of being together again in New Haven, in an apartment he'd rented on Howe Street with friends, they'd begun fighting, both admitting in the end that something had changed.
           They avoided each other now, when they happened to cross paths in the library and on the streets. He'd scratched out her phone number and the addresses he'd written down for her at Oxford and in Maine. But boarding the train it was impossible not to think of the afternoon, two years ago, they'd met. As usual the train was incredibly crowded, and this time he sat for the half journey in the vestibule. After Westerly he found a seat, and settled down with the course selection  guide for next semester. But he felt distracted for some reason, gloomy, impatient to be off the train ; he didn't bother to remove his coat, didn't bother to go to cafe car for something to drink even though he was thirsty. He put away the course guide and opened up a library book that might be helpful for his senior thesis project, a comparison between Renaissance Italian and Mughal palace design. But after a few paragraphs he closed this book as well. His stomach growled and he wondered what there would be for dinner at home, what his father had prepared. His mother and Sonia had gone to India for three weeks to attend a cousin's wedding, and this year Gogol and his father would spend Thanksgiving at the home of friends.
           He angled his head against the window and watched the autumnal landscape pass :the spewing pink and purple waters of a dye mill, electrical power stations, a big ball-shaped water tank covered with rust. Abandoned factories, with rows of small square windows partly bashed in, ravaged as if by moths. On the trees topmost branches were bare, the remaining leaves yellow and paper-thin. The train moved more slowly than usual, and when he looked at his watch he saw that they were running well behind schedule. And then, somewhere outside Providence, in an abandoned, grassy field, the train stopped. For over an hour they stood there as a solid, scarlet disk of sun sunk into tree-line horizon. The lights turned off, and the air inside the train turned uncomfortably warm. The conductors rushed anxiously through the compartments. "Probably a broken wire," the gentleman sitting beside Gogol remarked. Across the aisle a gray-haired woman was reading, a coat clutched like a blanket to her chest. Behind him two students were discussing the poems of Ben Jonson. It was not until they started moving again that an announcement was made on the loudspeaker about a medical emergency. But the truth, overheard by one of the passengers from a conductor, quickly circulated : a suicide had been committed, a person had jumped in front  of the train.
              He was shocked and discomfited by the news, feeling bad about his irritation and impatience, wondering if the victim had been a man or a woman, young or old. He imagined the person consulting the same schedule that's in his backpack, determining exactly when the train would be passing through. As a result of the delay he missed his commuter rail connection in Boston, waited forty minutes for the next train. He put a call to his parents' house, but no one answered. He tried his father's department at the university, but there too the phone rang and rang. At the station he saw his father waiting on the darkened platform, wearing sneakers and corduroys, anxious in his face.
            "Sorry, I'm late," Gogol said. "how long have you been waiting ?"
             "Since quarter to six," his father said. Gogol looked at his watch. It was nearly eight.
             "There was an accident."
             "I know. I called. What happened ? Were you hurt ?"
             Gogol shook his head. "Someone jumped onto the tracks. Somewhere in Rhode Island. I tried to call you. They had to wait for the police, I think."
            "I was worried."
            "I hope you haven't been standing out in the cold all this time," Gogol said, and from his father's lack of response he knew that this was exactly what he had done. Gogol wondered what was like for his father to be without his mother and Sonia. He wondered if he was lonely. But his father was not the type to admit such things, to speak openly of his desires, his moods, his needs. They walked to the parking lot, got into the car, and began the short drive home. They were silent in the car, Ashoke concentrating on the driving, Gogol fidgeting with the radio.
           "I want to tell you something," his father said when they'd already turned onto Pemberton Road.
          "What ?" Gogol asked.
          "It's about your name."
          Gogol looked at his father, puzzled. "My name ?"
          His father shut off the radio, "Gogol."
           These days he was called Gogol so seldom that the sound of it no longer upset him as it used to. After three years of being Nikhil the vast majority of the time, he no longer minded.
          "There is a reason for the discussion about your name now," his father continued.
          "Right, Baba. Gogol's is your favorite author, I know. But it doesn't mean that I've to dedicate myself, with all my fancies and conveniences, for your demigod, whatever be the rationale behind it," asserted Gogol. 
          Ashoke felt indignant to discuss the matter further and coolly lead him into the house.