ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 98

                                              (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


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


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

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 97

                                              (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


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


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

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 96

                                              (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


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


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

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 95

                                          (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


              One day Moushumi went to her mailbox for her class roaster, a business sized envelope caught her eye. She took the letter into her office, shut the door, sat at her desk. The envelope was addressed to a professor o Comparative Literature, who was teaching German as well as French. She opened the envelope. Inside she found a cover letter and a resume. For a minute she simply stared at the name centered at the top of the resume, laser- printed in an elegant font. She remembered the name, of course. The name alone, when she'd first learned it, had been enough to seduce her. Dimitri Desjardins. He pronounced Desjardins the English way, the s's intact, and in spite of her training in French this was how she still thought of it. Underneath the name was an address on West 164th street. He was looking for an adjunct position, teaching German part-time. She read through the resume, learned exactly where he'd been and what he'd done for the past decade. Traveled in Europe. A job working with the BBC. Articles and reviews published in Der Spiegel, Critical Inquiry. A Ph.D in German literature from the University of Heidelberg.
          She'd met him years ago, in her final months of high school. It was a period in which she and two of her friends, in their eagerness to be college students, in desperation over the fact no one their own age was interested in dating them, drove to Princeton, loitered on the campus, browsed in the college bookstore, did their homework in the buildings they entered without an ID. Her parents had encouraged these expeditions, believing she was at the library, or attending lectures - hoped she would go to the Princeton for college, living with them at home. One day, she and her friends were sitting on the grass, they were invited to join a student coalition from the university, a coalition protesting apartheid in South Africa. The group was planning a march on Washington, calling for sanctions.
           They took a chartered overnight bus to D.C. in order to be at the rally by early morning. Each of them had lied to their parents, claiming to be sleeping over at one another's homes. Every one on the bus was smoking pot and listening to the same Crosby, Stills, and Nash album continuously, on a tape player running on batteries. Moushumi had been facing backward, leaning over and talking to her friends, who were in two seats behind her, and when she turned back around he was in the neighboring seat. He seemed aloof from the rest of the group, not an actual member of the coalition, somehow dismissive of it all. He was wiry, slight, with small, downward-sloping eyes and an intellectual, ravaged-looking face that she found sexy though not handsome. His hairline was already receding, his hair curly and fair. He needed a shave ; his fingernails needed paring. He was wearing a white button-down shirt, faded Levi's with threadbare knees, pliable gold-framed spectacles that wrapped around his ears. Without introducing himself he began talking to her, as if they were already acquainted. He was twenty-seven, had gone to Williams College, was a student of European history. He was taking a German course at Princeton now, living with his parents, both of whom taught at the university, and he was going out of his mind. He had spent the years after college traveling around Asia, Latin America. He told her he probably wanted to get a Ph.D., eventually. The randomness of all this had appealed to her. He asked her what her name was and when she told him he had leaned toward her, cupping his ear, even though she knew he had heard heard it perfectly well. "How in the world do you spell that ?" he'd asked, and when she told him, he mispronounced it, as most people did. She corrected him, saying that "Mou" rhymed with "toe," but he shook his head and said, "I'll just call you Mouse."
            The nick name had irritated and pleased her at the same time. It made her feel foolish, but she was aware that in renaming her he'd claimed her somehow, already made her his own. As the bus grew quiet, as everyone began to fall asleep, she had let him lean his head against her shoulder. Dimitri was asleep, or so she thought. And so she pretended to fall asleep too. After a while she felt his hand on her leg, on top of the white denim skirt she was wearing. And then slowly, he began to unbutton skirt.
     

ABCDs ; The Cultue-Conflict. 94

                                            (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


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

ABCDS ; The Culture-Conflict. 93

 

                                            (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


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


  

ABCDS ; The Culture-Conflict. 92

                                               (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


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