Yamagola - Gudivada Vellanu - Spicy Song

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9O1oVFRq2s

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 104

                                                   (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


           Ashima finished breading the final croquette, then glanced at her wristwatch. She was slightly ahead of the schedule. She set the platter on the counter next to the stove. She took a pan out of the cupboard and poured in the oil, several cupfuls, to be heated in the minutes before her guests are expected. From a crock she selected the slotted spatula she would use. For now, there was nothing left to be done. The rest of the food had been prepared, sitting in  long Corning Ware pans on the dining room table : dal coated with a thick skin that would rupture as soon as the first of it was served, a roasted cauliflower dish, eggplant, a korma of lamb. Sweet yogurt and pantuas for dessert sat on the sideboard. She eyed every thing with anticipation. Normally cooking for parties leaves her without appetite, but to night she looked forward to serving herself, sitting among her guests. With Sonia's help the house had been cleaned one last time. Ashima always loved these hours before a party, the carpets vacuumed, the coffee table wiped with Pledge, her dimmed, blurry reflection visible in the wood.
          She rooted through her kitchen drawer for a packet of incense. She lighted a stick and walked from room to room. It had gratified her to go to all this effort - to make a final, celebratory meal for her children, her friends. To decide on menu, to make a list and shop in the supermarket and fill the refrigerator shelves with food. It was a pleasant change of pace, something finite in contrast to her current, overwhelming, ongoing task : to prepare for her departure, picking her bones of the house clean. For the past month, she had been dismantling her household piece by piece. Each evening she had tackled a drawer, a closet, a set of shelves. Though Sonia offered to help, Ashima preferred to do this alone. She had made piles of things to give to Gogol and Sonia, things to give to friends, things to take with her, things to donate to charities, things to put into trash bags and drive to the dump. The task both saddened and satisfied her at the same time. There was a thrill to whittling down her possessions to little more than what she had come with, to those three rooms in Cambridge in the middle of a winter's night. Tonight she would invite friends to take whatever might be useful, lamps, plants, platters, pots and pans. Sonia and Ben would rent a truck and take whatever furniture they had room for.
           The walls of the house reminded her of the house when they had first moved in, bare except for the photograph of her husband, which would be the last thing she would remove. She paused for a moment waving of the incense in front of Asoke's image. She went upstairs to shower, getting into her beige bathtub, behind the crackled sliding glass doors. She was exhausted from two days of cooking. from her morning of cleaning, from these weeks of packing and dealing with the sale of the house. Her feet felt heavy against the fiberglass floor of the tub. For a while she simply stood there before tending to the shampooing of her hair, soaping of her softening, slightly shrinking fifty- three-year-old body, which she must fortify each morning with calcium pills. When she was finished, she wiped the steam off the bathroom mirror and studied her face. A widow's face. But for most of her life, she reminded herself, a wife. And perhaps, one day, a grandmother, arriving in America laden with hand-knit sweaters and gifts,leaving, a month or two later, inconsolable, in tears.
          Ashima felt lonely suddenly, horribly, permanently alone, and briefly turned away from the mirror, she sobbed for her husband. She felt overwhelmed by the thought of the move she was about to make, to the city that was once home and was now in its own way foreign. She felt both impatience and indifference for all the days she still must live, for something told her she would not go quickly as her husband did. For thirty-three years she missed her life in India. Now she would miss her job at the library, the women with whom she had worked. She would miss throwing parties. She would miss living with her daughter, the surprising companionship they had formed, going into Cambridge together to see old movies at the Brattle, teaching her to cook the food Sonia had complained of eating as a child. She would miss the opportunity to drive, as she sometimes did on her way home from the library, to the university, past the engineering building where her husband once worked. She would miss the country in which she had grown to know and love her husband. Though his ashes had been scattered into the Ganges, it was here, in this house and in this town, that he would continue to dwell in her mind.

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 103

                                              (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


          Ashima had decided to spend six months of her life in India, six months in the States. She would live with her younger brother, Rana, living in Calcutta, when she would visit India. Her brother used to live with his wife, and their two grown, as yet unmarried daughters, in a spacious flat in Salt Lake.There she would have a room, the first in her life intended for her exclusive use. In spring and summer she would return to the Northeast, dividing her her time among her son, her daughter, and her close Bengali friends. True to the meaning of her name, she would be without borders, without a home of her own, a resident everywhere and nowhere. But it was no longer possible for her to live here now that Sonia was going to be married. The wedding would be in Calcutta, a little over a year from now, on an auspicious January day, just as she and her husband were married nearly thirty-four years ago. Something told her that Sonia would be happy with this boy - quickly she corrected herself - this young man. He had brought happiness to her daughter, in a way Moushumi had never brought it to her son. That it was she who had encouraged Gogol to meet Moushumi would be something for which Ashima would always feel guilty. How could she had known ? But fortunately they had not considered it their duty to stay married, as the Bengalis of Ashoke and Ashima's generation did. They were not willing to accept, to adjust, to settle for something less than their ideal of happiness. That pressure had given way, in the case of the subsequent generation, to American common sense.
          For the final hours she was alone in the house. Sonia had gone with Ben to pick up Gogol to the train station. It occurred to Ashima that the next time she would be by herself, she would be travelling, sitting on the plane. For the first time since her flight to meet her husband in Cambridge, in the winter of 1967, she would make the journey entirely on her own. The prospect no longer terrified her. She had learned to do things on her own, and though she still wore saris, still put her long hair in a bun, She was not the same Ashima who had once lived in Calcutta. She would return to India with American passport. In her wallet would remain her Massachusetts driver's license, her social security card. She would return to world where she would not single-handedly throw parties for dozens of people. She would not have to go to the trouble of making yogurt from half-and-half and sandesh from ricotta cheese. She would not have to make her own croquettes. They would be available to her from restaurants, brought up to the flat by servants, bearing a taste that after all these years she had still not quite managed, to her entire satisfaction, to replicate.  

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflicct. 102

                                          (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


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

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 101

                                           (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


             Gogol decided to try the Barnes and Noble, a book stall, at the northern edge of the square. But staring at the immense wall of new titles on display he realized he'd read none of those books, and what was the point of giving her something he hadn't read ? On his way out of the store he paused by a table devoted to travel guides. He picked up one for Italy, full of illustrations of the architecture he had studied so carefully as a student, had admired only in photographs, had always meant to see. It angered him, yet there was no one to blame but himself. What was stopping him ? A trip together, to  a place neither of them had been - may be that was what he and Moushumi needed. He could plan it all himself, selected the cities they would visit, the hotels. It could be his Christmas gift to her, two airplane tickets tucked into the back of the guide. He was due for another vacation, he could plan it for her spring break. Inspired by the thought, he went to the register, waited in a long line, and paid  for the book.
            He walked across the park toward home, thumbing through the book, anxious to see he now. He decided to stop  at the  gourmet grocery that was opened on Irving Place, to buy some of the things she liked : blood oranges, a wedge of cheese from the Pyrenees, slices of soppresata, a loaf of
peasant bread. For she would be hungry - they serve nothing on these days. He looked up from the 
book, at the sky, at the darkness gathering, the clouds a deep, beautiful gold, and was momentarily stopped by a flock of pigeons flying dangerously close. Suddenly terrified, he ducked his head, fee pedestrians had reacted. He stopped and watched as the birds shot up. He was unsettled by the sight. He thought of Italy, of Venice, the trip he would begin to plan.
           The lobby of the apartment was warm when he entered, the building's heat restored. "She just got back," the doorman told Gogol with a wink as he walked past, and his heart leaped, unburdened of its malaise, grateful for her simple act of returning to him. He imagined her puttering around the apartment, drawing a bath, pouring herself a glass of wine, her bags in the hallway. He slipped the book he would give her for Christmas into the pocket of his coat, making sure it was  concealed, and called elevator to take him upstairs.

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 100

                                            (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


         The previous weekend was Thanks giving. Gogol's mother and Sonia and Sonia's new boyfriend, Ben, had come, along with Moushumi's parents and brother, and they had all celebrated the holiday together in New York, crowded together in Gogol and Moushumi's apartment. It was the first time he'd not gone either to his parents' or to his in-laws' for a holiday. It felt strange to be hosting, to assume the center of responsibility. They had ordered a fresh turkey in advance from the farmers' market, planned the menu out of Food & Wine, bought folding chairs so that everyone would have a place to sit. Moushumi had gone out and bought a rolling pin, made an apple pie for the first time in her life. For Ben's sake they'd all spoken in English. Ben was half-Jewish, half-Chinese, raised in Newton, close to where Gogol and Sonia grew up. He was an editor at the Globe, He and Sonia met by chance, at a cafe on Newbury Street. Seeing them together, sneaking into the hallway so that they could kiss freely, holding hands discreetly as they sat at the table, Gogol had been oddly envious, and as they all sat eating their turkey and roasted sweet potatoes and cornbread stuffing, and the spiced cranberry chutney his mother had made, he looked at Moushumi and wondered what was wrong. They didn't argue, they still had sex, and yet he wondered. Did he still make her happy ? She accused him of nothing, but more and more he sensed her distance, her dissatisfaction, her distraction. But there had been no time to dwell on this worry. The weekend had been exhausting, getting their various family members to the apartments of nearby friends who were away and had given them keys. The day after Thanksgiving they had all gone to Jackson Heights, to the halal butcher so that both their mothers could stock up on goat meat, and then to brunch. And on Saturday there had been a concert of classical Indian music up at Columbia. Part of him wanted to bring it up with her. "Are you happy you married me ?" he would ask. But the fact that he was even thinking of this question made him afraid.
            He finished up the drawing by working through the lunch, and when stepped out of his office building it was colder, the light fading rapidly from the sky. He bought a cup of coffee and a falafel sandwich at the Egyptian restaurant on the corner and walked south as he ate, toward the Flatiron and lower Fifth Avenue, the twin towers of the World Trade Center looming in the distance, sparkling at the island's end. The falafel, wrapped in foil, was warm and messy in his hands. The stores were full, the windows decorated, the sidewalks crammed with shoppers. The thought of Christmas overwhelmed him. The previous year they went to Moushumi's parents' house. This year they would go to Pemberton Road. He no longer looked forward to the holiday ; he wanted only to be on the other side of the season. His impatience made him feel that he was, incontrovertibly, finally, an adult. He wandered absently into a perfume store, a clothing store, a store that sells only bags. He'd no idea what to get Moushumi for Christmas. Normally she dropped hints, showing him catalogues, but he had no clue as to what she was coveting this season, if it was a new pair of gloves or new pajamas she'd like. In the maze of stalls in Union Square that sell candles and shawls and handmade jewelry, nothing inspired him.

ABCDs ; The Cultur-Conflict. 99

                                              (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


           Gogol woke up late on Sunday morning, alone, from a bad dream he could not recall. He looked over at Moushumi's side of the bed, at the untidy pile of her books and magazines on the end table, the bottle of lavender room spray she liked to squirt sometimes on their pillows, the tortoiseshell barrette with strands of her hair caught in its clasp. She was at another conference this weekend, in Palm Beach.. By tonight she would be home. She claimed she'd told him about the conference months ago, but he didn't remember. "Don't worry," she'd said as she was packing, "I won't be there long enough to get a tan." But when he'd seen her bathing suit on top of the clothing on the bed, a strange panic had welled up inside of him as he thought of her lying without him by a hotel pool, her eyes closed, a book at her side. "At least one of us wasn't cold," he thought to himself now, crossing his arms tightly in front of his chest. Since the previous day afternoon the building's boiler had been broken, turning the apartment into an icebox. Last night he'd had to turn the oven on in order to tolerate being in the living room, and he'd worn his old Yale sweatpants, a thick sweater over a T-shirt, and a pair of rag-wool socks to bed. He threw back the comforter and the extra blanket he'd placed on top of it in the middle of the night. He couldn't find the blanket at first, nearly called Moushumi at the hotel to ask where she kept it. But by then it was nearly three in the morning, and so, eventually, he'd hunted it down himself, found it wedged on the top shelf of the hall closet, an unused wedding gift still in its zippered plastic case.
         He got out of the bed, brushed his teeth with freezing cold water from the tap, decided to skip shaving. He pulled on jeans and an extra sweater, and Moushumi's bathrobe over that, not caring how ridiculous he looked. He made a pot of coffee, toasted some bread to eat with butter and jam. He opened the front door and retrieved the Times, removing the wrapper, putting it on the coffee table to read later. There was a drawing for work to be completed by the next day, a cross section for a high school auditorium in Chicago. He unrolled the plan from lts tube and spread it it out on the dining table, securing the corners with paper back books. He put on his Abbey Road CD, and tried to work on the drawing. But his fingers were stiff and so he rolled up the plan, left a note for Moushumi on the kitchen counter, and went to the office.
          He was glad to have an excuse to be out of the apartment, instead of waiting for her, at some point that evening, to return. It felt milder outside, the air pleasantly damp, and instead of taking the train he walked the thirty blocks, up Park Avenue and over to Madison. He was the only person at the office. He sat in the darkened drafting room, surrounded by the desks of his co-workers, some piled with drawings and models, others as neat as a pin. He crouched over his table, a single pool of light from a swinging metal lamp illuminating the drawing. At the end of the week, it would be the fourth anniversary of his father's death. there was a photograph of his mother and Sonia and himself at Fatehpur Sikri, hanging on the wall in front of him. And next to this, a picture of Moushumi, an old passport photo he'd found and asked to keep. She was in her early twenties, her hair loose, her heavy-lidded eyes slightly lowered, looking to one side. It was taken before he'd begun to date her, when she was living in Paris. And yet they had met ; after all her adventures, it was he whom she had married. He with whom she shared her life.