(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
Letters used to arrive from her parents, from her husband's parents, from aunts and uncles and cousins and friends. The letters were filled with every possible blessing and good wishes. "We are dying to see him," her mother writes. "These are the most crucial months. Every hour there is a change," Ashima wrote back with careful descriptions of her son, reporting the circumstances of his first smile, the day he first rolled over, his first squeal of delight. She wrote that they are saving money for a trip home of the following December, after Gogol runs one.
The first bad news from their homes in India was the death of Ashima's grandmother. Ashima was inconsolable for days, thinking of the last time she saw her grandmother, her dida, a few days before flying to Boston. She remembered her grandmother feeding her sweets with her own hands. Unlike her parents she had not admonished Ashima not to eat beef or wear skirts or cut off her hair or forget her family the moment she landed in Boston.
By February, when Gogol was six months old, Ashoke and Ashima had known enough people to entertain them on an occasion : Gogol's annaprasan, his rice ceremony. There used to be no baptism for Bengali babies, no ritualistic naming in the eyes of God, instead, the first formal ceremony of their lives centered around the consumption of solid food. They asked Dilip Nandi to play the part of Ashima's brother, to hold the child and feed him rice, for the very first time. Gogol was dressed as an infant Bengali groom, in a pale yellow pajama-punjabi. The fragrance of cumin seeds, sent in the package along with the pajamas from Calcutta, lingered in the weave, a headpiece that Ashima cut out of paper, decorated with pieces of aluminium foil, was tied around Gogol's head with string. He wore a thin gold chain around his neck, his tiny forehead had been decorated with sandalwood paste to form six miniature beige moons floating above his brows, his eyes had been darkened with a touch of kohl. The food was arranged in ten separate bowls, a bowl contained payesh, a warm rice pudding Ashima had prepared for the baby to eat, customarily on a birthday as a child, alongside a bakery cake.
He was photographed by his father and his friends. Ashima, wearing a silvery sari, a wedding gift worn for the first time, the sleeves of her blouse reaching the crook of her elbow, was busy of setting up the buffet. She set out paper plates that had to be tripled to hold the weight of the biryani, the carp in yogurt sauce, the dal, the six different vegetable dishes she'd prepared during the past week.
Ashoke wore a transparent white punjabi top over bell-bottom trousers. They'd invited Alan Judy from upstairs, who looked as they always do, in jeans and thick sweaters, leather sandals buckled over woolly socks. Judy eyed on the buffet, bit into something that turned out to be a shrimp cutlet. "I thought Indians were supposed to be vegetarian," she whispered to Alan.
Gogol's feeding began. It was all just a touch, a gesture. No one expects the boy to eat more than a grain of rice here, a drop of dal there ; it was all meant to introduce him to a lifetime of consumption, a meal to inaugurate the tens of thousands of unremembered meals to come.
(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
Three days after Ashima was discharged from the hospital, Ashoke was back at MIT. During day times Ashima had to be on her own with Gogol in the silent house, Alan being back at Harvard, Judy being back at her work at the collective as usual, Amber and Clove were back at school. She suffered from sleep deprivation far worse than the worst of jet lag. She used to cry silently while feeding Gogol, patting him to sleep, and he cried between feeding and sleeping. One day when she found that they've run out of rice, she called Ashoke at his department to ask him to fetch the rice on his way home, there was no answer. She was so upset that she cried for a long time, finally she prepared herself to go to the supermarket on the street. She got up, washed her face and combed her hair, changed her dress, dressed up Gogol and put him in white-wheeled pram inherited from Alan and Judy, and she pushed him through the balmy street of Cambridge, to Purity Supreme, to buy a bag of white long-grain rice. The errand took longer than usual ; for she was repeatedly stopped on the street, and in the aisle of the supermarket, by perfect strangers, all Americans, suddenly taking notice of her, smiling, congratulating her for what she had done. They looked curiously, appreciatively, into the pram. "How old ?" they asked. "Boy or girl ?" "What's his name ?"
She felt proud of herself on doing it alone and in devising a routine. Like Ashoke,busy with his teaching and research and dissertation seven days a week, she, too, found herself doing something to occupy herself fully, to demand her utmost devotion, her last ounce of strength. Before Gogol's birth, her days had followed no visible pattern.
Ashima was engaged by Gogol almost through out the day , pacing the three rooms of the apartment with him in her arms whenever she is free. She used to take him out during afternoon, wandering up and down the streets, to pick up this or that, or to sit in Harvard Yard, sometimes used to meet Ashoke in MIT campus while sitting on a bench there. She used to bring him homemade samosas and a fresh thermos of tea. At times, staring at the baby. she saw pieces of her family in his face ; her mother's glassy eyes, her father's slim lips, her brother's lopsided smile. She purchased wool yarn at a store on the street and began to knit for the coming winter, making
Gogol sweaters, blankets, mittens, and caps. Every few days she used to give Gogol a bath in the porcelain sink in the kitchen. Every week she used to clip the nails the nails of his ten fingers and toes. When she took him in his pram for his immunization at pediatrician's, she stood outside the room and plugged up her ears.
One day Ashoke brought with him an Instamatic camera and took pictures of the baby, and when Gogol was napping she pasted the square, white-bordered prints behind plastic sheets in an album, captions written on pieces of masking tape. To put him to sleep she used to sing Bengali songs her mother had sung to her. One day when lifted him high over her head, smiling at him with her mouth open, and a quick stream of undigested milk from his last feeding rose from his throat and poured into her own ; for the rest of her life she would recall the shock of that incident.
(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
The apartment in which Ashoke and Ashima lived was a three-story house and the top two floors were occupied by their landlords, the Montgomerys, a Harvard sociology professor and his wife. The Montgomerys had two children, both girls, Amber and Clover, aged seven and nine, whose waist-length hair never braided, and who used to play on a swing in the back yard for hours during warm days. The professor preferred to be called, by Ashoke and Ashima, Alan, not professor Montgomery as they had first addressed him, had a wiry rust-colored beard that made him look much older than he actually was. They used to see him walking to Harvard yard in a pair of threadbare trousers, a fringed suede jacket, and rubber flip-flops. The Montgomerys had a dull green Volkswagen van covered with stickers: QUESTION AUTHORITY ! GIVE A DAMN ! BAN THE BRA ! PEACE ! They had a washing machine in the basement which Ashoke and Ashima were permitted to share, a television in their living room which Ashoke and Ashima could hear clearly through the ceiling. It had been through the ceiling one night in April, when Ashoke and Ashima were eating their dinner, that they had heard about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and of senator Robert Kennedy on another day.
Alan's wife, Judy, used to always wear blue jeans, torn into shorts, during summer seasons, and a necklace of small seashells around her throat. She was working for a women's health collective in Somerville a few days a week. Judy's daughters were born at home, with the help of midwives at the collective. Some nights Judy and Alan used to go out, leaving Amber and Clover unsupervised at home. Ashima always used to find the residence of Judy and Alan piles every where, piles of books and papers, piles of dirty plates on the kitchen counter, ashtrays the size of serving platters heaped with crushed-out cigarettes. Instead of cereal and tea bags, there used to be whiskey and wine bottles on top of the refrigerator. Just standing there had made Ashima feel drunk.
They arrived home from the hospital courtesy of Dr.Guptha, who owns a car. For a few days she found it very difficult to manage the daily chores of the house in American way, with baby crying in her arms, her breast swollen with milk, her groin still so sore she could scarcely sit, it was suddenly unbearable.
When she expressed her inability to continue in America with the problems that she was facing without a help from elders and people who assist her manage day-to-day activities associated with the delivery, "I'm saying I don't want to raise Gogol alone in this country, I want to go back," she said. He consoled her with what all that he could say to comfort her. He looked at Ashima, her face leaner, the features sharper than they had been at their wedding, but aware that her life in Cambridge, as his wife, had already taken a toll. On more than one occasion he had come home from the university to find her morose, in bed, rereading her parents' letters. Early mornings, when he sensed that she is quietly crying, he put an arm around her but could think of nothing to say, feeling that it was his fault, for marrying her, for bringing her here.
A soft knock on the door interrupted them: Alan and Judy along with their daughters, Amber and Clover, were there to see the baby. Judy was holding a dish covered with a checkered cloth in her hands, saying she had made a broccoli quiche. Alan set down a garbage bag full of Amber and Clover's old baby clothes, uncorked a bottle of cold champagne. The foaming liquid splashed onto the floor, was poured into mugs. They raised their mugs to Gogol, Ashima and Ashoke only pretending to take sips. Amber and Clover flanked Ashima at either side, both delighted when Gogol wrapped a hand around each of their fingers. Judy scooped the baby out of Ashima's lap. "Hello, handsome," she cooed. "Oh, Alan," she said, "let's have another one of these." Alan offered to bring up the girls' crib from the basement, and together he and Ashoke assembled it in the space next to Ashima and Ashoke's bed. Ashoke went to the corner store and brought a box of disposable diapers which replaced the framed black-and-white pictures of Ashima's family on the table. "Twenty minutes at three-fifty for the quiche," Judy said to Ashima. "Holler if you need anything," Alan added before they disappeared.
(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
Ashima's initial reaction at the glimpse of the baby, before the umbilical cord was clipped and they carried him away, was of a creature coated with a thick white paste, and streaks of blood, her blood, on the entire body of the child.A needle placed in the small of her back had removed all her sensation from her waist to the knees, and had given her a blistering headache in the final stages of her delivery. When it was all over she began to shiver profoundly, as if was beset with an acute fever. For half an hour she trembled, in a daze, covered by a blanket, her inside empty, her outside still misshapen. She was unable to speak, to allow the nurse to help exchange her blood-soaked gown for a fresh one. In spite of endless glasses of water, her throat was parched. She was told to sit on a toilet, to squirt warm water from a bottle bewteen her legs. Eventually she was sponged clan, put into a new gown,wheeled into yet another room. The lights were soothingly dim, and there was only one other bed next to hers, empty for the time being. When Ashoke arrived, Patty was taking Ashima's blood pressure, and Ashima was reclining against a pile of pillows, the child wrapped like an oblong white parcel in her arms. Beside the bed was a bassinet, labeled with a card that says BABY BOY GANGULI.
"He is here," she said quietly, looking up at Ashoke with a weak smile. Her skin was faintly yellow, the color missing from her lips. She had circles beneath her eyes, and her hair, spilling from its braid, looked as though it had not been combed for days. Her voice was hoarse, as if she'd caught in a cold. He pulled up a chair by the side of the bed and Patty helped to transfer the child from mother's to father's arms. In the process, the child pierced the silence in the room with a short lived cry. His parents reacted with mutual alarm, but Patty laughed approvingly. "You see," Patty said to Ashima, "he's already getting to know you."
Ashoke did as Patty instructed him, stretching out his arms, putting one hand below the neck, another below the bottom.
"Go on," Patty urged. "He wants to be held tightly. He is stronger than you think."
Ashoke lifted the minuscule parcel higher, close to his chest. "Like this ?"
"There you go," Patty said. "I'll leave you three alone for a while."
At first Ashoke was more perplexed than moved, by the pointier head, the puffiness of the lips, small white spots on the cheeks, the upper lip that droops prominently over the lower one. The skin was pale and translucent enough to show slim green veins at the temples. The scalp was covered by a mass of wispy black hair.
"What are the eyes like ? Why won't he open them ? Has he opened them ?" inquired Ashoke.
She simply nodded
They sat in silence. "How are you feeling ? Was it all right ?" he asked Ashima. But there was no answer, he found her sleeping.
When he looked back to the child, the eyes were open, staring up at him, unblinking, as dark as the hair on its head.
Next day there were three more visitors the baby had, all were Bengali ; Maya and Dilip Nandi, a young married couple in Cambridge whom Ashima and Ashoke had met a few months ago in the Purity Supreme, and Dr.Guptha, a mathematics postdoc from Dehradun, a bachelor in his fifties, whom Ashoke had befriended in the corridors of MIT.
Ashima was trained by the nursing staff how to change diapers and how to clean the umbilical stub, It took nearly three days for her to get the complete knowledge of these practices. She was given hot saltwater baths to soothe her bruises and stitches. She was given a list of pediatricians, and countless brochures on breast-feeding, and bonding, and immunizing, and samples of baby shampoos and Q-Tips and creams. On the fourth day Ashima and the baby were to be discharged. She was informed by Mr.Wilcox, the compiler of the hospital birth certificates, that they had to choose a name for the boy and that in America a baby cannot be discharged from the hospital without birth certificate containing the name of the baby born in a hospital.
Ashoke and Ashima were not aware of this procedure and they were puzzled to select the name of the boy, in Bengal tradition was that the a newly born child's name had to be determined by grandparents,, and no such people, from either mother's side or from father's side of the boy, are readily available in such a foreign place which is about eight thousand miles away from their homeland.
"But,sir," Ashima protested, "we can't possibly name him ourselves, and we are waiting for a letter from home in India."
"I see," said Mr.Wilcox, "that's unfortunate. I'm afraid your only alternative is to have a certificate with a tentative name as you choose now, you will, of course be required to amend the permanent record when a name is decided upon."
Ashima looked at Ashoke expectantly and he had preferred to be named 'Gogol', in memory of his favorite Russian novelist Nikolai Gogol. Thus 'Gogol Ganguli' is registered in hospital files. They took it to be a pet name, not to be taken seriously, simply something to put on the certificate for then to release them from the hospital. Mr. Wilcox, however, did not recommend to choose a temporary name saying "to amend the the name of the birth certificate, you'll have to appear before a judge, pay a fee. The red tape is endless."
"Good-bye, Gogol," Patty said, planting a quiet kiss on his shoulder, and to Ashima, dressed once again in her wrinkled silk sari, "Good luck." A first photograph, somewhat overexposed, is taken by Dr.Guptha.
Gogol, an indistinct blanketed mass, reposing in his mother's arms, left the hospital along with his mother and father.
"So, Gogol entered the world"
(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
In Cambridge it is eleven in the morning, already lunch time in the hospital, Patty, a nurse with a diamond engagement ring and a fringe of reddish hair beneath her cap, brought a tray holding warm apple juice, Jell-O, ice cream and cold baked chicken. Ashima would not have touched chicken, even if permitted. The nurse advised her to consume only the Jell-O and apple juice. Americans eat their chicken in its skin, but Ashima desists the chicken with skin ; she had found a butcher on Prospect Street who pull it off for her.
Patty came again to fluff the pillows and tidy the bed, followed by Dr.Ashley who put a stethoscope on her belly, "no need to worry," he chirped, "every thing is looking perfectly normal and we are expecting a normal delivery, Mrs.Ganguli." But nothing felt normal to Ashima, for the past eighteen months, ever since she had arrived in Cambridge, nothing she had felt normal at all.
It was not the pain, which she knew, somehow she would survive, but its consequence : motherhood in a foreign land, the dull queasy mornings in bed, the sleepless nights.
"How about a little walk ? It might do you good," Patty asked when she came to clear the lunch tray.
"Yes, all right," Ashima said. Patty helped her out of bed, tucked her feet one by one into slippers, draped a second nightgown around her shoulders
"Just think," Patty said as Ashima struggled to stand up. "In a day or two you'll be half the size." The nurse helped Ashima to step out of the room, into the hallway. After a few feet Ashima stopped, her legs trembling as another wave of pain surged through her body. She shook her head, her eyes with tears. "I cannot."
"You can. Squeeze my hand, squeeze as tight as you like," said the nurse.
After a minute they continued on towards the nurses' station. "Hoping for a boy or girl ?" Patty asked
"As long as there are ten finger and ten toe," Ashima replied. For these anatomical details, these particular signs of life, were the ones she had the most difficulty picturing when she imagined the baby in her arms.
Patty smiled, a little too widely, and suddenly Ashima realized her error, knew she should have said "fingers" and "toes." This error pained her almost as much as her last contraction, for English had been her subject.
The Baby, a boy was born at five past five in the morning. He measured twenty inches long weighed seven pounds nine ounces.
(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
Now she was alone, cut off by curtains from the three other women in the room. One woman's name was Breverly, as gathered from bits of conversation, another was Lois. Carol was to her left. "Goddamn it, goddamn you, this is hell," she heard one of them saying. And then a man' voice :"I love you sweet heart," words Ashima had neither heard nor expected to hear from her own husband ; this was not how they were. It was first time in her life she had slept alone, surrounded by strangers ; all her life she had slept either in a room with her parents, or with Ashoke at her side. She wished the the curtains were open, so that she could talk to the American women. Perhaps one of them who had given birth before, could tell her what to expect. But she had gathered that Americans, in spite of their public declaration of affection, in spite of their miniskirts and bikinis, in spite of their hand-holding on the street and lying on top of each other on the Cambridge Common, prefer their privacy. She used to spread her fingers over the taut, enormous drum her middle had become, wondering where the baby's feet and hands were at that moment. For the past few days, apart from the occasional flutter she had not felt either restlessness of the baby or its kick or punch or press against her ribs. She wondered if she was the only Indian person in the hospital, but a gentle twitch from her baby reminded her that she was, technically speaking,not alone. Ashima thought that it was strange that her child would be born in a place most people enter either to suffer or die. There was nothing to comfort her in the hospital in a foreign land. In India, she thought to herself,women go home to their parents to give birth, away from husbands and in-laws and household cares, retreating briefly to childhood when the baby arrives.
Another contraction began, more violent than the last. She cried out, pressing her head against the pillow, her fingers gripping the the chilly rails of the bed. She had been instructed to time the duration of the contractions and she used to see her watch, a bon voyage gift from her parents, slipped over her wrist the last time she saw them, amid airport confusion and tears It was not until she was on the plane flying for the first time in her life on a BOAC VC-10, whose deafening ascent at Dum Dum airport. She noticed the watch among the cavalcade of matrimonial bracelets on both her arms, and a plastic bracelet with a typed label identiffying her as a patient of the hospital
(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
It's in 1968, after about eighteen months of her settled life in America with Ashoke, she started experiencing morning sickness associated with nausea and vomiting. Initially she thought it to be a stomach disorder due to the unusual food that she had consumed in the week-end parties with their Bengali friends in their surroundings. But as it persisted she complained to Ashoke about her sickness. Ashoke took her to Mount Auburn Hospital in a Cambridge street, up Massachusetts Avenue and past Harvard Yard. A gynecologist, Dr.Ashley, confirmed her first pregnancy and prescribed suitable drugs to be regularly consuming and to get medical check-up periodically.
As the days passed on she started feeling the consequence of her pregnancy in a foreign land, away from her parents, suffering the queasy mornings, the sleepless nights, the dull throbbing in her back, the countless visits to the bathroom. That it was happening so far from home, unmonitored and unobserved by those she loved, had made made it more miraculous still. She was terrified to raise a child in a country where she is related to no one, where she knows so little, where life seems so tentative and spare.
During day time whenever she faced any problem associated with the pregnancy, she used to call out to her husband, Ashoke, a doctoral candidate in Electrical Engineering at MIT.
On a sticky August evening, two weeks before her due date, Ashima Ganguli was in her kitchen, standing, of a their Central Square apartment, combining Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion, thin slices of green chili pepper and salt in a bowl. Ashima had been consuming this concoction throughout her pregnancy, a humble approximation of the snack sold for pennies on Calcutta side walks and on railway platforms throughout India, spilling from news paper cones.
All of a sudden she started experiencing her pelvis aches from the baby's weight and a curious warmth flooding her abdomen, followed by a tightening so severe spasm of discomfort. In the bathroom she discovered, on her underpants, a slid streak of brownish blood. She called out her husband studying in the bedroom.
At dawn a taxi was called to ferry them to the hospital that she was going for her regular medical check-up,Mount Auburn Hospital. Ashima registered, answering about the frequency and duration of the contractions, as Ashoke filled out the forms. She was seated in a wheel chair and pushed through brightly lit corridors, whisked in to an elevator and taken to the maternity floor. She was assigned to a bed by a window, in a room at the end of the hall. She was asked to remove her Marshidabad silk sari in favor of flowered cotton gown that, to her mild embarrassment, only reaches her knees. A nurse offered to fold up the sari but, exasperated by the six slippery yards, ends up stuffing the material in to Ashima's slate blue suitcase. Her obstetrician, Dr. Ashley arrived to examine her progress. The baby's head was in the proper position, has already begun to descent. She was told that she was still in early labor, three centimeters dialated, beginning to efface. The process would take some time, Dr. Ashley told her, given that this was her first pregnancy, labor could take twenty-four hours, some times more.
"Don't you worry, Mr.Gaguli. She's got a long way to go. We can take over from here," a nurse added, and Ashoke stepped behind the curtain saying, "I'll be back soon," to his wife in Bengali.
