ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 85

                                                 (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


            Gogol and Moushumi barely talked to each other all evening ;throughout the ceremony she'd kept her eyes lowered, and during the reception, each time he'd looked at her, she'd been deep in conversation with people he didn't know. He wanted to be with her alone suddenly, wished they could sneak off to her room or his, ignored the rest of the party as he would when he was a boy. "Come on," he urged motioning toward the glass elevator, "fifteen minutes. No one will notice." But the dinner had begun, and table numbers were being called one by one on the loudspeaker. "I'd need someone to redo my hair," she said. The heated silver chafing dishes were labeled for American guests. It was typical north Indian fare, mounds of hot pink tandoori, aloo gobi in thick orange sauce.
           They sat at the head table in the center of the room, with his mother and Sonia, her parents and a handful of her relatives visiting from Calcutta, and her brother, Samrat, who was on his orientation at the University of Chicago. There were awkward champagne toasts and speeches by their families, their parents' friends. Her father stood up, smiling nervously, forgot to raise his glass, and said, "Thank you very much for coming," then turned to Gogol and Moushumi : "Okay, be happy." Forks were tapped against glasses by giggling, sari-clad mashis, instructing them when to kiss. Each time he obliged them and kissed his bride tamely on the cheek.
          A cake was wheeled out. "Nikhil weds Moushumi" piped across its surface. Moushumi smiled, as she always did for a camera, her mouth closed, her head tilted slightly downward and to the left.
He was aware that he and Moushumi were fulfilling a collective, deep-seated desire, because they both were Bengali, and every one of both the families could let hair down a bit. At times, looking out at the guests, he couldn't help but think that two years ago he might have been sitting watching her marry another man. The thought crashed over him like an unexpected wave, but quickly he 
reminded himself that he was the one sitting beside her. The red Banarasi wedding sari and the gold had been bought two years ago, for her wedding to Graham. This time all her parents had had to do was to bring down the boxes from a closet shelf, retrieve the jewels from the safety deposit box, find the itemized list for the caterer. The new invitation, designed by Ashima, the English
translation lettered by Gogol, was the only thing that wasn't  a leftover.
             Since Moushumi had to teach a class three days after the wedding, they had to postpone the honeymoon. The closest they came was a night alone in the Double Tree, which they were both dying to leave. But their parents had gone to a great trouble and expended to book the newlywed suit. "I have got to take a shower," she said as soon as they were finally alone, and disappeared into 
the bathroom. He knew she was exhausted, as he was ; the night had ended with a long session of dancing to Abba songs. He examined the room, opening drawers and pulling out the stationery, opening the minibar, reading the contents of the room service menu, though he was not at all hungry. If anything he felt slightly ill, from the combination of the bourbon and the two large pieces of cake he'd had because he had not any dinner. He sprawled on the king-sized bed. The bedspread had been strewn with flower petals, a final gesture before their families withdrew.  He waited for her, flipping through the channels on the television. Beside him was a bottle of champagne in a bucket, heart-shaped chocolates on a lace-covered plate. He took a bite out  of one
of the chocolates. The inside was an unyielding toffee, requiring more chewing than he'd expected.

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 84

                                              (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


            The Saturday of the wedding they packed suitcases, rented a car, and drove down to New Jersey, separating only when they got to the hotel, where they were claimed one last time by their respective families. Starting tomorrow, he realized with a shock, Moushumi and he would be regarded as a family of their own. They had not seen the hotel before hand. It was fascinating to everyone, its most memorable feature, a glass elevator that rose and fell ceaselessly at its center, much to the amusement of children and adults alike. The rooms were gathered around balconies. Gogol had a room to himself, on a floor with his mother and Sonia and a few of the Gangulis' closest family friends. Moushumi stayed chastely on the floor above, next to her parents, though by now she and Gogol were practically living at her place. His mother had brought him the things he was to wear, a parchment- colored Punjabi top that had once belonged to his father, a prepleated dhoti with a drawstring waist, a pair of nagrai slippers with curling toes. His father had never worn the punjabi, and Gogol had to hang it in the bathroom, hot water running in the shower, to get the crease out. "His blessings are always with you," his mother said, reaching up and placing both her hands for a moment on his head. For the first time since his father's death, she was dressed with care, wearing a pretty pale green sari, a pearl necklace at her throat, had agreed to let Sonia put some lipstick on her lips. "Is it too much ?" his mother worried, regarding herself in the mirror. Still, he had not seen her looking this lovely, this happy, this excited, in years. Sonia wore a sari, too, fuchsia with silver embroidery, a red rose stuck into her hair. She gave him a box wrapped in tissue.
          "What is this," he asked. 
           "You didn't think I forgot your thirtieth birthday, did you ?"
           It had been a few days ago, a week night he and Moushumi had both been busy to celebrate properly. Even his mother, preoccupied with last-minute wedding details, had forgotten to call him first thing in the morning, as she normally did. 
         "I think I'm officially at the age when I want people to forget my birthday," he said, accepting the gift.
         "Poor Goggles."
        Inside he found a small bottle of bourbon and a red leather flask. "I had it engraved," she said, and when he turned the flask over he saw the letters NG. He remembered poking his head into Sonia's room years ago, telling her about his decision to change his name to Nikhil. She'd been thirteen or so doing her homework on her bed. "You can't do that," she'd told him then, shaking her head, and when he'd asked her why not she'd simply said, "Because you can't. Because you are Gogol." He watched her now, applying her make-up in his room, pulling the skin next to her eye and painting a thin black line on the lid, and he recalled photographs his mother at her own wedding.
          "You are next, you know," he said.
          "Don't mind me." She grimaced, then laughed. The excitement of the preparations saddened him, all of it reminding him that his father was dead.. He imagined his father wearing an outfit similar to him, a shawl draped over one shoulder, as he used to during pujo. The ensemble he feared looked silly on himself would have looked dignified, elegant, befitting his father in a way, he knew, it didn't him.
         There was an hour-long watered-down Hindu ceremony on a platform covered with sheets. Gogol and Moushumi sat cross-legged,, first opposite each other, then side by side. A video camera and hand-held white lights hovered above their faces. Shenai music played  on a boom box. Nothing had been rehearsed or explained to them beforehand.
        The priest was a friend of Mousumi's parents, an anesthesiologist, a Brahmin. Offerings were made to pictures of their grand parents and his father, rice poured into a pyre that they were forbidden by the management of the hotel to ignite.
         It was the first time he'd seen Moushumi in a sari, apart from all those pujos year ago, which she'd suffered through silently. She had about twenty pounds of gold on her. Two enormous paisleys had been painted in red and white on her cheeks. Until now Moshumi's parents were called as uncle and aunt, as if she were a sort of cousin. But by the end of the night he would become son-in law and so be expected to address them as his second set of parents, an alternative to Baba and Ma.
          For reception he changed into a suit, she into a red Banarasi gown with spaghetti straps, something she'd designed herself and had made by a seamstress friend, in spite of her mother's protests, who was in favor of a shalwar kameeze. And when Moushumi happened to forget her shawl on a chair and bared her slim, bronze shoulders, which sparkled from a special powder she'd applied to them, her mother shot her reproachful glances, which Moushumi ignored. Countless people congratulated them, asked them to pose for photographs with them, wrapping his arms around his friends. He was numbly drunk through it all, thanks to the open bar her parents had sprung for. When they bumped into each other , on her way from the ladies room, they exchanged a quick kiss, the smoke on her breath faintly masked by the mint she was chewing.  
      

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 83

                                          (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


            After that disaster of breaking the marriage, which was about to take place with Graham, Moushumi impulsively thought of moving back to Paris. But she was in school, too invested to drop out, and besides she'd no money for that. She fled the apartment on York Avenue,  unable to afford on her own. She refused to go home to her parents. Some friends in Brooklyn took her in. It was painful, she told Gogol, living with a couple at that particular time, listening to them shower together in the mornings, watching them kiss and shut the door to their bedroom at the end of each night, but in the beginning she could not face being alone. She started temping. By the time she saved enough to move to her own place in the East Village, she was thankful to be alone. All summer she went to movie by herself, sometimes as many as three a day. She bought TV Guide every week and read it from cover to cover, planning her nights around her favorite shows. She began to subsist on a diets of raita and Triscuits. She grew thinner than she'd ever been in her life, so that in few pictures taken of her in that period her face was faintly unrecognizable. She went to end-of-summer sales and bought everything in size four ; six months later she would be forced to donate it all to a thrift shop. When autumn came, she threw herself into her studies, catching up on all the work she'd abandoned that spring, began every now and then to date. And then one day her mother called, asking if she remembered a boy named Gogol.
                                           *             *           *            *            *              *            *
            They married within a year at a Double Tree hotel in New Jersey, close to the suburb where her parents lived. It was not the type of wedding either of them really wanted. They would have preferred a sit-down dinner, jazz played during the reception, black-and-white photographs,  keeping things small. But their parents insisted on inviting close to three hundred people, and serving Indian food, and providing easy parking for all the guests. Gogol and Moushumi agreed that it was better to give in to these expectations than to put up a fight. It was what they deserved, they joked, for having listened to their mothers, and for getting together in the first place, and the fact that they were united in their resignation made the consequences somewhat bearable. Within weeks of announcing their engagement, the date was settled, the hotel booked, the menu decided,
and though for a while there were nightly phone calls, her mother asking if they preferred a sheet cake or layers, sage-or rose-colored napkins, Chardonnay or Chablis, there was little for either Gogol or Moushumi to do other than listen and say yes, whichever seemed best, it all sounded fine.
"Consider yourselves lucky," Gogol's coworkers told him. Planning  a wedding was incredibly stressful, the first real trial of a marriage, they said. Still, it felt a strange to be so uninvolved in his own wedding, and he was reminded of the many other celebrations in his life, all the birthdays and
graduation parties his parents had thrown when he was growing up, in his honor, attended by his parents' friends, occasions on which he had always felt at a slight remove.

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 82

                                             (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


           Moushumi found a job working for an agency, helping American business people learn conversational French, and French Business people learn conversational English.  She would meet them in cafes, or speak with them by phone, asking questions about their families, their backgrounds, their favorite books and foods. Her fiance was part of that crowd. He was an investment banker from New York, an American expatriate, living in Paris for years. She'd fallen in love and very quickly moved in with him. His name was Graham and for him she'd applied to New York University. They took a place on York Avenue. They lived there in secret, with two telephone lines so that her parents would never know. When her parents came to the city, he'd disappear to a hotel, removing all traces of himself from the apartment. It had been exciting at first, maintaining such elaborate lie. But then it had gotten tiresome, impossible. She brought him home to New Jersey, prepared herself for battle, but in fact, to her enormous surprise, her parents were relieved. By then she was old enough so that it didn't matter to them that he was an American. Enough of their parents' children had married Americans, had produced pale, dark-haired, half-American grandchildren, and none of it was as terrible as they had feared. And so her parents did their best to accept him. They told their Bengali friends that Graham was well behaved, Ivy educated, earned an impressive salary. they learned to overlook the fact his parents were divorced, that his father'd remarried not once but twice, that his second wife was only ten years older than Moushumi.
             One night in a taxi stuck in midtown traffic, she had impulsively asked him to marry her. Looking back on it, she supposed it was all those years of people attempting to claim her, choose her, of feeling an invisible net cast around her, that had led her to this proposal. Graham had accepted, gave her his grandmother's diamond. He had agreed to fly with her and her parents to Calcutta, to meet her extended family and ask her grandparents' blessing. He'd charmed them all, learned to sit on the floor and eat with his fingers, take the dust from her grandparents' feet. He'd visited the homes of dozens of her relatives, eaten the plates full of syrupy mishti, patiently posed for countless photographs on rooftops, surrounded by her cousins. He had agreed to a Hindu wedding and so she and her mother had gone shopping in Gariahat and New Market, selected a dozen saris, gold jewelry, a dhoti and a topor for Graham that her mother carried by hand on the plane ride back. The wedding was planned for summer in New Jersey, an engagement party thrown, a few gifts already received. Her mother had typed up an explanation of Bengali wedding rituals on the computer and mailed it to all the Americans on the guest list. A photograph of the two of them was taken for the local paper in her parents' town. 
              A few weeks before wedding, they were out to dinner with friends, getting happily drunk, and she heard Graham talking about their time in Calcutta. To her surprise, he was complaining about it, commenting that he found it taxing, found the culture repressed. All they did was visit her relatives, he said. Though he thought the city was fascinating, the society, in his opinion, was somewhat provincial. People tended to stay at home most of the time. There was nothing to drink. "Imagine dealing  with fifty in-laws without alcohol. I couldn't even hold her hand on the street without attracting stares," he had said. She had listened to him, partly sympathetic, partly horrified.
For it was one thing for her to reject her background, to be critical of her family's heritage, she realized that he had fooled everyone, including her. On their walk home from the restaurant, she brought it up, saying that his comments had upset her, why hadn't he told her these things ? Was he only pretending to enjoy himself all that time ? They'd begun to argue, a chasm opening up between them, swallowing them, and suddenly in a rage, she'd removed his grandfather's ring from
her finger and tossed it into the street, into oncoming traffic, and then Graham had struck her on the face as the pedestrians watched. By the end of the week, he had moved out of the apartment they shared. She stopped going to school, filed for incompletes in all her classes. She swallowed half a bottle of pills, was forced to drink charcoal in an emergency room. She was given a referral to
a therapist. She called her adviser at NYU, told him she'd had a nervous breakdown, took off the rest of the semester. The wedding was canceled, hundreds of phone calls made.

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 81

                                                              (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)





              The shameful truth in Moushumi's life was that she used to hate any sort of association with Bengali boys right from adolescent age, was in fact desperately lonely. She'd rebuffed the Indian men she wasn't interested in, and she had been forbidden as a teenager to date. In college she'd harbored lengthy infatuations, with students with whom she never spoke, with professors and teaching assistants. Occasionally one of her infatuations would culminate in a lunch or coffee date, an encounter on which she pinned all her hopes but which led to nothing. Toward the end of the college, as graduation loomed, she was convinced in her bones that there would be no one at all. Sometimes she wondered if it was her horror of being married to someone she didn't love, that had caused her, subconsciously, to shut herself off. Even now she regretted herself as a teenager, irritated with having revisited her past, regretted her obedience, her long, unstyled hair, her piano lessons and lace-collared shirts. She regretted her mortifying lack of confidence, the extra ten pounds she carried on her frame during puberty. When she said, "no wonder you never talked to me back then," he felt tenderness toward her, when she herself disparaged this way. And though he'd witnessed that stage of her himself, he could no longer picture it ; those vague recollections of her he'd carried with him all his life had been wiped clean, replaced by the woman he knew now.
           At Brown her rebellion had been academic. At her parents insistence, she'd majored in chemistry, for they were hopeful she would follow in her father's footsteps. Without telling them she'd, unlike Americans or Indians, pursued a double major in French. Her four years of secret study had prepared her, at the end of college to escape as far as possible. Deaf to her parents', she'd scraped together all the money she had and moved to Paris, with no specific plans.
               After years of being convinced that she would never have a lover, suddenly it was easy to fall effortlessly into affairs, with no hesitation, she allowed men to seduce her in cafes, in parks, while she gazed at paintings in museums. She gave herself openly, completely, not caring about the consequences. She was exactly the same person, looked and behaved the same way, and yet suddenly in that new city, she was transformed into the kind of girl she'd once envied, had believed she would never become. She allowed the men to buy her drinks, dinners, later to take her in taxis to their apartments, in neighborhoods she'd not yet discovered on her own. In retrospect she saw that her sudden lack of inhibition had intoxicated her more than any of the men had. Some of them had been married, far older, fathers to children in secondary schools. The men had been French for the most part, but also German, Persian, Italian, Lebanese. There were days when she slept with one man after lunch, another after dinner. They were a bit excessive, she told Gogol with a roll of her eyes, the type lavish her with perfume and jewels.

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 80

                                           (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


            Within three months they'd clothes and toothbrushes at each other's apartments. He saw her entire weekends without makeup, saw her with gray shadows under her eyes as  she typed papers at her desk, and when he kissed her head he tasted the oil that accumulated on her scalp between shampoos. He saw the hair that grew  on her legs between waxings, the black roots that emerged between the appointments at the saloon, and in these moments,these glimpses, he believed he had known no greater intimacy. He learned she slept, always, with her left leg straight, and her right leg bent, ankle over knee, in the shape of a 4. He learned that she was prone to snoring, ever so faintly, sounding like a lawn mower that would not start, and to gnashing her jaws, which he massaged for her as she slept. At restaurants and bars, they sometimes slip Bengali phrases into their conversation  in order to comment with impunity on another diner's unfortunate hair or shoes.
           They talked endlessly about how they knew and didn't know each other. In a way there was little to explain. There had been the same parties to attend when they were growing up, the same episodes of The Love Boat and Fantasy Island the children watched as the parents feasted in another part of the house, the same meals served to them on paper plates, the carpets lined with news papers when the hosts happened to be particularly fastidious. He could imagine her life, even after she and her family moved away to New Jersey, easily. He could imagine the large suburban house her family owned ; the china cabinet in the dining room, her mother's prized possession ; the large public high school in which she'd excelled but that she'd miserably attended. There had been the same frequent trips to Calcutta, being plucked out of their American lives for months at a time. They calculated the many months that they were in that distant city together, on trips that had overlapped by weeks and once by months, unaware of each other's presence. They talked about how they were both routinely assumed to be Greek, Egyptian, Mexican - even in this misrendering they were joined.
            She spoke with nostalgia of the years her family had spent in England, living at first in London, which she barely remembers, and then in a brick semidetached house in Croydon , with rose bushes in front. She told him that she'd hated moving to America, that she'd held on to her British accent for as long as she could. For some reason, her parents feared America much more than England, perhaps because of its vastness,, or perhaps because in their minds it had a less of a link to India. A few months before their arrival in Massachusetts, a child had disappeared while playing in his yard and was never found ; for a long time afterward there were posters in the supermarket. She was always used to call her mother every time she and her friends moved to another house in the neighborhood, to play with the neighboring girls.
            He didn't feel insulted when she told him that for most of her life he was exactly the type of person she had sought to avoid. If any thing it flatters him. From earliest girlhood, she said, she had been determined not to allow her parents to have a hand in her marriage. She had always been admonished not to marry an American, as had he, but he gathered that in her case these warnings had been relentless, and had therefore plagued her far more than they had him. When she was only five years old, she was asked by her relatives if she planned to get married in red sari or white gown. Though she'd refused to indulge them, she knew , even then, what the correct response was. By the time she was twelve she had made a pact, with two other Bengali girls she knew, never to marry a Bengali man. They had written a statement vowing never to do so, and spit on it at the same time, and buried it somewhere in her parents' backyard.

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 79

                                         (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


              Gogol took the hat to his apartment and hid it at the back of his closet ; he would give it to Moushumi on her birth day, of which he'd no idea when it was. That week end at his parents' house he confirmed it ; at night, after his mother and Sonia had gone to bed, he hunted for her in the photo albums that his mother had assembled over the years. Moushumi was there, lined up behind a blazing cake in his parents' dining room. He couldn't get the information about her birth day.


The following weekend she invited him over dinner at her place. She was waiting at the door steps for him, as the buzzer was broken, she'd warned him when they'd made their plans. She wore a sleeveless black dress tied loosely at the back. Her legs were bare, her feet slim, her toenails, exposed at the top of sandals. She led him up to her apartment on the third floor. She held half a cigarette between her fingers, but just before she leaned forward to kiss him on the cheeks she let it drop and crushed it with the toe of her sandal. The apartment smelt strongly of cooking, on the stove, a few large pieces of chicken were browning in a pan full of oil. Gogol handed her a bunch of flowers along with a bottle of wine that he'd also bought. She didn't know where to put the flowers ; the counter tops, were crammed with evidence of the meal she was preparing, onions and mushrooms, flour, a stick of butter rapidly softening in the heat, a glass of wine she was in the process of drinking, plastic bags of grocery she had not time to put away.
             She took him into the living room, unwrapped the flowers, "there's a vase up there," she said pointing to the top of a bookcase, "would you mind getting it down."
            He removed his coat and cap, draped them over the back of the sofa. He'd dressed with a blue-and-white-striped Italian shirt that Sonia had bought for him at Filene's Basement, a pair of black jeans. She filled the vase with flowers, putting it on the coffee table.  The living room had a square dining table in one corner, and a desk and file cabinets set up in another. On the dining table  there was a pepper mill, a saltcellar, bright clear-skinned clementines arranged in a bowl. He recognized versions of things he knew from home ; a Kashmiri crewelwork carpet on the floor,  Rajasthani silk pillows on the sofa, a cast-iron Natraj on one of the bookcases.
            Back in the kitchen she set out some olives and some goat cheese coated with  ash. She handed him a corkscrew and asked him to open the bottle he'd bought, to pour himself a glass. She dredged more of the chicken on a plate of flour. The pan was sputtering loudly and had showered the wall behind the stove with oil. He stood there as she referred to a cookbook by Julia Child. He was overwhelmed by the production taking place for his benefit. In spite of the meals they'd already shared, he was nervous about eating with her.
           "When would you like to eat ?" she said. "Are you hungry ?"
           "Whenever. What are you making ?"
          She looked at him doubtfully. "Coq au vin. I haven't made it before. I just found out that you're supposed to cook it twenty-four hours in advance. I'm afraid I'm running a bit behind."
          He shrugged. "It already smells great. I'll help you." He rolled up his sleeves. "What can I do ?"
           "Let's see," she said, reading. "Oh. Okay.You can take those onions and make X's in the bottom with a knife, and drop them into the pan."
           "In with chicken ?"
           "No. Shoot." She knelt down and retrieved a pot from one of the lower cupboards. "In here. They need to boil for a minute and then you take them out."
           He did as he was told, filling the pan with water and turning on the flame. He found a knife and scored the onions, as he had once been taught to do with Brussels sprouts in the Ratliff's kitchen. He watched her measure wine and tomato paste into the pan containing the chicken. She searched in a cupboard for a stainless-steel spice caddy and threw in a bay leaf.
         "Of course, my mother is appalled that I'm not making you Indian food," she said, studying the contents of the pan.
         "You told her I'm coming over ?"
          "She happened to call today." Then she asked him. "What about you ? Have you been giving your mother updates ?"
          "I've not gone out of my way. But probably she suspects something given that it's a Saturday and I'm not at home with her and Sonia."
          Moushumi leaned over the pan, watching the contents come to a simmer, prodding the pieces of chicken with a wooden spoon. She glanced back at the recipe. "I think I need to add more liquid," she said, pouring water into the pan, causing her glasses to steam. "I can't see." She laughed, stepping away so that she stood bit closer  him. The CD had ended and the apartment was silent apart from the sounds on the stove. She turned to him, still laughing, her eyes still obscured. She held up  her hands, messy from cooking, coated with flour and chicken fat. "Would you mind taking these glasses off me ?"
           With both the hands he pried the glasses from her face, clasping the frames where they meet her temples. He put them on the counter. And then he leaned over and kissed her. He touched his fingers at her bare arms, cool in spite of the warmth of  the kitchen. He pressed her close, a hand at the small of her back, against the knot of her dress, tasting the warm, slightly sour tang of her mouth. They made their way, through the living room, to the bedroom. He saw a box spring and mattress without a frame. He untied the knot at the back of her dress, then swiftly undid the long zipper, leaving a small black pool at her feet. In the light cast from the living room, he glimpsed black mesh underwear and a matching bra. She was curvier than she appeared clothed, her breasts fuller, her hips generously flared. They made love on top of the covers, quickly, efficiently, as if they'd known each other's bodies for years. But when they were finished she switched on the lamp by her bed and they examined each other, quietly discovering moles, marks and ribs. 
          "Who would have thought ," she said, her voice tired, satisfied. She was smiling, her eyes partly closed.
           He looked down at her face. "You're beautiful."
          "And you."
          "Can you even see me without those glasses ?"
           "Only if you stay close," she said.
          "Then I 'd better not move."
           "Don't."
            They peeled back the covers and lied together, sticky and spent, in each other's arms. He began to kiss her again, and she wrapped her legs around him. But the smell of something burning caused them to bolt naked from the bed rushing comically to the kitchen, laughing. The sauce had evaporated and the chicken was irreparably scorched, so much so that the pan itself had to be thrown away. By then they were starving, they lacked the energy either to  go out or to prepare another meal.