ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 91

                                          (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


            Of late Gogol found Moushumi enjoying the company of Astrid and Donald, and also recently began to notice that she was gloomy aftermath, as if seeing them served only to remind her that their own lives would never match up. The last time the'd gone home after one of Astrid and Donald's dinner parties, she'd picked up a fight with him as soon as they had walked in the door , complaining about the noise on Third Avenue, and about some of the fittings in their house. He told himself that it was the stress - she'd been studying for her orals, holed up in her carrel at the library until nine O'clock most nights. He remembered how it was studying for his licensing exam, which he failed twice before passing. He remembered the sustained isolation it had demanded, speaking to no one for days at a time, and so he didn't say anything. Tonight he had held out hope that she would use her orals as a reason to decline the invitation to Astrid and Donald's. But by now he had learned that there was never a question of saying no when it comes to them.
           Gogol understood that it was through Astrid and Donald that Moushumi had met her farmer fiance, Graham, Donald had gone to prep school with him, and it was he who introduced Moushumi to Graham when he'd moved to Paris, by giving her number. Gogol didn't like to think about the fact that Moushumi's connection to Graham persists through Astrid and Donald, that through them Moushumi had learned that Graham lived in Toronto now, was married and a father of twins. Back when Moushumi and Graham were together they had made a foursome with Donald and Astrid, renting cottages together in Vermont, time-shared in the Hamptons. They tried to incorporate Gogol into similar plans ; this summer, for example, they were thinking of renting a house on the coast of Brittany. Though Astrid and Donald had welcomed Gogol heartily into their lives, sometimes he'd the feeling that they still think she was with Graham. Once Astrid even called him Graham by mistake. No one had noticed except Gogol.
           Gogol ended up in the kitchen, where Donald was beginning to prepare spaghetti alle vongole.  He was handsome, with patrician features and swept-back, slightly greasy, light brown hair.
           "Hey there," Gogol said. "Need any help ?"
            "Nikhil. Welcome." Donald handed over the parsley. "be my guest. When are you guys moving to this neighborhood ?" he asked
           Gogol shrugged. He'd no interest in moving to Brooklyn, not in such proximity to Donald and Astrid, anyway. "I haven't really considered it. I prefer Manhattan. Moushumi does too."
           Donald shook his head. "You are wrong. Moushumi adores Brooklyn. We practically had to kick her out after the whole Graham thing."
          The mention of the name pricked him, deflated him as it always did.
          "She stayed here with you ?"
         "Right down the hall. She was here for a couple of months. She was a real mess. I've never seen anyone so devastated."
          He nodded. This was something else she'd never told him. He wondered why. He hated the house suddenly, aware that it was here, with Donald and Astrid, that she spent her darkest hour. That it was here she'd mourned for another man.
         "But you are much better for her," Donald concluded
         Gogol looked up, surprised.
          "Don't get me wrong, Graham was a great guy. But they were too alike somehow, too intense together."
          Gogol didn't find this observation particularly reassuring.
          Gogol was sent off with a stack of plates, a bunch of forks and knives. On his way he poked his head into the room down the hall where Moushumi had stayed.It was empty now, a drop cloth on the floor, a tangle of wires poking out of the center of the ceiling. He imagined her here in a bed in the corner, sullen, emaciated, a cloud of smoke over her head.  
   

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 90

                                         (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


               They were at the home of Moushumi's friends Astrid and Donald.It was a house under renovation ; Astrid and Donald, expecting their first child, were in the process of expanding their domain from single floor of the  house to the top three. Though it was close to ten O'clock, guests continued to arrive. They removed their coats, introduced themselves, poured themselves Chianti, a dry red Italian table wine.
           Gogol had been to that house a bit too frequently. Astrid was a friend of Moushumi from Brown, where she was living after returning from Paris. Astrid was teaching film theory at the New 
School and Donald was moderately talented painter. They were languidly confident couple, a model, Gogol guessed. They reached out people, hosting parties, helping little bit of themselves to their friends by being passionate spokespeople of their brand of life advising their friends a stream of a quotidian things, to buy bakery products at a certain bakery on Sullivan Street, a certain butcher on Mott, a certain style of coffee maker, a certain  Florentine designer of sheets for their bed. Their decrees drive Gogol crazy, though Moushumi was loyal and used to go out of the way, and out of their budget, to buy their home needs.
            At the get together party, Gogol recognized a few  familiar faces : Edith and Colin who were teaching sociology at Princeton and Yale, respectively, and Louise and Blake, both Ph.D. candidates, like Moushumi, at NYU. Oliver was an editor at an art magazine ; his wife Sally, worked as a pastry chef. The rest were painter friends of Donald's, poets, documentary film makers. They were all  married. Even now, a fact as ordinary, as obvious, as this astonished Gogol. All married ! But this was life now, the weekend sometimes more tiring than the workweek, an endless stream of dinner parties, occasionally, after-eleven parties with dancing and drugs to remind them that they were still young, followed by Sunday brunches full of unlimited Bloody Marys and overpriced eggs.
          They were an intelligent, attractive, well-dressed crowd. Also a bit incestuous. The vast majority of them know each other from Brown, and Gogol couldn't ever shake the feeling that half of the people in the room had slept with one another. At one end of the table, a woman with short red hair and cat's-eye glasses was talking about  a Brecht play she'd once acted in in San Francisco, performed fully in the nude.
           At their meetings, Gogol had nothing to say to these people, he didn't care about their diversified topics, he'd found them quite excruciating. Moushumi's devotion to these people puzzled him. Her smoking hadn't bothered him initially. But these days the smell of it, in her hair and on her fingertips, and in the bedroom where she sat typing, slightly disgusted him, and from time to time, he expressed his displeasure about her addiction. She'd laughed, "Oh, Nikhil," she said, "you can't be serious."

ABCDs ; THE Culture-Conflict. 89

                                                (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


          On their last day in Paris, in the morning, he shopped for gifts for his in-laws, his mother, Sonia. It was the day Moushumi was presenting her paper. He had offered to go with her, to sit in the audience and listen to her speak. But she told him that was silly, why sit in the middle of a roomful of people speaking a language he didn't understand when there was still of the city he could see ? And so, after shopping, he set off, alone, for the Louvre, a destination he'd put off until now. At the end of the day he met her at a cafe in the Latin Quarter. She was there waiting for him behind a glassed-in partition on the sidewalk, wearing a dark red lipstick, sipping a glass of wine.
         He sat down, ordered a coffee. "How was it ? How did it go ?" 
         She lighted a cigarette. "Okay. Over with, at any rate."
         She looked more regretful than relieved, her eyes lingering over the small round table between them.
         Normally she wanted a full account of his adventures, but today they sat silently, watching the passers-by. He showed her the things he'd bought, a tie for his father-in-law, soaps for their mothers, a shirt for her brother, Samrat, a silk scarf for Sonia, sketch books for himself, bottles of ink, a pen. She admired the drawings he'd done. It's a cafe they'd been before, and he felt the slight nostalgia it was sometimes possible  to feel at the end of an extended stay in a foreign place, taking in the details that would soon evaporate from his mind : the surly waiter who had served them both times, the view of the shops across the street, the green and yellow straw chairs.
          "Are you sad to be leaving ?" he asked, stirring sugar into his coffee, drinking it back in one gulp.
          "A little. I guess a little part of me wishes I'd never left Paris, you know ?"
           He leaned over, took both her hands into his. "But then we would never have met," he said, with more confidence than he felt.
          "True,"  she acknowledged. And then : "May be we'll move here one day."
          He nodded. "May be."
         She looked beautiful to him, tired, the concentrated light of the dying day on her face, infusing it with an amber-pink glow. He wanted to remember this moment, the two of them together, here. This was how he wanted to remember Paris. He took his camera, focusing on her face.
         "Nikhil, please, don't," she said , laughing, shaking her head. "I look awful." She shielded her face with the back of her hand.
          He still held up the camera. "Oh, come on, Mo. You're beautiful. You look great."
          But she refused to indulge him, moving her chair out of view with a scrape on the pavement ; she didn't want to be mistaken for a tourist in this city, she said.


A Saturday evening in May. A dinner party in Brooklyn. A dozen people were gathered around a long, scratched-up dining table, smoking cigarettes, drinking Chianti from juice glasses, sitting on series of backless stools. The room was dark apart from a domed metal lamp hanging from a long cord, with a concentrated pool of light on the table's center. An opera played on a battered boom box on the floor A joint was being passed around. Gogol took a hit, but as he sat there, holding his breath, he regretted  it ; he was already starved.

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 88

                                          (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


           He didn't feel jealous of her past, but it was only that sometimes Gogol wondered whether he represented some sort of capitulation or defeat. He didn't feel this always, just enough to nag at him,settling over his thoughts like a web. He looked round the apartment for reassurance, reminding  himself of the life they'd set up together and shared.


In March they went to Paris, Moshumi was invited to give a paper at a conference at the Sorbonne, and they decided to make a vacation out of it, Gogol arranged to take the week off from work.  Instead of staying in a hotel, they stayed in an apartment in the Bastille which belonged to a friend of Moushumi's, a male friend named Emanuel, a journalist, who was on holiday in Greece. The apartment was barely heated, minuscule, at the top of six steep flights of stairs, with a bathroom the size of a phone. There was a loft bed just inches from the ceiling, so that sex was a serious hazard. An espresso pot nearly filled  the narrow two-burner stove. Apart from two chairs at the dining table, there was no place to sit. The weather was raw, cheerless, the sky white, the Sun perpetually hidden from view. Paris is famous for such weather, Moushumi told him. He felt hidden himself ; men on the streets stared at Moushumi constantly, their glances lingering plainly, in spite of the fact that Gogol was at her side.
           It was his first time in Europe. The first time he saw the sort of architecture he'd read about for so many years, admired only in the pages of books and slides. For some reason, in Moushumi's company, he felt more apologetic than authentic. Though they journeyed together one day to Chartres, and another to Varsailles, he had the feeling she would rather be meeting friends for coffee, attending panels at the conference, eating at her favorite bistros, shopping at her favorite stores. From the beginning he felt useless. Moushumi made all the decisions, did all the talking. He was mute in the brasseries where they ate their lunches, mute in the shops where he gazed at beautiful belts, ties, paper, pens ; mute on the rainy afternoon they spent together at the d'Orsay. He was particularly mute when he and Moushumi had get together for dinners with groups of her French friends, drinking Pernods and feasting on couscous or choucroute, smoking and arguing around paper-covered tables. He struggled to grasp the topic of conversation ; the euro, Monica Lewinsky, Y2K - but everything else was a blur, indistinguishable from the clatter of plates, the drone of echoing, laughing voices. He watched them in the giant gilt-framed mirrors on the walls, their dark heads leaning close.
         Part of him knew it was a privilege, to be here with her who knew the city so well, but the part of him wanted simply to be tourist, looking at all the buildings in his list, getting lost. When he confessed his wish to her one night as they were walking back to the apartment, she said, "Why didn't you tell me that in the first place ?" and the next morning she instructed him to walk to the Metro station, had his photo taken in a booth, got a Carte Orange.. And so Gogol went sight  seeing alone, while she was off at her conference. His only companion was her Plan de Paris, a small guide, with a folded map attached to the back cover. And she warned him as was walking out the door, "Avoid ordering a cafe creme unless it's morning. The French never do that."
        It was quite cold outside, brisk air stinging his ears. He remembered his first lunch with Moushumi, the afternoon she'd dragged him to the hat store. He saw a young couple standing in a patch of sunlight on the side walk, clinging to each other for warmth. Suddenly he wanted to go back to the apartment, climb into the loft bed and forget about sightseeing, hold Moushumi in his arms. He wanted to lie with her for hours, as they did at the beginning, skipping meals, then wandering the streets at odd hours, desperate for something to eat. But he knew that she was seriously preparing for her paper presentation at the end of the week, and he knew she would not be roused from her task. He consulted his map, wandered along the famous boulevards, through the Marais, arrived at the Picasso Museum, after many wrong turns. He sat on a bench and sketched the town houses in the Place des Vosges, walked along the desolate gravel paths in the Luxembourg Gardens. He photographed the narrow sidewalks, the dark cobblestone streets, the mansard roofs, the ancient shuttered buildings of pale beige stone. All of it he found beautiful beyond description, and yet at the same time it depressed him that none of it was new to Moushumi, that she'd seen it all hundreds of times. He understood why she lived for so long as she did, away from her family, away from anyone she knew. Her French friends adored her, waiters and shopkeepers adored her.She both fitted in perfectly and yet remained slightly novel. Here Moushumi had reinvented herself, without misgivings, without guilt. He admired her, even resented her a little, for having moved to another country and made a separate life. He realized that this was what their parents had done in America. What he, in all likelihood, would never do. 

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 87

                                              (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)


            The nuptial night formalities and procedures were ignored before they completed the first official lovemaking. Afterward they opened up champagne and sat together on the bed, going through the large shopping bag full of cards with personal checks inside them. The checks had been given to them by their parents' hundreds of friends. They registered the gifts on numerous sheets of hotel stationery. Most of the checks had been written out to Mr. and Mrs. Nikhil and Moushumi Ganguli. Some were written to Gogol and Moushumi Gogol. The amounts were for one hundred and one dollars, two hundred and one dollars, occasionally three hundred and one dollars, as Bengalis consider it inauspicious to give round figures. Gogol added up the the subtotals on each page, "Seven thousand thirty-five," he annonced.
          "Not bad, Mr.Ganguli."
          "I would say we've made a killing, Mrs.Ganguli."
           Only she was not Mrs.Ganguli, Moushumi had kept her last name. She didn't adopt Ganguli, not even with a hyphen. Her own last name, Mazoomdar, was already a mothful. With a hyphenated surname, she would no longer fit into the window of a business envelope. Besides, by now she had begun to publish under Moushumi Mazoomdar, the name printed at the top of footnoted articles on French feminist theory in a number of prestigious academic journals that always managed to give Gogol a paper cut when he tried to read them. Though he'd not admitted this to her, he'd hoped, the day they'd filled out the application for their marriage licence, that she might consider otherwise, as a tribute to his father if nothing else. But the thought of changing her last name to Ganguli had never crossed Moushumi's mind. When relatives from India continued to address letters and cards to "Mrs.Moushumi Ganguli," she would shake her head and sigh.


They put the money toward a security deposit for a one-bedroom apartment in the Twenties, off Third Avenue. It was slightly more than they could comfortably afford, but they were won over by the maroon awning, the part-time doorman, a lobby paved with pumpkin-colored tiles. They were not thinking of children until Moushumi finished her dissertation. In their new home, they entertained together on occasion, throwing the sorts of parties their parents never had, mixing martinis in a stainless-steel shaker for a few of the architects at Gogol's work or Moushumi's graduate student friends at NYU.. He transferred the money in his bank account over to hers, and had common account with both their names printed on checks. The pass code they decided on for their ATM card, Lulu, was the name of French restaurant where they had their first meal together. They ate most nights side by side on the stools at the kitchen counter or at the coffee table, watching TV. They made Indian food infrequently ; usually it was pasta or broiled fish or take-out from the Thai restaurant down the block. But sometimes, on a Sunday, they took train out to Queens and had brunch at Jackson Diner, piling their plates with tandoori chicken and pakoras and kabobs, and shop afterward for basmati rice and the spices that needed replenishing. Sometimes they went to one of the hole-in-the-wall tea shops to drink tea or to to eat sweet yogurt or haleem, served by Bengali waitress. After dinner they watch TV, as Moushumi wrote out thank-you cards to all their parents' friends for the gifts. These were the things that made him feel married. Otherwise it was the same, only now they were always together. At night she slept beside him, always rolling onto her stomach, waking up every morning with a pillow pressed over her head.
          Occasionally, in the apartment, he found odd remnants of her life before he had appeared in it, her life with Graham ; the inscription to the two of them in a book of poems, a post card from Provence stuffed into the back of a dictionary, addressed to the apartment they'd secretly shared. Once, unable to stop himself, he'd walked to this address during his lunch break, wondering what her life had been like back then.
  

ABCDs ; The Culture-Conflict. 86

                                           (Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahir


             Gogol had proposed to her on her birthday, giving her a diamond solitaire in addition to the hat he had bought for her after their second date, by taking her to a country inn for the weekend. She had been overwhelmed that he remembered it all time. "I can't believe the store still had it," she said. From the very beginning it was safely assumed by their families, and soon enough by themselves, that as longs as they liked each other their courtship would not lag and they would surely wed.
           She emerged out of the bathroom in a snow-white terry-cloth hotel robe. She had taken off her make-up and her jewels, the vermilion which she had stained her part at the end of the ceremony had been rinsed from her hair. Her feet were free of three-inch heels she'd worn as soon as the religious part of the wedding was over. This was the way he found her most ravishing, unadorned, that she was willing to look for no one but him. She sat on the edge of the mattress, applied some blue cream from a tube to her calves and the bottom of her feet. She had massaged the cream onto his own feet once, the day they'd walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, causing them to tingle and go cold. And then she lied against the pillows, and looked at him, and put out a hand. Underneath the robe he expected to find some lingerie. But she was naked, her skin smelling, a little too intensely, of some sort of berry. He kissed the dark hair on her forearms, the prominent collarbone, which she'd once confessed to him was her favorite part of her body. They made love in spite of exhaustion, her damp hair limp and cool against his face, the rose petals sticking on to their elbows and shoulders and calves. He breathed in the scent of her skin, still unable to fathom that they were husband and wife. When would it sink in ? Even then he didn't feel fully alone with her, half waiting someone to knock on the door and tell them how to go about things. And though he desired her as much as ever, he was relieved when they were through, lying naked side by side, knowing that nothing else was expected of them, that finally they could relax.

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.