The Namesake

by Jhumpa Lahiri

They inquired after her studies and she was asked to recite a few stanzas from “The Daffodils.”

Since childhood he has had the habit and the ability to read while walking, holding a book in one hand on his way to school, from room to room in his parents’ three-story house in Alipore, and up and down the red clay stairs.

But now that the day had come to inherit the rest, a day his grandfather could no longer read the books himself, Ashoke was saddened, and as he placed the empty suitcase under his seat, he was disconcerted by its weightlessness, regretful of the circumstances that would cause it, upon his return, to be full.

“Lucky boy,” Ashoke remarks, turning the beautifully sewn pages. “Only hours old and already the owner of books.”

Pet names are a persistent remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated. They are a reminder, too, that one is not all things to all people.

Rickshaw drivers dress better than professors here,

Like Ashoke, busy with his teaching and research and dissertation seven days a week, she, too, now has something to occupy her fully, to demand her utmost devotion, her last ounce of strength.

Her grandmother had not been fearful of such signs of betrayal; she was the only person to predict, rightly, that Ashima would never change.

the following day the bags are returned, not a teaspoon missing. Somehow, this small miracle causes Ashima to feel connected to Cambridge in a way she has not previously thought possible, affiliated with its exceptions as well as its rules.

A few months ago, her family had asked in a letter for the phone number in Cambridge, and she had sent it reluctantly in her reply, aware that it would only be a way for bad news to reach her.

She feels her chest ache, moved after all this time to hear her brother call her Didi, his older sister, a term he alone in the world is entitled to use.

For being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy—a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts.

Ashoke and Ashima are amazed, when moving by U-Haul to the new house, to discover how much they possess; each of them had come to America with a single suitcase, a few weeks’ worth of clothes.

But Ashoke points out that even his chairman shops at yard sales, that in spite of living in a mansion an American is not above wearing a pair of secondhand pants, bought for fifty cents.

Though Sonali is the name on her birth certificate, the name she will carry officially through life, at home they begin to call her Sonu, then Sona, and finally Sonia. Sonia makes her a citizen of the world. It’s a Russian link to her brother, it’s European, South American.

They have met so many Bengalis that there is rarely a Saturday free, so that for the rest of his life Gogol’s childhood memories of Saturday evenings will consist of a single, repeated scene: thirty-odd people in a three-bedroom suburban house, the children watching television or playing board games in a basement, the parents eating and conversing in the Bengali their children don’t speak among themselves.

In some senses Ashoke and Ashima live the lives of the extremely aged, those for whom everyone they once knew and loved is lost, those who survive and are consoled by memory alone.

Each step, each acquisition, no matter how small, involves deliberation, consultation with Bengali friends. Was there a difference between a plastic rake and a metal one? Which was preferable, a live Christmas tree or an artificial one?

Though substitute teachers at school always pause, looking apologetic when they arrive at his name on the roster, forcing Gogol to call out, before even being summoned, “That’s me,”

But his father is unaffected at such moments, just as he is unaffected by the mailbox. “It’s only boys having fun,” he tells Gogol, flicking the matter away with the back of a hand,

Until now it has not occurred to Gogol that names die over time, that they perish just as people do.

Like his parents when they went to Calcutta, he could have had an alternative identity, a B-side to the self.

“Think of it as a long vacation,” Ashoke and Ashima say to their crestfallen children. But Gogol knows that eight months is no vacation.

She wanders freely around a city in which Gogol, in spite of his many visits, has no sense of direction.

He wonders how many times he has written his old name, at the tops of how many tests and quizzes, how many homework assignments, how many yearbook inscriptions to friends. How many times does a person write his name in a lifetime—a million? Two million?

Since everything else is suddenly so new, going by a new name doesn’t feel so terribly strange to Gogol.

At times he feels as if he’s cast himself in a play, acting the part of twins, indistinguishable to the naked eye yet fundamentally different.

He begins to meet her after her classes, remembering her schedule, looking up at the buildings and hovering casually under the archways.

Every evening they study together at the library, sitting at either end of a table to keep from whispering. She takes him to her dining hall, and he to hers.

She’d mentioned her interest in going there long ago, in the first weeks of their courtship, when the spring of junior year had felt like a remote speck on the horizon.

Still, he knows that each component of a building, however small, is nevertheless essential,

It’s the first apartment he has to himself, after an evolving chain of roommates all through college and graduate school.

for a year they overlapped at Columbia, living just three blocks away from each other, and that they have in all likelihood crossed paths on Broadway or walking up the steps of Low Library or in Avery.

They speak in that slightly strained, silly way that he associates now with flirtation—the exchange feels desperately arbitrary, fleeting.

From the very beginning he feels effortlessly incorporated into their lives.

Quickly, simultaneously, he falls in love with Maxine, the house, and Gerald and Lydia’s manner of living, for to know her and love her is to know and love all of these things.

She has the gift of accepting her life; as he comes to know her, he realizes that she has never wished she were anyone other than herself, raised in any other place, in any other way.

“I’m going with a girl I’m seeing,” he tells her. “Her parents have a place there.” Though she says nothing for a while, he knows what his mother is thinking, that he is willing to go on vacation with someone else’s parents but not see his own.

Once a year she dumps the letters onto her bed and goes through them, devoting an entire day to her parents’ words, allowing herself a good cry.

Now it is three in the afternoon, the sun’s strength already draining from the sky. It is the sort of day that seems to end minutes after it begins, defeating Ashima’s intentions to spend it fruitfully, the inevitability of nightfall distracting her.

He knows now the guilt that his parents carried inside, at being able to do nothing when their parents had died in India, of arriving weeks, sometimes months later, when there was nothing left to do.

All the people in his mother’s address books, always added to, never crossed out,

“Will you remember this day, Gogol?” his father had asked, turning back to look at him, his hands pressed like earmuffs to either side of his head. “How long do I have to remember it?” Over the rise and fall of the wind, he could hear his father’s laughter. He was standing there, waiting for Gogol to catch up, putting out a hand as Gogol drew near. “Try to remember it always,”

“Remember that you and I made this journey, that we went together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.”

They order espresso and share a crème brûlée, their two teaspoons cracking the hard amber surface from either side.

still, he is secretly pleased that she has seen those rooms, tasted his mother’s cooking, washed her hands in the bathroom, however long ago.

“Who would have thought,” she says, her voice tired, satisfied.

structuring her days around chance meetings in the library, or a conversation during office hours, or the one class she and a fellow student shared, so that even now she associated a particular year of college with the man or boy she had silently, faithfully, absurdly, desired.

And though he had witnessed that stage of her himself, he can no longer picture it; those vague recollections of her he’s carried with him all his life have been wiped clean, replaced by the woman he knows now.

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, another to hear it from him.