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After dinner they watch television, as Moushumi writes out thank-you cards to all their parents’ friends, for the checks they had needed twenty different slips to deposit. These are the things that make him feel married. Otherwise it’s the same, only now they’re always together.
They reach out to people, hosting dinner parties, bequeathing little bits of themselves to their friends. They are passionate spokespeople for their brand of life, giving Gogol and Moushumi a steady, unquestionable stream of advice about quotidian things.
They are an intelligent, attractive, well-dressed crowd. Also a bit incestuous.
“Ugly or beautiful?” she asks him. It is a question she poses to him often, as they leaf together through apartments featured in Architectural Digest or the design section of the Times magazine. Often his answers surprise her, convincing her to appreciate an object she would have otherwise dismissed.
Moushumi feels sick at the thought of it, of a death so sudden, of a woman so marginal and yet so central to her world.
He wonders how his parents had done it, leaving their respective families behind, seeing them so seldom, dwelling unconnected, in a perpetual state of expectation, of longing. All those trips to Calcutta he’d once resented—how could they have been enough?
