The Namesake

by Jhumpa Lahiri

But she has gathered that Americans, in spite of their public declarations 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.

It’s the consequence: motherhood in a foreign land.

That it was happening so far from home, unmonitored and unobserved by those she loved, had made it more miraculous still.

But she is 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.

Ashima, unable to resist a sudden and overwhelming urge, stepped into the shoes at her feet. Lingering sweat from the owner’s feet mingled with hers, causing her heart to race; it was the closest thing she had ever experienced to the touch of a man.

In some ways the story made less sense each time he read it, the scenes he pictured so vividly, and absorbed so fully, growing more elusive and profound.

Just as Akaky’s ghost haunted the final pages, so did it haunt a place deep in Ashoke’s soul, shedding light on all that was irrational, all that was inevitable about the world.

Those books, set in countries he had never seen, reminded him only of his confinement.

imagined not only walking, but walking away, as far as he could from the place in which he was born and in which he had nearly died.

Being rescued from that shattered train had been the first miracle of his life. But here, now, reposing in his arms, weighing next to nothing but changing everything, is the second.

Pet names are a persistent remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated.

They all come from Calcutta, and for this reason alone they are friends.

For hours they argue about the politics of America, a country in which none of them is eligible to vote.

it is all meant to introduce him to a lifetime of consumption, a meal to inaugurate the tens of thousands of unremembered meals to come.

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.

What a thrill, he thinks, to stand lecturing before a roomful of American students. What a sense of accomplishment it gives him to see his name printed under “Faculty” in the university directory. What joy each time Mrs. Jones says to him, “Professor Ganguli, your wife is on the phone.”

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. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been ordinary life, only to discover that that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding. Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect.

All the houses belong to Americans. Shoes are worn inside, trays of cat litter are placed in the kitchens, dogs bark and jump when Ashima and Ashoke ring the bell.

Though his father remembers to mix up the rice and curry for Gogol beforehand, he doesn’t bother to shape it into individual balls the way his mother does, lining them around his plate like the numbers on a clockface.

“Gogol G,” he signs his work in the lower right-hand corner, as if there were a need to distinguish him from any other Gogol in the school.

The people they have grown up with will never see this life, of this they are certain.

For when Ashima and Ashoke close their eyes it never fails to unsettle them, that their children sound just like Americans, expertly conversing in a language that still at times confounds them, in accents they are accustomed not to trust.

For by now he is aware, in stores, of cashiers smirking at his parents’ accents, and of salesmen who prefer to direct their conversation to Gogol, as though his parents were either incompetent or deaf.

All this is less stressful to her than the task of feeding a handful of American children, half of whom always claim they are allergic to milk, all of whom refuse to eat the crusts of their bread.

Lately he’s been lazy, addressing his parents in English though they continue to speak to him in Bengali. Occasionally he wanders through the house with his running sneakers on. At dinner he sometimes uses a fork.

He hates that his name is both absurd and obscure, that it has nothing to do with who he is, that it is neither Indian nor American but of all things Russian.

At times his name, an entity shapeless and weightless, manages nevertheless to distress him physically, like the scratchy tag of a shirt he has been forced permanently to wear.

Within minutes, before their eyes Ashoke and Ashima slip into bolder, less complicated versions of themselves, their voices louder, their smiles wider, revealing a confidence Gogol and Sonia never see on Pemberton Road.

It’s easier to surrender to confinement.

A tour guide tells them that after the Taj was completed, each of the builders, twenty-two thousand men, had his thumbs cut off so that the structure could never be built again.

But during his life he was understood by no one, least of all himself.

To read the story, he believes, would mean paying tribute to his namesake, accepting it somehow. Still, listening to his classmates complain, he feels perversely responsible, as if his own work were being attacked.

the only person who didn’t take Gogol seriously, the only person who tormented him, the only person chronically aware of and afflicted by the embarrassment of his name, the only person who constantly questioned it and wished it were otherwise, was Gogol.

He wonders if this is how it feels for an obese person to become thin, for a prisoner to walk free.

He fears being discovered, having the whole charade somehow unravel, and in nightmares his files are exposed, his original name printed on the front page of the Yale Daily News.

He likes that she doesn’t bother to pull the billfold out of her jeans, that she allows him to buy them for her.

He has no ABCD friends at college. He avoids them, for they remind him too much of the way his parents choose to live, befriending people not so much because they like them, but because of a past they happen to share.

“I’m Nikhil now,” Gogol says, suddenly depressed by how many more times he will have to say this, asking people to remember, reminding them to forget, feeling as if an errata slip were perpetually pinned to his chest.

Though there are only inches between them, for an instant his father is a stranger, a man who has kept a secret, has survived a tragedy, a man whose past he does not fully know. A man who is vulnerable, who has suffered in an inconceivable way.

She has the gift of accepting her life;

Unlike his parents, they pressure her to do nothing, and yet she lives faithfully, happily, at their side.

At times, as the laughter at Gerald and Lydia’s table swells, and another bottle of wine is opened, and Gogol raises his glass to be filled yet again, he is conscious of the fact that his immersion in Maxine’s family is a betrayal of his own.

He knows that this sort of life, one which is such a proud accomplishment for his own parents, is of no relevance, no interest, to her, that she loves him in spite of it.

In spite of the fact that there is nothing in particular to do, the days assume a pattern. There is a certain stringency to life, a willful doing without.

And then she’d never mentioned it again, this essential fact about his life slipping from her mind as so many others did.

Maxine a bitch tbh

At dinner he is asked by his neighbor, a middle-aged woman named Pamela, at what age he moved to America from India. “I’m from Boston,” he says.

If there is a dinner invitation at friends’, they go together, driving along the highway without the children, sadly aware that Gogol and Sonia, now both grown, will never sit with them in the back seat again.

Who had forsaken everything to come to this country, to make a better life, only to die here?

“I’m so sorry,” he hears her say to his mother, aware that his father’s death does not affect Maxine in the least.

“Now I know why he went to Cleveland,” she tells people, refusing, even in death, to utter her husband’s name. “He was teaching me how to live alone.”