The Namesake

by Jhumpa Lahiri

And though, over the years, his departures had become mundane, his father would always stand on the platform until the moment the train was out of sight.

At the same time she’s thankful that there’s something tangible for her to be upset about.

Part of him wants to bring it up with her. “Are you happy you married me?” he would ask. But the fact that he is even thinking of this question makes him afraid.

Ashima had felt a moment’s panic, a protective instinct, wanting to retract her offer, wanting the house to remain as it’s always been, as her husband had last seen it. But this had been sentimentality speaking. It is foolish for her to hope that the golden letters spelling GANGULI on the mailbox will not be peeled off, replaced. That Sonia’s name, written in Magic Marker on the inside of her bedroom door, will not be sanded, restained. That the pencil markings on the wall by the linen closet, where Ashoke used to record his children’s height on their birthdays, will not be painted over.

She feels both impatience and indifference for all the days she still must live, for something tells her she will not go quickly as her husband did.

She will miss the country in which she had grown to know and love her husband.

He felt the chill of her secrecy, numbing him, like a poison spreading quickly through his veins.

for the first time in his life, another man’s name upset Gogol more than his own.

They had both acted on the same impulse, that was their mistake. They had both sought comfort in each other, and in their shared world, perhaps for the sake of novelty, or out of the fear that that world was slowly dying.

In so many ways, his family’s life feels like a string of accidents, unforeseen, unintended, one incident begetting another.

They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end.

The name he had so detested, here hidden and preserved—that was the first thing his father had given him.

Until moments ago it was destined to disappear from his life altogether, but he has salvaged it by chance, as his father was pulled from a crushed train forty years ago.