The Namesake

by Jhumpa Lahiri

Gogol was aware of an obligation being fulfilled; that it was, above all else, a sense of duty that drew his parents back. But it is the call of pleasure that summons Gerald and Lydia to New Hampshire.

He looks up at her, and behind her, at the sky, which holds more stars than he ever has seen at one time, crowded together, a mess of dust and gems.

It is an impulse his parents have never felt, this need to be so far from things. They would have felt lonely in this setting, remarking

that they were the only Indians.

And then he remembers that his parents can’t possibly reach him: he has not given them the number, and the Ratliffs are unlisted. That here at Maxine’s side, in this cloistered wilderness, he is free.

At forty-eight she has come to experience the solitude that her husband and son and daughter already know, and which they claim not to mind.

She hates returning in the evenings to a dark, empty house, going to sleep on one side of the bed and waking up on another. At first she was wildly industrious, cleaning out closets and scrubbing the insides of kitchen cupboards and scraping the shelves of the refrigerator, rinsing out the vegetable bins.

Now she does the laundry once a month. She no longer dusts, or notices dust, for that matter. She eats on the sofa, in front of the television, simple meals of buttered toast and dal, a single pot lasting her a week and an omelette to go with it if she has energy to bother.

Having been deprived of the company of her own parents upon moving to America, her children’s independence, their need to keep their distance from her, is something she will never understand.

And only for its duration is their grief slightly abated, the enforced absence of certain foods on their plates conjuring his father’s presence somehow.

Early in January, after holidays they don’t celebrate, in the first days of a year that his father does not live to see,

I pay tribute, in some sense, to the journey my parents made: a process of leaving behind, of reconstructing, of moving back and forth, of living such that every voyage is a departure and no destination is ever fully home. Now that I too have rooted myself, as an adult, in two different parts of the world, I can no longer live, wherever I am, without feeling, just as Ashima does in the opening paragraph of the novel, that “something is missing.” This complication, both logistical and existential, has been a choice on my part. And like many of the important choices we make in life, it has also been a need.