The Namesake

by Jhumpa Lahiri

She can’t help but wonder who will console her the day her own mother dies,

due to their son’s preference he will be known as Gogol at school.

Way to sell him out.

For the sake of Gogol and Sonia they celebrate, with progressively increasing fanfare, the birth of Christ, an event the children look forward to far more than the worship of Durga and Saraswati.

“We live in a country where a president is called Jimmy.

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.

for together they form a record of all the Bengalis she and Ashoke have known over the years, all the people she has had the fortune to share rice with in a foreign land.

At forty-eight

!!!!

Even now she regrets herself as a teenager. She regrets her obedience, her long, unstyled hair, her piano lessons and lace-collared shirts.

He was not who she saw herself ending up with, he had never been that person.