The Namesake

by Jhumpa Lahiri

The reader should realize himself that it could not have happened otherwise, and that to give him any other name was quite out of the question. —NIKOLAI GOGOL, “The Overcoat”

Ashima Ganguli stands in the kitchen of a Central Square apartment, combining Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion in a bowl. She adds salt, lemon juice, thin slices of green chili pepper, wishing there were mustard oil to pour into the mix. Ashima has been consuming this concoction throughout her pregnancy, a humble approximation of the snack sold for pennies on Calcutta sidewalks and on railway platforms throughout India, spilling from newspaper cones.

She wishes the curtains were open, so that she could talk to the American women. Perhaps one of them has given birth before, can tell her what to expect. 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.

Ghosh shook his head. “You are still young. Free,” he said, spreading his hands apart for emphasis. “Do yourself a favor. Before it’s too late, without thinking too much about it first, pack a pillow and a blanket and see as much of the world as you can. You will not regret it. One day it will be too late.” “My grandfather always says that’s what books are for,” Ashoke said, using the opportunity to open the volume in his hands. “To travel without moving an inch.”

Ashoke was still reading at two-thirty in the morning, one of the few passengers on the train who was awake, when the locomotive engine and seven bogies derailed from the broad-gauge line. The sound was like a bomb exploding. The first four bogies capsized into a depression alongside the track. The fifth and sixth, containing the first-class and air-conditioned passengers, telescoped into each other, killing the passengers in their sleep.

Again he thinks of the night he was nearly killed, the memory of those hours that have forever marked him flickering and fading in his mind. 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.

In Bengali the word for pet name is daknam, meaning, literally, the name by which one is called, by friends, family, and other intimates, at home and in other private, unguarded moments. Pet names are a persistent remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated. They are a reminder, too, that one is not all things to all people.

Ashima’s pet name is Monu, Ashoke’s is Mithu, and even as adults, these are the names by which they are known in their respective families, the names by which they are adored and scolded and missed and loved. Every pet name is paired with a good name, a bhalonam, for identification in the outside world.

Ashima means “she who is limitless, without borders.” Ashoke, the name of an emperor, means “he who transcends grief.” Pet names have no such aspirations. Pet names are never recorded officially, only uttered and remembered. Unlike good names, pet names are frequently meaningless, deliberately silly, ironic, even onomatopoetic.

Maxine is open about her past, showing him photographs of her ex-boyfriends in the pages of a marble-papered album, speaking of those relationships without embarrassment or regret. She has the gift of accepting her life; as he comes to know her, he realizes that she has never wished she were anyone other than herself, raised in any other place, in any other way.

They entertain together on occasion, throwing the sorts of parties their parents never had, mixing martinis in a stainless-steel shaker for a few of the architects at Gogol’s work or Moushumi’s graduate student friends at NYU. They play bossa nova and serve bread and salami and cheese.

And yet these events have formed Gogol, shaped him, determined who he is. 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.

As for all the people in the house, all the mashis and meshos to whom he is still, and will always be, Gogol—now that his mother is moving away, how often will he see them? Without people in the world to call him Gogol, no matter how long he himself lives, Gogol Ganguli will, once and for all, vanish from the lips of loved ones, and so, cease to exist.

The Namesake’s great themes are change and becoming, inventing, adapting, assimilating, adjusting to new states of being. It is about how life’s direction can be interrupted. It is about wanting to be something other than oneself. Given these basic themes, it resembles all my other books. The battle with myself, my origins, my place in the world, goes on. New identities, languages, and settings have been incorporated, former habits and passions have made space for others. Were I to stop fully waging this battle, I would cease to know myself, and my guess is that I would stop writing.

I am now, stylistically, quite far from The Namesake. I write in a phase of concentration, of distillation, with the aim to drain away cultural specificity, to limit details, to speak more abstractly of the places and things and customs that represent who we are. The novel I have recently published, along with all the rest of my writing in Italian thus far, dispenses with the use of names altogether.

I am really, really writing for myself and to make sense of something for myself. That is the ultimate impetus behind what I do. I am trying to understand things about life, about human beings, about the human condition, about what I both have experienced and haven’t experienced and am afraid of experiencing and perhaps will never experience. All of those things fuel my desire to write.

I certainly write about what I know, but I write a lot about my fears, my worries, my concerns, my worst nightmare. I try to write about experiences that are foreign to me: What might it be like to lose a parent or a child? What might it be like to immigrate? Certainly the novel is very much a collage of things I have gone through and have never gone through. But I can’t possibly think of a reader as I am writing because so much of the process to me is answering a question.

I had wanted to write about the pet name–good name distinction for a long time, and I knew I needed the space of a novel to explore the idea. It’s almost too perfect a metaphor for the experience of growing up as the child of immigrants, having a divided identity, divided loyalties, etc.