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their privacy. She spreads her fingers over the taut, enormous drum her middle has become, wondering where the baby’s feet and hands are at this moment. The child is no longer restless; for the past few days, apart from the occasional flutter, she has not felt it punch or kick or press against her ribs. She wonders if she is the only Indian person in the hospital, but a gentle twitch from the baby reminds her that she is, technically speaking, not alone. Ashima
Ashoka on hospitals
She pictures clearly the gray cement floor of her parents’ sitting room, feels its solid chill underfoot even on the hottest days. An enormous black-and-white photograph of her deceased paternal grandfather looms at one end against the pink plaster wall;
Throughout the experience, in spite of her growing discomfort, she’d been astonished by her body’s ability to make life, exactly as her mother and grandmother and all her great-grandmothers had done. That it was happening so far from home, unmonitored
no
After a minute they continue on, toward the nurses’ station. “Hoping for a boy or a girl?” Patty asks. “As long as there are ten finger and ten toe,” Ashima replies.
on babies
She saw the size, eight and a half, and the initials U.S.A. And as her mother continued to sing her praises, 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.
He was slightly plump, scholarly-looking but still youthful, with black thick-framed glasses and a sharp, prominent nose.
her first sighting of her husband
The father was a labor officer for the customs department of a shipping company. “My son has been living abroad for two years,” the man’s father said, “earning a Ph.D. in Boston, researching in the field of fiber optics.” Ashima had never heard of Boston, or of fiber optics.
ashokes family
she has learned that her husband likes his food on the salty side, that his favorite thing about lamb curry is the potatoes, and that he likes to finish his dinner with a small final helping of rice and dal.
knowing your husband
As soon as he comes home from the university the first thing he does is hang up his shirt and trousers, donning a pair of drawstring pajamas and a pullover if it’s cold.
ashoke on clothing
On Sundays he spends an hour occupied with his tins of shoe polishes and his three pairs of shoes, two black and one brown. The brown ones are the ones he’d been wearing when he’d first come to see her.
Ashokes love for shoes
He takes off his thick-rimmed glasses, fitted by a Calcutta optometrist, polishes the lenses with the cotton handkerchief he always keeps in his pocket, A for Ashoke embroidered by his mother in light blue thread. His black hair, normally combed back neatly from his forehead, is disheveled, sections of it on end.
Ashokes mannerism
As a teenager he had gone through all of Dickens. He read newer authors as well, Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham, all purchased from his favorite stall on College Street with pujo money. But most of all he loved the Russians. His paternal grandfather, a former professor of European literature at Calcutta University, had read from them aloud in English translations when Ashoke was a boy.
Ashoke as a reader
But his grandfather had recently gone blind, and he had requested Ashoke’s company specifically, to read him The Statesman in the morning, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy in the afternoon. Ashoke accepted the invitation eagerly. He
Going blind as a reader
“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.”
Travel now when you can
“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.”
Why we read books
He does not thank God; he openly reveres Marx and quietly refuses religion. But there is one more dead soul he has to thank.
Ashokes politics and religion
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.
The two miracles of Ashoke's life
Without a single grandparent or parent or uncle or aunt at her side, the baby’s birth, like most everything else in America, feels somehow haphazard, only half true. As she strokes and suckles and studies her son, she can’t help but pity him. She has never known of a person entering the world so alone, so deprived.
The idea of family
to every single person, two names. 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.
daknames
Pet names are never recorded officially, only uttered and remembered.
on pet names
She has never read any Gogol herself, but she is willing to place him on a shelf in her mind, along with Tennyson and Wordsworth.
what love does to people
Instead of cereal and tea bags, there were whiskey and wine bottles on top of the refrigerator, most of them nearly empty. Just standing there had made Ashima feel drunk.
Culture shock for ashima
Until now Ashima has accepted that there is no one to sweep the floor, or do the dishes, or wash clothes, or shop for groceries, or prepare a meal on the days she is tired or homesick or cross. She has accepted that the very lack of such amenities is the American way.
on not having a house help in America
It’s not right. I want to go back.” He looks at Ashima, her face leaner, the features sharper than they had been at their wedding, aware that her life in Cambridge, as his wife, has already taken a toll. On more than one occasion he has come home from the university to find her morose, in bed, rereading her parents’ letters. Early mornings, when he senses that she is quietly crying, he puts an arm around her but can think of nothing to say, feeling that it is his fault, for marrying her, for bringing her here. He remembers suddenly about Ghosh, his companion on the train, who had returned from
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Ashima wants to go back
She cries as she feeds him, and as she pats him to sleep, and as he cries between sleeping and feeding. She cries after the mailman’s visit because there are no letters from Calcutta. She cries when she calls Ashoke at his department and he does not answer. One day she cries when she goes to the kitchen to make dinner and discovers that they’ve run out of rice.
How ashima cries
The letter is dated three weeks ago, and from it they learn that Ashima’s grandmother has had a stroke, that her right side is permanently paralyzed, her mind dim. She can no longer chew, barely swallows, remembers and recognizes little of her eighty-odd years. “She is with us still, but to be honest we have already lost her,” her father has written. “Prepare yourself, Ashima. Perhaps you may not see her again.”
on strokes and adjustment
she was the only person to predict, rightly, that Ashima would never change.
Ashima would never change said her grandma
the bachelors fly back to Calcutta one by one, returning with wives. Every weekend, it seems, there is a new home to go to, a new couple or young family to meet. They all come from Calcutta, and for this reason alone they are friends.
Why are we friends?
But when Ashoke comes home he calls the MBTA lost and found; the following day the bags are returned, not a teaspoon missing. 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. She has a story to tell at dinner parties.
Losing her things for the first time
that her father died yesterday evening, of a heart attack, playing patience on his bed. They leave for India six days later, six weeks before they’d planned. Alan and Judy, waking the next morning to Ashima’s sobs, then hearing the news from Ashoke, leave a vase filled with flowers by the door. In those six days, there is no time to think of a good name for Gogol. They get an express passport with “Gogol Ganguli” typed across the United States of America seal, Ashoke signing on his son’s behalf. The day before leaving, Ashima puts Gogol in his stroller, puts the sweater she’d knit for her
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Death of your father
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.
On being an immigrant
Once a week she makes thirty samosas to sell at the international coffeehouse, for twenty-five cents each, next to the linzer squares baked by Mrs. Etzold, and baklava by Mrs. Cassolis.
Being enterprising
She misses her son’s habit of always holding on to the free end of her sari as they walk together.
Moms love
When he poses for the camera he has to be coaxed into a smile. The house is fifteen minutes from the nearest supermarket, forty minutes from a mall.
How you buy houses
There are four modest bedrooms, one and a half bathrooms, seven-foot ceilings, a one-car garage. In the living room is a brick fireplace and a bay window overlooking the yard.
Ganguli house
She watches The Price Is Right and Guiding Light and The $10,000 Pyramid on the television Ashoke moves in from the living room to her side of the bed.
Housewife and tv
They write it for him on a sheet of paper, ask him to copy it over ten times. “Don’t worry,” his father says. “To me and your mother, you will never be anyone but Gogol.”
Learning your name
Within a decade abroad, they are both orphaned; Ashoke’s parents both dead from cancer, Ashima’s mother from kidney disease. Gogol and Sonia are woken by these deaths in the early mornings, their parents screaming on the other side of thin bedroom walls.
Losing your parents
In some senses Ashoke and Ashima live the lives of the extremely aged, those for whom everyone they once knew and loved is lost, those who survive and are consoled by memory alone. Even those family members who continue to live seem dead somehow, always invisible, impossible to touch.
Life of the aged
Voices on the phone, occasionally bearing news of births and weddings, send chills down their spines. How could it be, still alive, still talking? The sight of them when they visit Calcutta every few years feels stranger still, six or eight weeks passing like a dream.
Visiting india as nris
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.
Celebrate foreign festivals
Still, they do what they can. They make a point of driving into Cambridge with the children when the Apu Trilogy plays at the Orson Welles, or when there is a Kathakali dance performance or a sitar recital at Memorial Hall. When Gogol is in the third grade, they send him to Bengali language and culture lessons every other Saturday, held in the home of one of their friends.
Maintaining culture
“Gogol is an outstanding student, curious and cooperative,” his teachers write year after year on report cards.
On report cards
As for his last name, Ganguli, by the time he is ten he has been to Calcutta three more times, twice in summer and once during Durga pujo, and from the most recent trip he still remembers the sight of it etched respectably into the whitewashed exterior of his paternal grandparents’ house.
Trips to India
She makes sure to prepare his favorite things: lamb curry with lots of potatoes, luchis, thick channa dal with swollen brown raisins, pineapple chutney, sandeshes molded out of saffron-tinted ricotta cheese. 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.
Cooking food for allergies
Gogol Ganguli wears a Harvard sweatshirt and gray Levi’s corduroys. He has worn a tie once in his life,
Gogol on teenage years
but he cannot imagine saying, “Hi, it’s Gogol” under potentially romantic circumstances. He cannot imagine this at all.
Oddness of cultural names
“I feel a special kinship with Gogol,” Ashoke says, “more than with any other writer. Do you know why?” “You like his stories.” “Apart from that. He spent most of his adult life outside his homeland. Like me.” Gogol nods. “Right.”
Why he likes gogol
