The Namesake

by Jhumpa Lahiri

and empty glasses that clutter the table. Something tells him that none of this is for his benefit, that this is the way the Ratliffs eat every night. Gerald is a lawyer. Lydia is a curator of textiles at the Met. They are at once satisfied and intrigued by his background, by his years at Yale and Columbia, his career as an architect, his Mediterranean looks. “You could be Italian,” Lydia remarks at one point during the meal, regarding him in the candle’s glow. Gerald remembers a bar of French chocolate he bought on his way home, and this is unwrapped, broken apart, and passed around the table. Eventually the talk turns to India. Gerald asks questions about the recent rise of Hindu fundamentalism, a topic Gogol knows little about. Lydia talks at length about Indian carpets and miniatures, Maxine about a college class she’d once taken on Buddhist stupas. They have never known a person who has been to Calcutta. Gerald has an Indian colleague at work who just went to India for his honeymoon. He’d brought back spectacular photographs, of a palace built on a lake. Was that in Calcutta? “That’s Udaipur,” Gogol tells them. “I’ve never been there. Calcutta’s in the east, closer to Thailand.”

A white family showing interest in him.