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But this time it frustrates him that it is to Calcutta that they always go. Apart from visiting relatives there was nothing to do in Calcutta. He’s already been to the planetarium and the Zoo Gardens and the Victoria Memorial a dozen times. They have never been to Disneyland or the Grand Canyon. Only once, when their connecting flight in London was delayed, did they leave Heathrow and take a double-decker bus tour of the city.
Only visiting calcutta in the breaks
Within minutes, before their eyes Ashoke and Ashima slip into bolder, less complicated versions of themselves, their voices louder, their smiles wider, revealing a confidence Gogol and Sonia never see on Pemberton Road.
How your parents become confident among siblings
Instead he called out the name in a perfectly reasonable way, without pause, without doubt, without a suppressed smile, just as he had called out Brian and Erica and Tom.
He called the name out without any additional questions
He was, in addition, by all accounts, morbidly melancholic, given to fits of severe depression.
Morbidly melancholic
Her beauty is direct, unassuming. She wears no make-up apart from something glossy on her lips; two small brown moles by her right cheekbone are the only things that distract from the pale peach of her complexion. She has slim, small hands with unpolished nails and ragged cuticles. She leans over to put the magazine away and get a book from the bag at her feet,
Her beauty is direct and unassuming
it occurs to him that he has never spoken of his experiences in India to any American friend.
He has nevr spoken of his experiences in india to his american friends
she says, and though they both have classes, they remain in the room, sitting on the sofa and kissing until it is too late to bother going.
Kissing on the sofa
They’ve even gone so far as to point out examples of Bengali men they know who’ve married Americans, marriages that have ended in divorce.
Cross culturl marriage ends in divorce
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.
Not interacting with abcds at college
He and Ruth are no longer together. Instead of coming back from Oxford after those twelve weeks, she’d stayed on to do a summer course, explaining that a professor she admired would be retiring after that.
Falling in and out of love
She wanted to go back to England for graduate school, she said. “I imagine they’ve got good architecture schools,” she’d added.
Distance and expectations of an early lover
But boarding the train it is impossible not to think of the afternoon, two years ago, they’d met.
Counterfsctual thinking
“I was worried.” “I hope you haven’t been standing out in the cold all this time,” Gogol says, and from his father’s lack of response he knows that this is exactly what he has done.
DIstance between parents and kids in college years
But his father is not the type to admit such things, to speak openly of his desires, his moods, his needs.
how parents dont speak of their desires and moods to their kids
“There is a reason for it, you know,” his father continues. “Right, Baba. Gogol’s your favorite author. I know.”
On his babas reason
Though there are only inches between them, for an instant his father is a stranger, a man who has kept a secret, has survived a tragedy, a man whose past he does not fully know. A man who is vulnerable, who has suffered in an inconceivable way.
Trauma of your parents
“Is that what you think of when you think of me?” Gogol asks him. “Do I remind you of that night?” “Not at all,” his father says eventually, one hand going to his ribs, a habitual gesture that has baffled Gogol until now. “You remind me of everything that followed.”
you remind me of everything that followed
His contributions are incidental, and never fully his own: a stairwell, a skylight, a corridor, an air-conditioning duct. Still, he knows that each component of a building, however small, is nevertheless essential, and he finds it gratifying that after all his years of schooling, all his crits and unbuilt projects, his efforts are to have some practical end. He typically works late into his evenings, and on most of his weekends, drawing designs on the computer, drafting plans, writing specifications, building Styrofoam and cardboard models to scale. He goes home to a studio in Morningside
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Gogol as a 26 year old architecture student
It’s the first apartment he has to himself, after an evolving chain of roommates all through college and graduate school.
the first apartment you have to yourself
They’d hoped he would choose MIT, the other architecture program to which he’d been accepted. But after four years in New Haven he didn’t want to move back to Massachusetts, to the one city in America his parents know. He didn’t want to attend his father’s alma mater, and live in an apartment in Central Square as his parents once had, and revisit the streets about which his parents speak nostalgically. He didn’t want to go home on the weekends, to go with them to pujos and Bengali parties, to remain unquestionably in their world.
On moving away from parents
At once strident and flirtatious, she is a little bit drunk. She has dirty blond hair gathered sloppily into a bun, strands falling randomly, attractively, around her face. Her forehead is high and smooth, her jawbones sloping and unusually long. Her eyes are greenish, the irises encased by thin rings of black. She is dressed in silk capri pants and a sleeveless white shirt that shows off her tan. “What did you think of it?” she asks Gogol, drawing him without warning into the discussion. When he tells her he hasn’t seen the film she looks away.
That girl at 26
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
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A white family showing interest in him.
He looks at her, watching as she undoes her hair, letting it hang loose for a moment over her shoulders before wrapping it thoughtlessly around her hand. She looks back at him, smiling. Once again he is aware of her nakedness beneath the cardigan.
Male desire from the perspective of a female writer. Fascinating.
At night he sleeps with her in the room she grew up in, on a soft, sagging mattress, holding her body, as warm as a furnace, through the night, making love to her in a room just above the one in which Gerald and Lydia lie.
That maxine feeling
Seeing the two of them curled up on the sofa in the evenings, Gerald’s head resting on Lydia’s shoulder, Gogol is reminded that in all his life he has never witnessed a single moment of physical affection between his parents.
Affection between parents
He volunteers to take Silas out for walks, holding the leash as the dog sniffs and pokes at trees, and he picks up Silas’s warm shit with a plastic bag.
Takes care of theie dog
Instead it is his knowledge that apart from their affluence, Gerald and Lydia are secure in a way his parents will never be.
On secure parents
“I’ll do it,” Gogol says, getting up, irritated by his parents’ perpetual fear of disaster. When he returns to the house, the lunch is set out, too rich for the weather.
It is a meal he knows it has taken his mother over a day to prepare, and yet the amount of effort embarrasses him.
Being embarrased by mum
but Gogol has never been to camp, and though he is only three hours away from his parents’ house, this is an unknown world to him, a kind of holiday he’s never been on.
Traveliing in your country
They have traveled a bit of the world together, Italy, Greece, Egypt, Iran. “We never got as far as India,” Edith tells him. “We would certainly have loved to have seen that.”
Life of affluence
On the first rainy day Gerald and Lydia teach him to play cribbage. They are often in bed by nine. The phone, in the main house, seldom rings.
Wake up at 6 and sleep at nine
At dinner he is asked by his neighbor, a middle-aged woman named Pamela, at what age he moved to America from India. “I’m from Boston,” he says. It turns out Pamela is from Boston as well, but when he tells her the name of the suburb where his parents live Pamela shakes her head. “I’ve never heard of that.” She goes on, “I once had a girlfriend who went to India.” “Oh? Where did she go?” “I don’t know. All I remember is that she came back thin as a rail, and that I was horribly envious of her.” Pamela laughs. “But you must be lucky that way.” “What do you mean?” “I mean, you must never get
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Questions on India i once went there, food is spicy and not getting sick
But such concerns make no sense here among Maxine and her family. That night, lying in the cabin beside Maxine, he is woken by the sound of the phone ringing persistently in the main house. He gets out of bed, convinced that it’s his parents calling to wish him a happy birthday, mortified that it will wake Gerald and Lydia from sleep. He stumbles onto the lawn, but when his bare feet strike the cold grass there is silence, and he realizes the ringing he’d heard had been a dream.
On the urgency to do things
If there is nothing decent on television she leafs through books she takes out of the library, books that occupy the space Ashoke normally does on the bed.
Books and human experience
It still bothers her that neither Gogol nor Sonia had come home for Thanksgiving this year. Sonia, who is working for an environmental agency and studying for her LSAT, had said it was too far to travel. Gogol, who had to work the following day because of a project at his firm, had spent the holiday with Maxine’s family in New York. 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.
Son wants to spend tme at gfs family
In her own life Ashima has lived in only five houses: her parents’ flat in Calcutta, her in-laws’ house for one month, the house they rented in Cambridge, living below the Montgomerys, the faculty apartment on campus, and, lastly, the one they own now. One hand, five homes. A lifetime in a fist.
Ashimas five houses
Gerald and Lydia, who were sitting under a blanket on the sofa, watching a French film on video, sipping glasses of after-dinner wine.
All the wine
He knows now the guilt that his parents carried inside, at being able to do nothing when their parents had died in India, of arriving weeks, sometimes months later, when there was nothing left to do. On
Luxury of being present for all of dads last rites
For ten days following his father’s death, he and his mother and Sonia eat a mourner’s diet, forgoing meat and fish. They eat only rice and dal and vegetables, plainly prepared.
Mourner meals
Maxine drives up from New York, bringing Gogol the clothes he normally keeps at her house, his laptop, his mail. His bosses have given him a month off from work. It’s a bit of a shock to see Maxine, to introduce her to Sonia. This time he doesn’t care how the house, how the pile of guests’ shoes heaped by the doorway, might appear to her eyes.
Family lost
Recently, bumping into Gerald and Lydia in a gallery, he learned of their daughter’s engagement to another man.
A past lover now married
But he has the urge to be alone all of a sudden, to be thoroughly passive, to revisit the evening in solitude.
Urge to be alone all of a sudden
If his parents were in the cab they would have struck up a conversation with the driver, asking what part of Bangladesh he was from, how long he’d been in this country, whether his wife and children lived here or there.
WHeer is your family in India from?
She speaks of her students, the topic for the dissertation she plans to write, about twentieth-century francophone poets from Algeria.
Studying for phd
“Well, it’s just funny to think that all our lives our parents raised us according to the illusion that we were cousins, that we were all part of some makeshift extended Bengali family, and now here we are, years later, and someone actually thinks we’re related.”
Extended bengali and bunt family
“It’s so damn hot in my apartment all the time,” he says. “The heat just got turned on.
Heat in new york parents
They make love on top of the covers, quickly, efficiently, as if they’ve known each other’s bodies for years.
They have known ea ch othee
He sees the hair that grows on her legs between waxings, the black roots that emerge between appointments at the salon, and in these moments, these glimpses, he believes he has known no greater intimacy. He learns that she sleeps, always, with her left leg straight and her right leg bent, ankle over knee, in the shape of a 4.
Knowing someone beyond their true best presented version of themselves
He learns that she is prone to snoring, ever so faintly, sounding like a lawn mower that will not start, and to gnashing her jaws, which he massages for her as she sleeps. At restaurants and bars, they sometimes slip Bengali phrases into their conversation in order to comment with impunity on another diner’s unfortunate hair or shoes.
