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He can imagine her life, even after she and her family moved away to New Jersey, easily. He can imagine the large suburban house her family owned; the china cabinet in the dining room, her mother’s prized possession; the large public high school in which she had excelled but that she had miserably attended. There had been the same frequent trips to Calcutta, being plucked out of their American lives for months at a time. They calculate the many months that they were in that distant city together, on trips that had overlapped by weeks and once by months, unaware of each other’s presence.
Abcd life experience
From earliest girlhood, she says, she had been determined not to allow her parents to have a hand in her marriage. She had always been admonished not to marry an American, as had he, but he gathers that in her case these warnings had been relentless, and had therefore plagued her far more than they had him.
Marry a bengali not an american
In college she had harbored lengthy infatuations, with students with whom she never spoke, with professors and TAs. In her mind she would have relationships with these men, structuring her days around chance meetings in the library, or a conversation during office hours, or the one class she and a fellow student shared, so that even now she associated a particular year of college with the man or boy she had silently, faithfully, absurdly, desired.
Memory and desire
There were days she slept with one man after lunch, another after dinner. They were a bit excessive, she tells
That phase
But then it had gotten tiresome, impossible. She brought him home to New Jersey, prepared herself for battle, but in fact, to her enormous surprise, her parents were relieved. By then she was old enough so that it didn’t matter to them that he was an American. Enough of their friends’ children had married Americans, had produced pale, dark-haired, half-American grandchildren, and none of it was as terrible as they had feared. And so her parents did their best to accept him. They told their Bengali friends that Graham was well behaved, Ivy educated,
Bi racial children
A few weeks before the wedding, they were out to dinner with friends, getting happily drunk, and she heard Graham talking about their time in Calcutta. To her surprise, he was complaining about it, commenting that he found it taxing, found the culture repressed. All they did was visit her relatives, he said. Though he thought the city was fascinating, the society, in his opinion, was somewhat provincial. People tended to stay at home most of the time. There was nothing to drink. “Imagine dealing with fifty in-laws without alcohol. I couldn’t even hold her hand on the street without attracting
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Culture was repressedfrom white mans perspective
She called her adviser at NYU, told him she’d had a nervous breakdown, took off the rest of the semester. The wedding was canceled, hundreds of phone calls made. They lost the deposit they’d paid to Shah Jahan caterers, as well as to their honeymoon destination, Palace on Wheels. The gold was taken to a bank vault, the saris and blouses and petticoats put away in a mothproof box.
What if you plan everything and still dont love each other
East Village, she was thankful to be alone. All summer she went to movies by herself, sometimes as many as three a day. She bought TV Guide every week and read it from cover to cover, planning her nights around her favorite shows. She began to subsist on a diet of raita and Triscuits. She grew thinner than she’d ever been in her life, so that in the few pictures taken of her in that period her face is faintly unrecognizable.
She spent summer alone
A cluster of mashis and meshos surround them, telling them continually what to do, when to speak or stand or throw flowers at a small brass urn.
Just follow instructions
Moushumi smiles as she always smiles for a camera, her mouth closed, her head tilted slightly downward and to the left.
howmoushumi smils
The red Banarasi wedding sari and the gold had been bought two years ago, for her wedding to Graham. This time all her parents have had to do is bring down the boxes from a closet shelf,
Same clothe new wedding
This is the way he still finds her most ravishing, unadorned, aware that it is a way she is willing to look for no one but him. She sits on the edge of the mattress, applies some blue cream from a tube to her calves and the bottoms of her feet. She’d massaged the cream onto his own feet once, the day they’d walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, causing them to tingle and go cold. And then she lies against the pillows, and looks at him, and puts out a hand. Underneath the robe he expects to find some racy lingerie—back in New York he’d glimpsed the pile of things she’d received for her shower in
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Finally husband and wife
They spend a few weekends taking the shuttle bus to Ikea and filling up the rooms: imitation Noguchi lamps, a black sectional sofa, kilim and flokati carpets, a blond wood platform bed. Both her parents and Ashima are at once impressed and puzzled when they come to visit for the first time. Isn’t it a bit small, now that they are married? But Gogol and Moushumi aren’t thinking of children at the moment, certainly not until Moushumi finishes her dissertation.
Visiting parents as a married couple
After dinner they watch television, as Moushumi writes out thank-you cards to all their parents’ friends, for the checks they had needed twenty different slips to deposit. These are the things that make him feel married.
After dinner they sit to watch television
She both fits in perfectly yet remains slightly novel.
Perfectly fits in and remains novel
All married! But this is life now, the weekend sometimes more tiring than the workweek, an endless stream of dinner parties, cocktail parties, occasional
Weekend more tiring than weekday
The vast majority of them know each other from Brown, and Gogol can’t ever shake the feeling that half the people in the room have slept with one another.
Half this room has slept with another
There is the usual academic talk around the table, versions of the same conversation he can’t participate in, concerning conferences, job listings, ungrateful undergraduates, proposal deadlines.
Academic lingo
When Moushumi had first introduced him to her crowd he and she would sit with their arms around each other, their fellow guests a footnote to their own ongoing conversation.
My conversation with you is always going to be the most interesting and important one for me
He remembers how it was studying for his licensing exam, which he failed twice before passing. He remembers the sustained isolation it had demanded, speaking to no one for days at a time, and so he doesn’t say anything.
Stress of preparing for an exam
It will be a tiny, odd fact about him, an anecdote, perhaps, for a future dinner party.
Collecting anecdotes for dinner parties
“There’s no such thing as a perfect name. I think that human beings should be allowed to name themselves when they turn eighteen,” he adds.
What would you nMe yourself if you could?
There were nights that she told him she was at her carrel in the library when really she’d met Astrid and her baby, Esme, in SoHo, or gone for a walk by herself. Sometimes she would
Wanting to just be on your own somdtimes
And yet she is a perfectly intelligent woman, was an honors student in philology at Presidency College before she was married off at twenty-two.
Your mothers degree before marriage
she’s learned that his architect’s mind for detail fails when it comes to everyday things. For example, he had not bothered to hide the receipt for the shawl, leaving it, along with change emptied from his pocket, on top of the bureau they share. She can’t really blame him for not remembering. She herself can no longer remember the exact date of that evening.
Forgetting dates and first things of a couple
By the time she’d met him she’d begun to fear that she was retreating into her former self, before Paris—untouched, bookish, alone. She
He teaches me too love
They are the last of the diners to leave. It’s been wildly expensive, far more than they’d expected. They put down a credit card. Watching Nikhil sign the receipt, she feels cheap all of a sudden, irritated that they have to leave such a generous tip though there had been no real reason to fault the waiter’s performance. She notices that a number of tables have already been cleared, chairs placed upside down on their surfaces.
More expensive than necessary
Beginning French, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, a total of three hours a week.
Teach classes as a phd student
Nikhil has a respectable if not terribly lucrative job. It would have been different with Graham—he’d made more than enough money for the both of them. And yet that, too, had been frustrating, causing her to fear that her career was somehow an indulgence, unnecessary.
Having a husband who earns enough and one who doesnt
By the time the paramedics had arrived she was dead from an aneurysm. She was in her thirties, unmarried, perpetually sipping herbal tea.
Character Description
There had been a brittle quality to her, something unyielding, a young person who carried about her a premonition of old age.
young and old
He has not been married. He does not seem very desperate to be employed. He spends his days cooking meals, reading, listening to classical music. She
He has not been married ad is not desperate to be employed
As usual they get into bed, kiss, then slowly they turn away from each other in order to stretch comfortably into sleep. Only Moushumi stays awake.
Only moushumi stays awake
He wonders how his parents had done it, leaving their respective families behind, seeing them so seldom, dwelling unconnected, in a perpetual state of expectation, of longing. All those trips to Calcutta he’d once resented—how could they have been enough?
How his parents had done it
Still, he wonders how he’s arrived at all this: that he is thirty-two years old, and already married and divorced.
“Gogol, the camera,” his mother calls out over the crowd. “Take some pictures tonight, please? I want to remember this Christmas. Next year at this time I’ll be so far away.”
Why we take pictures and write
