The Namesake

by Jhumpa Lahiri

But she is terrified to raise a child in a country where she is related to no one, where she knows so little, where life seems so tentative and spare.

“As long as there are ten finger and ten toe,”

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.

It was only after the betrothal that she’d learned his name.

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.

Like pregnancy, being a foreigner, Ashima believes, is something that elicits the same curiosity from strangers, the same combination of pity and respect.

Even those family members who continue to live seem dead somehow, always invisible, impossible to touch.

The people they have grown up with will never see this life,

Ever since that day, the day he became a father, the memory of his accident has receded, diminishing over the years. Though he will never forget that night, it no longer lurks persistently in his mind, stalking him in the same way.

To read the story, he believes, would mean paying tribute to his namesake, accepting it somehow.

the only person who didn’t take Gogol seriously, the only person who tormented him, the only person chronically aware of and afflicted by the embarrassment of his name, the only person who constantly questioned it and wished it were otherwise, was Gogol.

He wonders if this is how it feels for an obese person to become thin, for a prisoner to walk free.

But after eighteen years of Gogol, two months of Nikhil feel scant, inconsequential.

At times he feels as if he’s cast himself in a play, acting the part of twins, indistinguishable to the naked eye yet fundamentally different.

He longs for her as his parents have longed, all these years, for the people they love in India—for the first time in his life, he knows this feeling.

befriending people not so much because they like them, but because of a past they happen to share.