The Namesake

by Jhumpa Lahiri

Like a kiss or caress in a Hindi movie, a husband’s name is something intimate and therefore unspoken, cleverly patched over.

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.

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.

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.

They inquired after her studies and she was asked to recite a few stanzas from “The Daffodils.

he openly reveres Marx and quietly refuses 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.

“Lucky boy,” Ashoke remarks, turning the beautifully sewn pages. “Only hours old and already the owner of books.” What a difference, he thinks, from the childhood he has known.

Ashima means “she who is limitless, without borders.” Ashoke, the name of an emperor, means “he who transcends grief.” Pet

“Dida, I’m coming,” Ashima had said. For this was the phrase Bengalis always used in place of good-bye.

Instead, the first formal ceremony of their lives centers around the consumption of solid food.

Gogol is offered a plate holding a clump of cold Cambridge soil dug up from the backyard, a ballpoint pen, and a dollar bill, to see if he will be a landowner, scholar, or businessman.

Only then, forced at six months to confront his destiny, does he begin to cry.

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.

Somehow, bad news, however ridden with static, however filled with echoes, always manages to be conveyed.

Until now it has not occurred to Gogol that names die over time, that they perish just as people do.

“Death is not a pastime,” she says, her voice rising unsteadily, “not a place to make paintings.”

these very first immigrants to America, these bearers of unthinkable, obsolete names, have spoken to him, so much so that in spite of his mother’s disgust he refuses to throw the rubbings away. He rolls them up, takes them upstairs, and puts them in his room, behind his chest of drawers, where he knows his mother will never bother to look, and where they will remain, ignored but protected, gathering dust for years to come.

At times his name, an entity shapeless and weightless, manages nevertheless to distress him physically,

it somehow, the way the other Indian boy in his school, Jayadev, had gotten people to call him Jay.

Other boys his age have begun to court girls already, asking them to go to the movies or the pizza parlor, but he cannot imagine saying, “Hi, it’s Gogol” under potentially romantic circumstances.

We all came out of Gogol’s overcoat.’”

Not only does Gogol Ganguli have a pet name turned good name, but a last name turned first name. And so it occurs to him that no one he knows in the world, in Russia or India or America or anywhere, shares his name. Not even the source of his namesake.

Gogol’s life, in a nutshell, was a steady decline into madness.

He was, in addition, by all accounts, morbidly melancholic, given to fits of severe depression. He had trouble making friends. He never married, fathered no children. It’s commonly believed he died a virgin.”

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

At eight in the morning of February 21, 1852, he breathed his last. He was not yet forty-three years old.’”

He and his group of friends, Colin and Jason and Marc, prefer to listen to records together, to Dylan and Clapton and The Who, and read Nietzsche in their spare

They don’t suspect him, for instance, of smoking pot, which he does from time to time when he and his friends get together

listen to records at one another’s homes.

He doesn’t want to endure her reaction, to watch her lovely blue eyes grow wide. He wishes there were another name he could use, just this once, to get him through the evening. It wouldn’t be so terrible. He’s lied to her already, about being at Amherst. He could introduce himself as Colin or Jason or Marc, as anybody at all, and their conversation could continue, and she would never know or care.

But he doesn’t tell them that it hadn’t been Gogol who’d kissed Kim. That Gogol had had nothing to do with

He wonders if this is how it feels for an obese person to become thin, for a prisoner to walk free. “I’m Nikhil,” he wants to tell the people who are walking their dogs, pushing children in their strollers, throwing bread to the ducks.

A few days later, following Ruth back to her room because she’s forgotten a book she needs for a class, he places his hand over hers as she reaches for the doorknob. Her roommates are out. He waits for her on the sofa in the common room as she searches for the book. It is the middle of the day, overcast, lightly raining. “Found it,” 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.

They go first to a movie at the Brattle, buying tickets for whatever is about to begin, sitting at the back of the balcony and kissing, causing people to turn back and stare.

Afterward they wander hand in hand,

Ruth tells him she doesn’t mind his parents’ disapproval, that she finds it romantic. But

He pities his parents when they speak to him this way, for having no experience of being young and in love.

Living with a pet name and a good name, in a place where such distinctions do not exist—surely that was emblematic of the greatest confusion of all.

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. “Gogol,

she has never wished she were anyone other than herself, raised in any other place, in any other way. This, in his opinion, is the biggest difference between them, a thing far more foreign to him than the beautiful house she’d grown up in, her education at private schools.

Unlike his parents, they pressure her to do nothing, and yet she lives faithfully, happily, at their side.

Gogol is reminded that in all his life he has never witnessed a single moment of physical affection between his parents. Whatever love exists between them is an utterly private, uncelebrated thing. “That’s so depressing,” Maxine says when he confesses this fact to her, and though it upsets him to hear her reaction, he can’t help but agree.

He feels no nostalgia for the vacations he’s spent with his family, and he realizes now that they were never really true vacations at all. Instead they were overwhelming, disorienting expeditions, either going to Calcutta, or sightseeing in places they did not belong to and intended never to see again. Some summers there had been road trips with one or two Bengali families, in rented vans, going to Toronto or Atlanta or Chicago, places where they had other Bengali friends. The fathers would be huddled at the front, taking turns at the wheel, consulting maps highlighted by AAA. All the children would sit in the back with plastic tubs of aloo dum and cold flattened luchis wrapped in foil, fried the day before, which they would stop in state parks to eat on picnic tables.

“Remember that you and I made this journey, that we went together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.”

when he kisses her head he tastes the oil that accumulates on her scalp between shampoos.

He sees the hair that grows on her legs between waxings,

and in these moments, these glimpses, he believes he has known ...

“No wonder you never talked to me back then,” she says. He feels tenderness toward her when she disparages herself this way.

For it was one thing for her to reject her background, to be critical of her family’s heritage, another to hear it from him.