The Namesake: Chapters 4–6

She makes sure to prepare his favorite things: lamb curry with lots of potatoes, luchis, thick channa dal with swollen brown raisins, pineapple chutney, sandeshes molded out of saffron-tinted ricotta cheese.

Dark hair slants steeply across his forehead and is plastered to either side of his head, and there is a disturbing, vaguely supercilious smile set into long, narrow lips.

He hates that his name is both absurd and obscure, that it has nothing to do with who he is, that it is neither Indian nor American but of all things Russian.

“I feel a special kinship with Gogol,” Ashoke says, “more than with any other writer. Do you know why?”
“You like his stories.”
“Apart from that. He spent most of his adult life outside his homeland. Like me.”

He stares at the commuters who cling precariously to trams and buses, threatening at any moment to spill onto the street, and at the families who boil rice and shampoo their hair on the sidewalk.

“I want a picture here, just the two of us,” Ashima says to Ashoke as they wander around the massive plinth, and so under the blinding Agra sun, overlooking the dried-up Yamuna, Ashoke teaches Gogol how to use the Nikon, how to focus and advance the film.

And so the eight months are put behind them, quickly shed, quickly forgotten, like clothes worn for a special occasion, or for a season that has passed, suddenly cumbersome, irrelevant to their lives.

He looks at the table of contents, sees Gogol listed after Faulkner, before Hemingway. The sight of it printed in capital letters on the crinkly page upsets him viscerally. It’s as though the name were a particularly unflattering snapshot of himself that makes him
want to say in his defense, “That’s not really me.”

He is celebrated today as one of Russia’s most brilliant writers. But during his life he was understood by no one, least of all himself. One might say he typified the phrase ‘eccentric genius.’

In 1852, in Moscow, disillusioned and convinced of his failure as a writer, he renounced all literary activity and burned the manuscript to the second volume of Dead Souls.

And then he remembers his surreptitious identity for the evening: “I’m a freshman at Amherst.”

For his father had a point; 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.

In spite of his parents’ sanction he feels that he is overstepping them, correcting a mistake they’ve made.

He wonders whether to tell the judge the whole convoluted story, about his great-grandmother’s letter that never made it to Cambridge, and about pet names and good names, about what had happened on the first day of kindergarten.

He is too harried, at first, to sit on the grass in Old Campus as the other students do, perusing their course catalogues, playing Frisbee, getting to know one another among the verdigris-covered statues of robed, seated men.

He doesn’t tell his parents about the drawing class, something they would consider frivolous at this stage of his life, in spite of the fact that his own grandfather was an artist.

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

For his drawing class, in which he is required to make half a dozen sketches every week, he is inspired to draw the details of buildings: flying buttresses, pointed archways filled with flowing tracery, thick rounded doorways, squat columns of pale pink stone.

As they are talking a woman across the aisle reprimands them; she’s been trying to take a nap, she says.

“Teleologically speaking, ABCDs are unable to answer the question ‘Where are you from?’” the sociologist on the panel declares.

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.

His contributions are incidental, and never fully his own: a stairwell, a skylight, a corridor, an air-conditioning duct.

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.

They speak in that slightly strained, silly way that he associates now with flirtation—the exchange feels desperately arbitrary, fleeting.

He is stunned by the house, a Greek Revival, admiring it for several minutes like a tourist before opening the gate. He notes the pedimented window lintels, the Doric pilasters, the bracketed entablature, the black cruciform paneled door.

Along the hallways on every floor shelves ascend to the ceiling, crammed with all the novels one should read in a lifetime, biographies, massive monographs of every artist, all the architecture books Gogol has ever coveted.

The Ratliffs are vociferous at the table, opinionated about things his own parents are indifferent to: movies, exhibits at museums, good restaurants, the design of everyday things.

In addition, he is continually amazed by how much Maxine emulates her parents, how much she respects their tastes and their ways.

“I won’t let you live here.” When his mother had said more or less the same thing, the first time his parents had visited the apartment, he’d argued with her, hotly defending the merits of his spartan, solitary existence.

By then he knows enough about her to know that she is not one to offer things if she doesn’t mean them. Still, he demurs; what would her parents think?

Unlike Gerald and Lydia, who preside at the center of their dinners, his parents behaved more like caterers in their own home, solicitous and watchful, waiting until most of their guests’ plates were stacked by the sink in order finally to help themselves.

Instead it is his knowledge that apart from their affluence, Gerald and Lydia are secure in a way his parents will never be.

The restrictions amuse her; she sees them as a single afternoon’s challenge, an anomaly never to be repeated.

His parents are diffident around Maxine, at first keeping their distance, not boisterous as they typically are around their Bengali friends.

In the driveway there are hugs and kisses good-bye, initiated by Maxine, his parents reciprocating clumsily.

Though the sun is beginning to set, its warmth is still palpable, the air lazy and mild.

There are insect carcasses everywhere, squashed against the windowpanes and walls, languishing in pools of water behind the taps of the sink.

Gogol goes for runs around the lake with Gerald, arduous laps along steep hilly dirt roads, so infrequently traveled that they can occupy the dead center.

In spite of the fact that there is nothing in particular to do, the days assume a pattern. There is a certain stringency to life, a willful doing without.

They would not care to cook with the fresh basil that grows rampant in Gerald’s garden or to spend a whole day boiling blueberries for jam.