The Namesake: Chapters 7–9

She is careful to choose ones that say “Happy Holidays” or “Season’s Greetings” as opposed to “Merry Christmas,” to avoid angels or nativity scenes in favor of what she considers firmly secular images—a sleigh being pulled through a snow-covered field, or skaters on a pond.

At first she was wildly industrious, cleaning out closets and scrubbing the insides of kitchen cupboards and scraping the shelves of the refrigerator, rinsing out the vegetable bins.

She passes over two pages filled only with the addresses of her daughter, and then her son. She has given birth to vagabonds.

He is unaccustomed to the banality of domestic flights, the narrow cabin, the single bag he’s packed, small enough to stow overhead.

The only thing to distinguish each building is a number and a name; to either side of it are more units, absolutely identical, each three stories tall, arranged around a vast looping road. Tudor facades, tiny metal balconies, wood chips under the stairs. The relentless uniformity of it upsets him profoundly, more so than even the hospital, and the sight of his father’s face.

His father had abhorred waste of any kind, to the point where he complained to Ashima if a kettle had been filled with too much water.

He feels strangely vigilant, as if, were he to pay close enough attention, some sign of his father might manifest itself, putting a stop to the events of the day.

A dull, steady ache persists on the right side of his head, emanating from deep inside his skull.

Sonia and his mother will be there, along with a few friends of the family, waiting for him at the arrival gate. He wishes it could be otherwise. Wishes he could simply get into another cab, and ride along another highway, deferring the moment he must face them.

Without articulating it to one another, they draw comfort from the fact that it is the only time in the day that they are alone, isolated, as a family; even if there are visitors lingering in the house, only the three of them partake of this meal.

And only for its duration is their grief slightly abated, the enforced absence of certain foods on their plates conjuring his father’s presence somehow.

And though, over the years, his departures had become mundane, his father would always stand on the platform until the moment the train was out of sight.

Finally they stood by the lighthouse, exhausted, surrounded by water on three sides, pale green in the harbor, azure behind.

On the anniversary of his father’s death, and on his father’s birthday, a day they never celebrated when his father was alive, they stand together in front of the photograph and drape a garland of rose petals around the frame and anoint his father’s forehead with sandalwood paste through the glass.

From time to time his mother asks him if he has a new girlfriend. In the past she broached the topic defensively, but now she is hopeful, quietly concerned.

She appears to be at ease with the comparison, looking comically askance at Gogol.

The waiter’s comment has discomfited him, making his attraction to Moushumi feel mildly illicit.

“Of course, my mother is appalled that I’m not making you Indian food,” she says, studying the contents of the pan.

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.

She had rebuffed the Indian men she wasn’t interested in, and she had been forbidden as a teenager to date.

Occasionally one of her infatuations would culminate in a lunch or coffee date, an encounter on which she would pin all her hopes but which would lead to nothing.

She regrets her mortifying lack of confidence, the extra ten pounds she carried on her frame during puberty. “No wonder you never talked to me back then,” she says. He feels tenderness toward her when she disparages herself this way.

Immersing herself in a third language, a third culture, had been her refuge—she approached French, unlike things American or Indian, without guilt, or misgiving, or expectation of any kind.

She began to socialize with other American expatriates. Her fiancé was part of that crowd. He was an investment banker from New York, living in Paris for a year.

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.

He imagines his father wearing an outfit similar to his own, a shawl draped over one shoulder, as he used to during pujo. The ensemble he fears looks silly on himself would have looked dignified, elegant, befitting his father in a way he knows it does not him.

She wears the gown in spite of her mother’s protests—what was wrong with a salwar kameeze, she’d wanted to know—and when Moushumi happens to forget her shawl on a chair and bares her slim, bronze shoulders, which quietly sparkle from a special powder she’s applied to them, her mother manages, in the midst of that great crowd, to shoot her reproachful glances, which Moushumi ignores.

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.

The amounts are for one hundred and one dollars, two hundred and one dollars, occasionally three hundred and one dollars, as Bengalis consider it inauspicious to give round figures.

But sometimes, on a Sunday, both craving the food they’d grown up eating, they ride the train out to Queens and have brunch at Jackson Diner, piling their plates with tandoori chicken and pakoras and kabobs, and shop afterward for basmati rice and the spices that need replenishing.

It’s only that sometimes Gogol wonders whether he represents some sort of capitulation or defeat.

It is a café they’ve been to before, and he feels the slight nostalgia it is sometimes possible to feel at the end of an extended stay in a foreign place, taking in the details that will soon evaporate from his mind: the surly waiter who has served them both times, the view of the shops across the street, the green and yellow straw chairs.

Donald’s rendition of a spool of thread, a wedding present to Gogol and Moushumi, hangs in their bedroom.

They are passionate spokespeople for their brand of life, giving Gogol and Moushumi a steady, unquestionable stream of advice about quotidian things.

He tells himself that it’s the stress—she’s been studying for her orals, holed up in her carrel at the library until nine o’clock most nights.

In the end they’d designed something implausible, a town house of poured concrete with a glass facade.

He is handsome, with patrician features and swept-back, slightly greasy, light brown hair.

Isn’t Prudence one of the virtues?

“You’re not helping,” Astrid says, petulant, kissing Donald on the nose.

Gogol watches them, knowing that it’s all in jest—they’re not the type to do something so impulsive, so naive, to blunder, as his own parents had done.