The Namesake: Chapters 10–12

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.

She’d been deeply skeptical herself—apart from the young Shashi Kapoor and a cousin in India, she had never until then found herself attracted to an Indian man.

The shoes are arranged on a Lucite pedestal, glowing under a spotlight, the gladiator-style straps festooned with rhinestones.

After years of clandestine relationships, it felt refreshing to court in a fishbowl, to have the support of her parents from the very start, the inevitability of an unquestioned future, of marriage, drawing them along.

Perhaps for those very reasons, in those early months, being with him, falling in love with him, doing precisely what had been expected of her for her entire life, had felt forbidden, wildly transgressive, a breach of her own instinctive will.

A small fleet gathers to welcome them, to tick their names off a list at a podium, to lead them to their table. The fuss feels unwarranted as they step into a stark, sunken dining room.

The atmosphere is somber, vaguely abandoned, as the streets had been.

“I’m still hungry,” she says, looking out the window, at the restaurants still open at this hour—brashly lit diners with specials scrawled on paper plates, cheap calzone places with sawdust-coated floors, the type of restaurants she would never think to enter normally but which look suddenly enticing.

Moushumi wonders how long she will live her life with the trappings of studenthood in spite of the fact that she is a married woman, that she’s as far along in her studies as she is, that Nikhil has a respectable if not terribly lucrative job.

Moushumi wonders how long she will live her life with the trappings of studenthood in spite of the fact that she is a married woman, that she’s as far along in her studies as she is, that 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.

She pushes the button to collate the syllabus but forgets to push the button for staples.

One day, as she and her friends were sitting on the grass, they were invited to join a student coalition from the university, a coalition protesting apartheid in South Africa.

He was wearing a white button-down shirt, faded Levi’s with threadbare knees, pliable gold-framed spectacles that wrapped around his ears.

The letter reveals nothing other than earnest pedagogical intent, mentions a panel Dimitri and the professor to whom it’s addressed attended some years ago.

As she sits down at her desk, her eye travels upward; the window in the office reaches the top of the wall, so that the rooftop of the building across the street stretches across the bottom edge of the sill. The view induces the opposite of vertigo, a lurching feeling inspired not by gravity’s pull to earth, but by the infinite reaches of heaven.

Somehow she managed to hold on to it for years; it’s moved with her from Providence to Paris to New York, a secret talisman on her shelves that she would glance at now and again, still faintly flattered by his peculiar pursuit of her, and always faintly curious as to what had become of him.

By then she’s dug up the postcards, saved in an unsealed, unmarked manila envelope in the box where she keeps her tax returns, and read them, too, amazed that his words, the sight of his handwriting, still manage to discombobulate her.

The first time they met, the day after she called him, at the bar of a crowded Italian restaurant near NYU, they had not been able to stop staring at each other, not been able to stop talking about the résumé, and the uncanny way it had fallen into Moushumi’s hands.

The sill of a window left open in the living room is soaked, streaked with mud, as are the bills and books and papers piled on it. The sight of it makes her weep. At the same time she’s thankful that there’s something tangible for her to be upset about.

He no longer looks forward to the holiday; he wants only to be on the other side of the season. His impatience makes him feel that he is, incontrovertibly, finally, an adult.

“She just got back,” the doorman tells Gogol with a wink as he walks past, and his heart leaps, unburdened of its malaise, grateful for her simple act of returning to him.

She roots through her kitchen drawer for a packet of incense. She lights a stick by the flame of the stove and walks from room to room.

For the past month, she has been dismantling her household piece by piece. Each evening she has tackled a drawer, a closet, a set of shelves.

A widow’s face. But for most of her life, she reminds herself, a wife. And perhaps, one day, a grandmother, arriving in America laden with hand-knit sweaters and gifts, leaving, a month or two later, inconsolable, in tears.

Gogol knows now that his parents had lived their lives in America in spite of what was missing, with a stamina he fears he does not possess himself.

The day after Christmas she left Pemberton Road, with the excuse to his mother and Sonia that a last-minute interview had fallen into place at the MLA. But really the job was a ruse; she and Gogol had decided that it was best for her to return to New York alone.

In the spring he went to Venice alone for a week, the trip he’d planned for the two of them, saturating himself in its ancient, melancholy beauty.

In so many ways, his family’s life feels like a string of accidents, unforeseen, unintended, one incident begetting another.

Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end.

Without people in the world to call him Gogol, no matter how long he himself lives, Gogol Ganguli will, once and for all, vanish from the lips of loved ones, and so, cease to exist. Yet the thought of this eventual demise provides no sense of victory, no solace.