"Gogol"
by Jhumpa Lahiri
In
a hospital waiting room in Cambridge, Ashoke Ganguli hunches over a Boston Globe
from a month ago, abandoned on a neighboring chair. He reads about the riots
that took place during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and about
Dr. Benjamin Spock, the baby doctor, being sentenced to two years in jail for
threatening to counsel draft evaders. The Favre Leuba strapped to his wrist is
running six minutes ahead of the large gray-faced clock on the wall. It is
four-thirty in the morning.
He
desperately needs a cup of tea, not having managed to make one before leaving
the house. But the machine in the corridor dispenses only coffee, tepid at
best, in paper cups. He takes off his thick-rimmed glasses, fitted by a
Calcutta optometrist, and polishes the lenses with the cotton handkerchief he
always keeps in his pocket, “A” for Ashoke embroidered by his mother in
light-blue thread. His black hair, normally combed back neatly from his
forehead, is dishevelled, sections of it on end. He stands and begins pacing,
as the other expectant fathers do. The men wait with cigars, flowers, address books,
bottles of champagne. They smoke cigarettes, ashing onto the floor. Ashoke, a
doctoral candidate in electrical engineering at M.I.T., is indifferent to such
indulgences. He neither smokes nor drinks alcohol of any kind. Ashima is the
one who keeps all their addresses, in a small notebook she carries in her
purse. It has never occurred to him to buy his wife flowers.
He
returns to the Globe, still pacing as he reads. A slight limp causes
Ashoke’s right foot to drag almost imperceptibly with each step. Since
childhood he has had the habit and the ability to read while walking, holding a
book in one hand on his way to school, from room to room in his parents’
three-story house in Alipore, and up and down the red clay stairs. Nothing
roused him. Nothing distracted him. Nothing caused him to stumble. As a
teen-ager he had gone through all of Dickens. He read newer authors as well,
Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham, all purchased from his favorite stall on
College Street with pujo money. But most of all he loved the Russians.
His paternal grandfather, a former professor of European literature at Calcutta
University, had read from them aloud in English translation when Ashoke was a
boy. Each day at teatime, as his brothers and sisters played kabadi and
cricket outside, Ashoke would go to his grandfather’s room, and for an hour his
grandfather would read supine on the bed, his ankles crossed and the book
propped open on his chest, Ashoke curled at his side. For that hour Ashoke was
deaf and blind to the world around him. He did not hear his brothers and
sisters laughing on the rooftop, or see the tiny, dusty, cluttered room in
which his grandfather read. “Read all the Russians, and then reread them,” his
grandfather had said. “They will never fail you.” When Ashoke’s English was
good enough, he began to read the books himself. It was while walking on some
of the world’s noisiest, busiest streets, on Chowringhee and Gariahat Road,
that he had read pages of “The Brothers Karamazov,” and “Anna Karenina,” and
“Fathers and Sons.” Ashoke’s mother was always convinced that her eldest son
would be hit by a bus or a tram, his nose deep into “War and Peace”—that he
would be reading a book the moment he died.
One day, in the earliest hours of
October 20, 1961, this nearly happened. Ashoke was twenty-two, a student at
Bengal Engineering College. He was travelling on the No. 83 Up Howrah-Ranchi
Express to visit his grandparents in Jamshedpur, where they had moved upon his
grandfather’s retirement from the university. Ashoke had never spent the Durga
pujo holidays away from his family. But his grandfather had recently gone
blind, and he had requested Ashoke’s company specifically, to read him The
Statesman in the morning, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy in the afternoon. Ashoke
accepted the invitation eagerly. He carried two suitcases, the first one
containing clothes and gifts, the second empty. For it would be on this visit,
his grandfather had said, that the books in his glass-fronted case, collected
over a lifetime and preserved under lock and key, would be given to Ashoke. He
had already received a few in recent years, given to him on birthdays and other
special occasions. But now that the day had come to inherit the rest, the day
his grandfather could no longer read the books himself, Ashoke was saddened,
and as he placed the empty suitcase under his seat he was disconcerted by its
weightlessness, regretful of the circumstances that would cause it, upon his
return, to be full.
He
carried a single volume for the journey, a hardbound collection of short
stories by Nikolai Gogol, which his grandfather had given him when he’d
graduated from class twelve. On the title page, beneath his grandfather’s
signature, Ashoke had written his own. Because of his passion for this
particular book, the spine had recently split, threatening to divide the pages
into two sections. His favorite story in the book was the last, “The Overcoat,”
and that was the one Ashoke had begun to reread as the train, late in the
evening, pulled out of Howrah Station with a prolonged and deafening shriek,
away from his parents and his six younger brothers and sisters, all of whom had
come to see him off, and had huddled until the last moment by the window,
waving to him from the long, dusky platform.
Outside
the view turned quickly black, the scattered lights of Howrah giving way to
nothing at all. He had a second-class sleeper, in the seventh bogie behind the
air-conditioned coach. Because of the season, the train was especially crowded,
filled with families on holiday. Small children were wearing their best
clothing, the girls with brightly colored ribbons in their hair. He shared his
compartment with three others. There was a middle-aged Bihari couple who, he
gathered from overhearing their conversation, had just married off their eldest
daughter, and a friendly, potbellied, middle-aged Bengali businessman wearing a
suit and tie, by the name of Ghosh. Ghosh told Ashoke that he had recently
spent two years in England on a job voucher, but that he had come back home
because his wife was inconsolably miserable abroad. Ghosh spoke reverently of
England. The sparkling, empty streets, the polished black cars, the rows of
gleaming white houses, he said, were like a dream. Trains departed and arrived
according to schedule, Ghosh said. No one spat on the sidewalks. It was in a
British hospital that his son had been born.
“Seen
much of this world?” Ghosh asked Ashoke, untying his shoes and settling himself
cross-legged on the berth. He pulled a packet of Dunhill cigarettes from his
jacket pocket, offering them around the compartment before lighting one for
himself. “You are still young. Free,” he said, spreading his hands apart for
emphasis. “Do yourself a favor. 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. You will not regret it. One day it will be too late.”
“My
grandfather always says that’s what books are for,” Ashoke said, using the
opportunity to open the volume in his hands. “To travel without moving an
inch.”
“To
each his own,” Ghosh said. He tipped his head politely to one side, letting the
last of the cigarette drop from his fingertips. He reached into a bag by his
feet and took out his diary, turning to the twentieth of October. The page was
blank, and on it, with a fountain pen whose cap he ceremoniously unscrewed, he
wrote his name and address. He ripped out the page and handed it to Ashoke. “If
you ever change your mind and need contacts, let me know. I live in Tollygunge,
just behind the tram depot.”
“Thank
you,” Ashoke said, folding up the information and putting it at the back of his
book.
“How
about a game of cards?” Ghosh suggested. He pulled out a well-worn deck from
his suit pocket, with an image of Big Ben on the back. But Ashoke politely
declined. One by one the passengers brushed their teeth in the vestibule,
changed into their pajamas, fastened the curtain around their compartments, and
went to sleep. Ghosh offered to take the upper berth, climbing barefoot up the
ladder, his suit carefully folded away, so that Ashoke had the window to
himself. The Bihari couple shared some sweets from a box and drank water from
the same cup without either of them putting their lips to the rim, then settled
into their berths as well, switching off the lights and turning their heads to
the wall.
Only
Ashoke continued to read, still seated, still dressed. A single small bulb
glowed dimly over his head. From time to time he looked through the open window
at the inky Bengal night, at the vague shapes of palm trees and the simplest of
homes. Carefully he turned the soft yellow pages of his book, a few delicately
tunnelled by worms. The steam engine puffed reassuringly, powerfully. Deep in
his chest he felt the rough jostle of the wheels. Sparks from the smokestack
passed by his window. A fine layer of sticky soot dotted one side of his face,
his eyelid, his arm, his neck; his grandmother would insist that he scrub
himself with a cake of Margo soap as soon as he arrived. Immersed in the
sartorial plight of Akaky Akakyevich, lost in the wide, snow-white, windy
avenues of St. Petersburg, unaware that one day he was to dwell in a snowy
place himself, Ashoke was still reading at two-thirty in the morning, one of
the few passengers on the train who was awake, when the locomotive engine and
seven bogies derailed from the broad-gauge line. The sound was like a bomb
exploding. The first four bogies capsized into a depression alongside the
track. The fifth and sixth, containing the first-class and air-conditioned passengers,
telescoped into each other, killing the passengers in their sleep. The seventh,
where Ashoke was sitting, capsized as well, flung by the speed of the crash
farther into the field. The accident occurred two hundred and nine kilometres
from Calcutta, between the Ghatshila and Dhalbumgarh stations. More than an
hour passed before the rescuers arrived, bearing lanterns and shovels and axes
to pry bodies from the cars.
Ashoke
can still remember their shouts, asking if anyone was alive. He remembers trying
to shout back, unsuccessfully, his mouth emitting nothing but the faintest
rasp. He remembers the sound of people half-dead around him, moaning and
tapping on the walls of the train, whispering hoarsely for help, words that
only those who were also trapped and injured could possibly hear. Blood
drenched his chest and the left arm of his shirt. He had been thrust partway
out the window. He remembers being unable to see anything at all; for the first
hours he thought that perhaps, like his grandfather, he’d gone blind. He
remembers the acrid odor of flames, the buzzing of flies, children crying, the
taste of dust and blood on his tongue. They were nowhere, somewhere in a field.
Milling about them were villagers, police inspectors, a few doctors. He remembers
believing that he was dying, that perhaps he was already dead. He could not
feel the lower half of his body, and so was unaware that the mangled limbs of
Ghosh were draped over his legs. Eventually he saw the cold, unfriendly blue of
earliest morning, the moon and a few stars still lingering in the sky. The
pages of his book, which had been tossed from his hand, fluttered in two
sections a few feet away from the train. The glare from a search lantern
briefly caught the pages, momentarily distracting one of the rescuers. “Nothing
here,” Ashoke heard someone say. “Let’s keep going.”
But
the lantern’s light lingered, just long enough for Ashoke to raise his hand, a
gesture that he believed would consume the small fragment of life left in him.
He was still clutching a single page of “The Overcoat,” crumpled tightly in his
fist, and when he raised his hand the wad of paper dropped from his fingers.
“Wait!” he heard a voice cry out. “The fellow by that book. I saw him move.”
He
was pulled from the wreckage, placed on a stretcher, transported on another
train to a hospital in Tatanagar. He had broken his pelvis, his right femur,
and three of his ribs on the right side. For the next year of his life he lay
flat on his back, ordered to keep as still as possible while the bones of his
body healed. There was a risk that his right leg might be permanently
paralyzed. He was transferred to Calcutta Medical College, where two screws
were put into his hips. By December he had returned to his parents’ house in
Alipore, carried through the courtyard and up the red clay stairs like a
corpse, hoisted on the shoulders of his four brothers. Three times a day he was
spoon-fed. He urinated and defecated into a tin pan. Doctors and visitors came
and went. Even his blind grandfather from Jamshedpur paid a visit. His family
had saved the newspaper accounts. In a photograph, Ashoke observed the train
smashed to shards, piled jaggedly against the sky, security guards sitting on
the unclaimed belongings. He learned that fishplates and bolts had been found
several feet from the main track, giving rise to the suspicion, never
subsequently confirmed, of sabotage. “holiday-makers’ tryst with death,” the Times
of India had written.
During
the day he was groggy from painkillers. At night he dreamed either that he was
still trapped inside the train or, worse, that the accident had never happened,
that he was walking down a street, taking a bath, sitting cross-legged on the
floor and eating a plate of food. And then he would wake up, coated in sweat,
tears streaming down his face, convinced that he would never live to do such
things again. Eventually, in an attempt to avoid his nightmares, he began to
read, late at night, which was when his motionless body felt most restless, his
mind agile and clear. Yet he refused to read the Russians his grandfather had
brought to his bedside, or any novels, for that matter. Those books, set in
countries he had never seen, reminded him only of his confinement. Instead he
read his engineering books, trying his best to keep up with his courses,
solving equations by flashlight. In those silent hours, he thought often of
Ghosh. “Pack a pillow and a blanket,” he heard Ghosh say. He remembered the
address Ghosh had written, somewhere behind the tram depot in Tollygunge. Now
it was the home of a widow, a fatherless son. Each day, to bolster his spirits,
his family reminded him of the future, the day he would stand unassisted, walk
across the room. It was for this, each day, that his father and mother prayed.
But, as the months passed, Ashoke began to envision another sort of future. He
imagined not only walking, but walking away, as far as he could, from the place
where he was born and where he had nearly died. The following year, walking
with a cane, he returned to college and graduated, and without telling his
parents he applied to continue his engineering studies abroad. Only after he’d
been accepted with a full fellowship, a newly issued passport in hand, did he
inform them of his plans. “But we already nearly lost you once,” his bewildered
father had protested. His siblings had pleaded and wept. His mother,
speechless, had refused food for three days. In spite of all that, he’d gone.
Seven
years later, there are still certain images that wipe him flat. They lurk
around a corner as he rushes through the engineering department at M.I.T. They
hover by his shoulder as he leans over a plate of rice at dinnertime, or
nestles against Ashima’s limbs at night. At every turning point in his life—at
his wedding, in Calcutta, when he stood behind Ashima, encircling her waist and
peering over her shoulder as they poured puffed rice into a fire, or during his
first hours in America, seeing a small gray city caked with snow—he has tried
but failed to push these images away: the twisted, battered, capsized bogies of
the train, his body twisted below it, the terrible crunching sound he had heard
but not comprehended, his bones crushed as fine as flour. It is not the memory
of pain that haunts him; he has no memory of that. It is the memory of waiting
before he was rescued, and the persistent fear, rising up in his throat, that
he might not have been rescued at all. At times he still presses his ribs to
make sure they are solid.
He
presses them now, in the hospital, shaking his head in relief, disbelief.
Although it is Ashima who carries the child, he, too, feels heavy, with the
thought of life, of his life and the life about to come from it. He was raised
without running water, nearly killed at twenty-two. He was born twice in India,
and then a third time, in America. Three lives by thirty. For this he thanks
his parents, and their parents, and the parents of their parents. He does not
thank God; he openly reveres Marx and quietly refuses religion. Instead of
thanking God he thanks Gogol, the Russian writer who had saved his life, when
the nurse enters the waiting room.
The
baby, a boy, is born at half past five in the morning. He measures twenty
inches long, weighs seven pounds nine ounces. When Ashoke arrives, the nurse is
taking Ashima’s blood pressure, and Ashima is reclining against a pile of
pillows, the child wrapped like an oblong white parcel in her arms. Beside the
bed is a bassinet, labelled with a card that says “Baby Boy Ganguli.”
“He’s
here,” she says quietly, looking up at Ashoke with a weak smile. Her skin is
faintly yellow, the color missing from her lips. She has circles beneath her
eyes, and her hair, spilling from its braid, looks as though it had not been
combed for days. Her voice is hoarse, as if she’d caught a cold. He pulls up a
chair by the side of the bed and the nurse helps to transfer the child from
mother’s to father’s arms. In the process, the child pierces the silence in the
room with a short-lived cry. His parents react with mutual alarm, but the nurse
laughs approvingly. “You see,” she says to Ashima, “he’s already getting to
know you.”
At
first Ashoke is more perplexed than moved, by the pointiness of the head, the
puffiness of the lids, the small white spots on the cheeks, the fleshy upper
lip that droops prominently over the lower one. The skin is paler than either
Ashima’s or his own, translucent enough to show slim green veins at the
temples. The scalp is covered by a mass of wispy black hair. He attempts to
count the eyelashes. He feels gently through the flannel for the hands and
feet.
“It’s
all there,” Ashima says, watching her husband. “I already checked.”
“What
are the eyes like? Why won’t he open them? Has he opened them?”
She
nods.
“What
can he see? Can he see us?”
“I
think so. But not very clearly. And not in full color. Not yet.”
They
sit in silence, the three of them as still as stones. “How are you feeling? Was
it all right?” he asks Ashima after a while.
But
there is no answer, and when Ashoke lifts his gaze from his son’s face he sees
that she, too, is sleeping.
When
he looks back to the child, the eyes are open, staring up at him, unblinking,
as dark as the hair on its head. The face is transformed; Ashoke has never seen
a more perfect thing. He imagines himself as a dark, grainy, blurry presence.
As a father to his son. 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.
Because
neither set of grandparents has a working telephone, the couple’s only link to
home is by telegram, which Ashoke has sent to both sides in Calcutta: “With
your blessings, boy and mother fine.” As for a name, they have decided to let
Ashima’s grandmother, who is past eighty now, who has named each of her six
other great-grandchildren in the world, do the honors. Ashima’s grandmother has
mailed the letter herself, walking with her cane to the post office, her first
trip out of the house in a decade. The letter contains one name for a girl, one
for a boy. Ashima’s grandmother has revealed them to no one.
Though
the letter was sent a month ago, in July, it has yet to arrive. Ashima and
Ashoke are not terribly concerned. After all, they both know, an infant doesn’t
really need a name. He needs to be fed and blessed, to be given some gold and
silver, to be patted on the back after feedings and held carefully behind the
neck. Names can wait. In India parents take their time. It wasn’t unusual for
years to pass before the right name, the best possible name, was determined.
Ashima and Ashoke can both cite examples of cousins who were not officially
named until they were registered, at six or seven, in school. Besides, there
are always pet names to tide one over: a practice of Bengali nomenclature
grants, to every single person, two names. In Bengali the word for “pet name”
is daknam, meaning literally the name by which one is called, by
friends, family, and other intimates, at home and in other private, unguarded
moments. Pet names are a persistent remnant of childhood, a reminder that life
is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated. They are a reminder, too,
that one is not all things to all people. Every pet name is paired with a “good
name,” a bhalonam, for identification in the outside world. Consequently,
good names appear on envelopes, on diplomas, in telephone directories, and in
all other public places. Good names tend to represent dignified and enlightened
qualities. Ashima means “she who is limitless, without borders.” Ashoke, the
name of an emperor, means “he who transcends grief.” Pet names have no such
aspirations. They are never recorded officially, only uttered and remembered.
Three
days come and go. Ashima is shown by the nursing staff how to change diapers
and how to clean the umbilical stub. She is given hot saltwater baths to soothe
her bruises and stitches. She is given a list of pediatricians, and countless
brochures on breast-feeding and bonding and immunizing, and samples of baby
shampoos and Q-Tips and creams. The fourth day there is good news and bad news.
The good news is that Ashima and the baby are to be discharged the following
morning. The bad news is that they are told by Mr. Wilcox, compiler of hospital
birth certificates, that they must choose a name for their son. For they learn
that in America a baby cannot be released from the hospital without a birth
certificate. And that a birth certificate needs a name.
“But,
sir,” Ashima protests, “we can’t possibly name him ourselves.”
Mr.
Wilcox, slight, bald, unamused, glances at the couple, both visibly distressed,
then glances at the nameless child. “I see,” he says. “The reason being?”
“We
are waiting for a letter,” Ashoke says, explaining the situation in detail.
“I
see,” Mr. Wilcox says again. “That is unfortunate. I’m afraid your only
alternative is to have the certificate read ‘Baby Boy Ganguli.’ You will, of
course, be required to amend the permanent record when a name is decided upon.”
Ashima
looks at Ashoke expectantly. “Is that what we should do?”
“I
don’t recommend it,” Mr. Wilcox says. “You will have to appear before a judge,
pay a fee. The red tape is endless.”
“Oh
dear,” Ashoke says.
Mr.
Wilcox nods, and silence ensues. “Don’t you have any backups?” he asks.
“Something in reserve, in case you didn’t like what your grandmother has
chosen.”
Ashima
and Ashoke shake their heads. It has never occurred to either of them to
question Ashima’s grandmother’s selection, to disregard an elder’s wishes in
such a way.
“You
can always name him after yourself, or one of your ancestors,” Mr. Wilcox
suggests, admitting that he is actually Howard Wilcox III. “It’s a fine
tradition. The kings of France and England did it,” he adds.
But
this isn’t possible. This tradition doesn’t exist for Bengalis, naming a son
after father or grandfather, a daughter after mother or grandmother. This sign
of respect in America and Europe, this symbol of heritage and lineage, would be
ridiculed in India. Within Bengali families, individual names are sacred,
inviolable. They are not meant to be inherited or shared.
“Then
what about naming him after another person? Someone you greatly admire?” Mr.
Wilcox says, his eyebrows raised hopefully. He sighs. “Think about it. I’ll be
back in a few hours,” he tells them, exiting the room.
The
door shuts, which is when, with a slight quiver of recognition, as if he’d
known it all along, the perfect pet name for his son occurs to Ashoke.
“Hello,
Gogol,” he whispers, leaning over his son’s haughty face, his tightly bundled
body. “Gogol,” he repeats, satisfied. The baby turns his head with an
expression of extreme consternation and yawns.
Ashima
approves, aware that the name stands not only for her son’s life but for her
husband’s. She’d first heard the story of the accident soon after their
marriage was arranged, when Ashoke was still a stranger to her. But the thought
of it now makes her blood go cold. There are nights when she has been woken by
her husband’s muffled screams, times they have ridden the subway together and
the rhythm of the wheels on the tracks makes him suddenly pensive, aloof. She
has never read any Gogol herself, but she is willing to place him on a shelf in
her mind, along with Tennyson and Wordsworth. When Mr. Wilcox returns with his
typewriter, Ashoke spells out the name. Thus Gogol Ganguli is registered in the
hospital’s files. A first photograph, somewhat overexposed, is taken that
broiling-hot, late summer’s day: Gogol, an indistinct blanketed mass, reposing
in his weary mother’s arms. She stands on the steps of the hospital, staring at
the camera, her eyes squinting into the sun. Her husband looks on from one
side, his wife’s suitcase in his hand, smiling with his head lowered. “Gogol
enters the world,” his father will eventually write on the back in Bengali
letters.
Letters
arrive from Ashima’s parents, from Ashoke’s parents, from aunts and uncles and
cousins and friends, from everyone, it seems, but Ashima’s grandmother. The
letters are filled with every possible blessing and good wish, composed in an
alphabet they have seen all around them for most of their lives, on billboards
and newspapers and awnings, but which they see now only in these precious,
pale-blue missives.
In
November, when Gogol is three months old, he develops a mild ear infection.
When Ashima and Ashoke see their son’s pet name typed on the label of a
prescription for antibiotics, when they see it at the top of his immunization
record, it doesn’t look right; pet names aren’t meant to be made public in this
way. But there is still no letter from Ashima’s grandmother, and they are forced
to conclude that it is lost in the mail. The very next day a letter arrives in
Cambridge. The letter is dated three weeks ago, and from it they learn that
Ashima’s grandmother has had a stroke, that her right side is permanently
paralyzed, her mind dim. She can no longer chew, barely swallows, remembers and
recognizes little of her eighty-odd years. “She is with us still, but to be
honest we have already lost her,” Ashima’s father has written. “Prepare
yourself, Ashima. Perhaps you may not see her again.”
It
is their first piece of bad news from home. Ashoke barely knows Ashima’s
grandmother, only vaguely recalls touching her feet at his wedding, but Ashima
is inconsolable for days. She sits at home with Gogol as the leaves turn brown
and drop from the trees, as the days begin to grow quickly, mercilessly dark.
Unlike Ashima’s parents, and her other relatives, her grandmother, her dida,
had not admonished Ashima not to eat beef or wear skirts or cut off her hair or
forget her family the moment she landed in Boston. Her grandmother had not been
fearful of such signs of betrayal; she was the only person to predict, rightly,
that Ashima would never change. A few days before leaving Calcutta, Ashima had
stood, her head lowered, under her late grandfather’s portrait, asking him to
bless her journey. Then she bent down to touch the dust of her dida’s feet to
her head.
“Dida,
I’m coming,” Ashima had said. For this was the phrase Bengalis always used in
place of goodbye.
“Enjoy
it,” her grandmother had bellowed in her thundering voice, helping Ashima to
straighten. With trembling hands, her grandmother had pressed her thumbs to the
tears streaming down Ashima’s face, wiping them away. “Do what I will never do.
It will all be for the best. Remember that. Now go.”
By
1971, the Gangulis have moved to a university town outside Boston, where Ashoke
has been hired as an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the
university. In exchange for teaching five classes, he earns sixteen thousand
dollars a year. He is given his own office, with his name etched onto a strip
of black plastic by the door. The job is everything Ashoke has ever dreamed of.
He had always hoped to teach in a university rather than work for a
corporation. What a thrill, he thinks, to stand lecturing before a roomful of
American students. What a sense of accomplishment it gives him to see his name
printed under “Faculty” in the university directory. From his fourth-floor
office he has a sweeping view of the quadrangle, surrounded by vine-covered brick
buildings. On Fridays, after he has taught his last class, he visits the
library, to read international newspapers on long wooden poles. He reads about
American planes bombing Vietcong supply routes in Cambodia, Naxalites being
murdered on the streets of Calcutta, India and Pakistan going to war. At times
he wanders up to the library’s sun-filled, unpopulated top floor, where all the
literature is shelved. He browses in the aisles, gravitating most often toward
his beloved Russians, where he is particularly comforted, each time, by his
son’s name stamped in golden letters on the spines of a row of red and green
and blue hardbound books.
Ashoke
and Ashima purchase a shingled two-story colonial in a recently built
development, a house previously occupied by no one, erected on a quarter acre
of land. This is the small patch of America to which they lay claim. Gogol
accompanies his parents to banks, sits waiting as they sign the endless papers.
Ashoke and Ashima are amazed, when moving by U-Haul to the new house, to
discover how much they possess; each of them had come to America with a single
suitcase, a few weeks’ worth of clothes. The walls of the new house are
painted, the driveway sealed with pitch, the shingles and sundeck
weatherproofed and stained. Ashoke takes photographs of every room, Gogol
standing somewhere in the frame, to send to relatives in India. He is a
sturdily built child, with full cheeks but already pensive features. When he
poses for the camera he has to be coaxed into a smile.
In
the beginning, in the evenings, his family goes for drives, exploring their new
environs bit by bit: the neglected dirt lanes, the shaded back roads. The back
seat of the car is sheathed with plastic, the ashtrays on the doors still
sealed. Sometimes they drive out of the town altogether, to one of the beaches
along the North Shore. Even in summer, they never go to swim or to turn brown
beneath the sun. Instead they go dressed in their ordinary clothes. By the time
they arrive, the ticket collector’s booth is empty, the crowds gone; there are
only a handful of cars in the parking lot. Together, as the Gangulis drive,
they anticipate the moment the thin blue line of ocean will come into view. On
the beach Gogol collects rocks, digs tunnels in the sand. He and his father
wander barefoot, their pant legs rolled halfway up their calves. He watches his
father raise a kite within minutes into the wind, so high that Gogol must tip
his head back in order to see, a rippling speck against the sky.
The
August that Gogol turns five, Ashima discovers she is pregnant again. In the
mornings she forces herself to eat a slice of toast, only because Ashoke makes
it for her and watches her while she chews it in bed. Her head constantly
spins. She spends her days lying down, a pink plastic wastepaper basket by her
side, the shades drawn, her mouth and teeth coated with the taste of metal.
Sometimes Gogol lies beside her in his parents’ bedroom, reading a picture
book, or coloring with crayons. “You’re going to be an older brother,” she tells
him one day. “There’ll be someone to call you Dada. Won’t that be exciting?”
In
the evenings, Gogol and his father eat together, alone, a week’s worth of
chicken curry and rice, which his father cooks in two battered Dutch ovens
every Sunday. As the food reheats, his father tells Gogol to shut the bedroom
door because his mother cannot tolerate the smell. It is odd to see his father
presiding in the kitchen, standing in his mother’s place at the stove. When
they sit down at the table, the sound of his parents’ conversation is missing.
Because
his mother tends to vomit the moment she finds herself in a moving car, she is
unable to accompany Ashoke to take Gogol, in September of 1973, to his first
day of kindergarten at the town’s public elementary school. By the time Gogol
starts, it is already the second week of the school year. For the past week,
Gogol has been in bed, just like his mother, listless, without appetite,
claiming to have a stomach ache, even vomiting one day into his mother’s pink
wastepaper basket. He doesn’t want to go to kindergarten. He doesn’t want to
wear the new clothes his mother has bought him from Sears, hanging on a knob of
his dresser, or carry his Charlie Brown lunchbox, or board the yellow school
bus that stops at the end of Pemberton Road.
There
is a reason Gogol doesn’t want to go to kindergarten. His parents have told him
that at school, instead of being called Gogol, he will be called by a new name,
a good name, which his parents have finally decided on, just in time for him to
begin his formal education. The name, Nikhil, is artfully connected to the old.
Not only is it a perfectly respectable Bengali good name, meaning “he who is
entire, encompassing all,” but it also bears a satisfying resemblance to
Nikolai, the first name of the Russian Gogol’s. Ashoke thought of it recently,
staring mindlessly at the Gogol spines in the library, and he rushed back to
the house to ask Ashima her opinion. He pointed out that it was relatively easy
to pronounce, though there was the danger that Americans, obsessed with
abbreviation, would truncate it to Nick. She told him she liked it well enough,
though later, alone, she’d wept, thinking of her grandmother, who had died
earlier in the year, and of the letter, forever hovering somewhere between
India and America.
But
Gogol can’t understand why he has to answer to anything else. “Why do I have to
have a new name?” he asks his parents, tears springing to his eyes. It would be
one thing if his parents were to call him Nikhil, too. But they tell him that
the new name will be used only by the teachers and children at school. He is
afraid to be Nikhil, someone he doesn’t know. Who doesn’t know him. His parents
tell him that they each have two names, too, as do all their Bengali friends in
America, and all their relatives in Calcutta. It’s a part of growing up, they
tell him, part of being a Bengali. They write it for him on a sheet of paper,
ask him to copy it over ten times. “Don’t worry,” his father says. “To me and
your mother, you will never be anyone but Gogol.”
At
school, Ashoke and Gogol are greeted by the secretary, who asks Ashoke to fill
out a registration form. He provides a copy of Gogol’s birth certificate and
immunization records, which are put in a folder along with the registration. “This
way,” the secretary says, leading them to the principal’s office. Candace
Lapidus, the name on the door says. Mrs. Lapidus assures Ashoke that missing
the first week of kindergarten is not a problem, that things have yet to settle
down. Mrs. Lapidus is a tall, slender woman with short white-blond hair. She
wears frosted blue eye shadow and a lemon-yellow suit. She shakes Ashoke’s hand
and tells him that there are two other Indian children at the school, Jayadev
Modi, in the third grade, and Rekha Saxena, in fifth. Perhaps the Gangulis know
them? Ashoke tells Mrs. Lapidus that they do not. She looks at the registration
form and smiles kindly at the boy, who is clutching his father’s hand. Gogol is
dressed in powder-blue pants, red-and-white canvas sneakers, a striped
turtleneck top.
“Welcome
to elementary school, Nikhil. I am your principal, Mrs. Lapidus.”
Gogol
looks down at his sneakers. The way the principal pronounces his new name is
different from the way his parents say it, the second part of it longer,
sounding like “heel.”
She
bends down so that her face is level with his, and extends a hand to his
shoulder. “Can you tell me how old you are, Nikhil?”
When
the question is repeated and there is still no response, Mrs. Lapidus asks,
“Mr. Ganguli, does Nikhil follow English?”
“Of
course he follows,” Ashoke says. “My son is perfectly bilingual.”
In
order to prove that Gogol knows English, Ashoke does something he has never
done before, and addresses his son in careful, accented English. “Go on,
Gogol,” he says, patting him on the head. “Tell Mrs. Lapidus how old you are.”
“What
was that?” Mrs. Lapidus says.
“I
beg your pardon, Madam?”
“That
name you called him. Something with a ‘G.’ ”
“Oh
that, that is what we call him at home only. But his good name should be—is”—he
nods his head firmly— “Nikhil.”
Mrs.
Lapidus frowns. “I’m afraid I don’t understand. ‘Good name’?”
“Yes.”
Mrs.
Lapidus studies the registration form. She has not had to go through this
confusion with the two other Indian children.
“I’m
not sure I follow you, Mr. Ganguli. Do you mean that Nikhil is a middle name?
Or a nickname? Many of the children go by nicknames here. On this form there is
a space—”
“No,
no, it’s not a middle name,” Ashoke says. He is beginning to lose patience. “He
has no middle name. No nickname. The boy’s good name, his school name, is
Nikhil.”
Mrs.
Lapidus presses her lips together and smiles. “But clearly he doesn’t respond.”
“Please,
Mrs. Lapidus,” Ashoke says. “It is very common for a child to be confused at
first. Please give it some time. I assure you he will grow accustomed.”
He
bends down, and this time in Bengali, calmly and quietly, asks Gogol to please
answer when Mrs. Lapidus asks a question. “Don’t be scared, Gogol,” he says,
raising his son’s chin with his finger. “You’re a big boy now. No tears.”
Though
Mrs. Lapidus does not understand a word, she listens carefully, hears that name
again. Gogol. Lightly, in pencil, she writes it down on the registration form.
Ashoke
hands over the lunchbox, a windbreaker in case it gets cold. He thanks Mrs.
Lapidus. “Be good, Nikhil,” he says in English. And then, after a moment’s
hesitation, Gogol’s father is gone.
At
the end of his first day he is sent home with a letter to his parents from Mrs.
Lapidus, folded and stapled to a string around his neck, explaining that owing
to their son’s preference he will be known as Gogol at school. What about the
parents’ preference? Ashima and Ashoke wonder, shaking their heads.
And
so Gogol’s formal education begins. At the top of sheets of scratchy
pale-yellow paper he writes out his pet name again and again, and the alphabet
in capital and lowercase. He learns to add and subtract, and to spell his first
words. In the front covers of the textbooks from which he is taught to read he
leaves his legacy, writing his name in No. 2 pencil below a series of others.
In art class, his favorite hour of the week, he carves his name with paper
clips into the bottoms of clay cups and bowls. He pastes uncooked pasta to
cardboard, and leaves his signature in fat brushstrokes below paintings. Day
after day he brings his creations home to Ashima, who hangs them proudly on the
refrigerator door. “Gogol G.,” he signs his work in the lower right-hand
corner, as if there were a need to distinguish him from any other Gogol in the
school.
In
May his sister is born. This time, Ashoke and Ashima are ready. They have the
names lined up, for a boy or a girl. The only way to avoid confusion, they have
concluded, is to do away with the pet name altogether, as many of their Bengali
friends have already done. For their daughter, good name and pet name are one
and the same: Sonali, meaning “she who is golden.” Though Sonali is the name on
her birth certificate, the name she will carry officially through life, at home
they begin to call her Sonu, then Sona, and, finally, Sonia. Sonia makes her a
citizen of the world. It’s a Russian link to her brother, it’s European, South
American. Eventually it will be the name of the Indian Prime Minister’s Italian
wife.
As
a young boy Gogol doesn’t mind his name. He recognizes pieces of himself in
road signs: “Go Left,” “Go Right,” “Go Slow.” For birthdays his
mother orders a cake on which his name is piped across the white frosted
surface in a bright-blue sugary script. It all seems perfectly normal. It
doesn’t bother him that his name is never an option on key chains or
refrigerator magnets. He has been told that he was named after a famous Russian
author, born in a previous century. That the author’s name, and therefore his,
is known throughout the world and will live on forever. One day his father
takes him to the university library, and shows him, on a shelf well beyond his
reach, a row of Gogol spines. When his father opens up one of the books to a
random page, the print is far smaller than in the Hardy Boys series Gogol has
begun recently to enjoy. “In a few years,” his father tells him, “you’ll be
ready to read them.” Though substitute teachers at school always pause, looking
apologetically when they arrive at his name on the roster, forcing Gogol to
call out, before even being summoned, “That’s me,” his regular teachers know
not to give it a second thought. After a year or two, the students no longer
tease and say “Giggle” or “Gargle.” In the programs of the school Christmas
plays, the parents are accustomed to seeing his name among the cast. “Gogol is
an outstanding student, curious and coöperative,” his teachers write year after
year on report cards. “Go, Gogol!” his classmates shout on golden autumn days
as he runs the bases or sprints in a dash.
As
for his last name, Ganguli, by the time he is ten he has been to Calcutta three
times, twice in summer and once during Durga pujo, and from the most
recent trip he still remembers the sight of the name etched respectably into
the pink stone façade of his paternal grandparents’ house. He remembers the
astonishment of seeing six pages full of Gangulis, three columns to a page, in
the Calcutta telephone directory. He’d wanted to rip out the page as a
souvenir, but, when he’d told this to one of his cousins, the cousin had
laughed. On taxi rides through the city, going to visit the various homes of
his relatives, his father had pointed out the name elsewhere, on the awnings of
confectioners, and stationers, and opticians. He had told Gogol that Ganguli
was a legacy of the British, an anglicized way of pronouncing his real surname,
Gangopadhyay.
Back
home on Pemberton Road, he helps his father paste individual golden letters
bought from a rack in the hardware store, spelling out Ganguli on one side of
their mailbox. One morning, the day after Halloween, Gogol discovers, on his
way to the bus stop, that it has been shortened to “Gang,” with the word
“green” scrawled in pencil following it. He runs back into the house, sickened,
certain of the insult his father will feel. Though it is his last name, too,
something tells Gogol that the desecration is intended for his parents more
than for Sonia and him. For by now he is aware, in stores, of cashiers smirking
at his parents’ accents, and of salesmen who prefer to direct their
conversation to Gogol, as though his parents were either incompetent or deaf.
But his father is unaffected at such moments, just as he is unaffected by the
mailbox. “It’s only boys having fun,” he tells Gogol, flicking the matter away
with the back of a hand, and that evening they drive to the hardware store, to
buy the missing letters again.
Gogol’s
fourteenth birthday. Like most events in his life, it is another excuse for his
parents to throw a party for their Bengali friends. His own friends from school
were invited the previous day, for pizzas that his father picked up on his way
home from work, a basketball game watched together on television, some
Ping-Pong in the den. His mother cooks for days beforehand, cramming the refrigerator
with stacks of foil-covered trays. 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. All this is less stressful to her than the task
of feeding a handful of American children, half of whom always claim they are
allergic to milk, all of whom refuse to eat the crusts of their bread.
Close
to forty guests come, from three different states. Women are dressed in saris
far more dazzling than the pants and polo shirts their husbands wear. A group
of men sit in a circle on the floor and immediately start a game of poker.
These are all his mashis and meshos, his honorary aunts and
uncles. Presents are opened when the guests are gone. Gogol receives several
dictionaries, several calculators, several Cross pen-and-pencil sets, several
ugly sweaters. His parents give him an Instamatic camera, a new sketchbook,
colored pencils and the mechanical pen he’d asked for, and twenty dollars to
spend as he wishes. Sonia has made him a card with Magic Markers, on paper
she’s ripped out of one of his own sketchbooks, which says “Happy Birthday
Goggles,” the name she insists on calling him instead of Dada. His mother sets
aside the things he doesn’t like, which is almost everything, to give to his
cousins the next time they go to India. Later that night he is alone in his
room, listening to side three of the White Album on his parents’ cast-off RCA
turntable. The album is a present from his American birthday party. Born when
the band was near death, Gogol is a passionate devotee of John, Paul, George,
and Ringo. He sits cross-legged on the bed, hunched over the lyrics, when he
hears a knock on the door.
“Come
in!” he hollers, expecting it to be Sonia in her pajamas, asking if she can
borrow his Rubik’s Cube. He is surprised to see his father, standing there in
stocking feet, a small potbelly visible beneath his oat-colored sweater vest,
his mustache turning gray. Gogol is especially surprised to see a gift in his
father’s hands. His father has never given him birthday presents apart from
whatever his mother buys, but this year, his father says, walking across the
room to where Gogol is sitting, he has something special. The gift is covered
in red-and-green-and-gold-striped paper left over from Christmas the year
before, taped awkwardly at the seams. It is obviously a book, thick, hardcover,
wrapped by his father’s own hands. Gogol lifts the paper slowly, but in spite
of this the tape leaves a scab. “The Short Stories of Nikolai Gogol,” the
jacket says. Inside, the price has been snipped away on the diagonal.
“I
ordered it from the bookstore, just for you,” his father says, his voice raised
in order to be heard over the music. “It’s difficult to find in hardcover these
days. It’s a British publication, a very small press. It took four months to
arrive. I hope you like it.”
Gogol
leans over toward the stereo to turn the volume down a bit. He would have
preferred “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” or even another copy of “The
Hobbit” to replace the one he lost last summer in Calcutta, left on the rooftop
of his father’s house in Alipore and snatched away by crows. In spite of his
father’s occasional suggestions, he has never been inspired to read a word of
Gogol, or of any Russian writer, for that matter. He has never been told why he
was really named Gogol. He thinks his father’s limp is the consequence of an
injury playing soccer in his teens.
“Thanks,
Baba,” Gogol says, eager to return to his lyrics. Lately he’s been lazy,
addressing his parents in English, though they continue to speak to him in
Bengali. Occasionally he wanders through the house with his running sneakers
on. At dinner he sometimes uses a fork.
His
father is still standing there in his room, watching expectantly, his hands
clasped together behind his back, so Gogol flips through the book. A single
picture at the front, on smoother paper than the rest of the pages, shows a
pencil drawing of the author, sporting a velvet jacket, a billowy white shirt,
and a cravat. The face is foxlike, with small, dark eyes, a thin, neat
mustache, an extremely large pointy nose. 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. Gogol
Ganguli is relieved to see no resemblance.
For
by now he’s come to hate questions pertaining to his name, hates having
constantly to explain. He hates having to tell people that it doesn’t mean
anything “in Indian.” He hates having to wear a nametag on his sweater at Model
United Nations Day at school. 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. He hates having to live with it, with
a pet name turned good name, day after day, second after second. He hates
seeing it on the brown-paper sleeve of the National Geographic
subscription his parents got him for his birthday the year before, and seeing
it perpetually listed in the high honor roll printed in the town’s newspaper.
At times his name, an entity shapeless and weightless, manages nevertheless to
distress him physically, like the scratchy tag of a shirt he has been forced
permanently to wear. At times he wishes he could disguise it, shorten it
somehow, the way the other Indian boy in his school, Jayadev, had got people to
call him Jay. But Gogol, already short and catchy, resists mutation. 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. He cannot imagine this at all.
From
the little he knows about Russian writers, it dismays him that his parents
chose the weirdest namesake. Leo or Anton, he could have lived with. Alexander,
shortened to Alex, he would have greatly preferred. But Gogol sounds ludicrous
to his ears, lacking dignity or gravity. What dismays him most is the irrelevance
of it all. Gogol, he’s been tempted to tell his father on more than one
occasion, was his father’s favorite author, not his. Then again, it’s his own
fault. He could have been known, at school at least, as Nikhil. That one day,
his first day of kindergarten, which he no longer remembers, could have changed
everything.
“Thanks
again,” Gogol tells his father now. He shuts the cover and swings his legs over
the edge of the bed, to put the book away on his shelves. But his father takes
the opportunity to sit beside him on the bed. For a moment he rests a hand on
Gogol’s shoulder. The boy’s body, in recent months, has grown tall, nearly as
tall as Ashoke’s. The childhood pudginess has vanished from his face. The voice
has begun to deepen, is slightly husky now. It occurs to Ashoke that he and his
son probably wear the same size shoe. In the glow of the bedside lamp, Ashoke
notices a scattered down emerging on his son’s upper lip. An Adam’s apple is
prominent on his neck. The pale hands, like Ashima’s, are long and thin. He
wonders how closely Gogol resembles him at this age. But there are no
photographs to document Ashoke’s childhood; not until his passport, not until
his life in America, does visual documentation exist. On the night table Ashoke
sees a can of deodorant, a tube of Clearasil. He lifts the book from where it
lies on the bed between them, running a hand protectively over the cover. “I
took the liberty of reading it first. It has been many years since I have read
these stories. I hope you don’t mind.”
“No
problem,” Gogol says.
“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.”
Gogol
nods. “Right.”
“And
there is another reason.” The music ends and there is silence. But then Gogol
flips the record, turning the volume up on “Revolution 1.”
“What’s
that?” Gogol says, a bit impatiently.
Ashoke
looks around the room. He notices the Lennon obituary pinned to the bulletin
board, and then a cassette of classical Indian music he’d bought for Gogol
months ago, after a concert at Kresge, still sealed in its wrapper. He sees the
pile of birthday cards scattered on the carpet, and remembers a hot August day
fourteen years ago in Cambridge when he held his son for the first time. 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.
Instead, it is affixed firmly to a distant time, to a place far from Pemberton
Road. Today, his son’s birthday, is a day to honor life, not brushes with
death. And so, for now, Ashoke decides to keep the explanation of his son’s
name to himself.
“No
other reason. Good night,” he says to Gogol, getting up from the bed. At the
door he pauses, turns around. “Do you know what Dostoyevsky once said?”
Gogol
shakes his head.
“
‘We all came out of Gogol’s overcoat.’ ”
“What’s
that supposed to mean?”
“It
will make sense to you one day. Many happy returns of the day.”
Gogol
gets up and shuts the door behind his father, who has the annoying habit of
always leaving it partly open. He turns the lock on the knob for good measure,
then wedges the book on a high shelf between two volumes of the Hardy Boys. He
settles down again with his lyrics on the bed when something occurs to him.
This writer he is named after—Gogol isn’t his first name. His first name is
Nikolai. 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.
Plenty
of people changed their names: actors, writers, revolutionaries, transvestites.
In history class, Gogol has learned that European immigrants had their names
changed at Ellis Island, that slaves renamed themselves once they were
emancipated. Though Gogol doesn’t know it, even Nikolai Gogol renamed himself,
simplifying his surname at the age of twenty-two, from Gogol-Yanovsky to Gogol,
upon publishing in the Literary Gazette.
One
day in the summer of 1986, in the frantic weeks before moving away from his
family, before his freshman year at Yale is about to begin, Gogol Ganguli does
the same. He rides the commuter rail into Boston, switching to the Green Line
at North Station, getting out at Lechmere, the closest stop to the Middlesex
Probate and Family Court. He wears a blue oxford shirt, khakis, a camel-colored
corduroy blazer bought for his college interviews that is too warm for the
sultry day. Knotted around his neck is his only tie, maroon with yellow stripes
on the diagonal. By now Gogol is just shy of six feet tall, his body slender,
his thick brown-black hair slightly in need of a cut. His face is lean,
intelligent, suddenly handsome, the bones more prominent, the pale-gold skin
clean-shaven and clear. He has inherited Ashima’s eyes—large, penetrating, with
bold, elegant brows—and shares with Ashoke the slight bump at the very top of
his nose.
The
courthouse is an imposing, pillared brick building occupying a full city block,
but the entrance is off to the side, down a set of steps. Inside, Gogol empties
his pockets and steps through a metal detector, as if he were at an airport,
about to embark on a journey. He is soothed by the chill of the
air-conditioning, by the beautifully carved plaster ceiling, by the voices that
echo pleasantly in the marbled interior. A man at the information booth tells
him to wait upstairs, in an area filled with round tables, where people sit
eating their lunch. Gogol sits impatiently, one long leg jiggling up and down.
The
idea to change his name had first occurred to him a few months ago. He was
sitting in the waiting room of his dentist, flipping through an issue of Reader’s
Digest. He’d been turning the pages at random until he came to an article
that caused him to stop. The article was called “Second Baptisms.” “Can you
identify the following famous people?” was written beneath the headline. The
only one he guessed correctly was Robert Zimmerman, Bob Dylan’s real name. He
had no idea that Leon Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein. That Gerald
Ford’s name was Leslie Lynch King, Jr., and that Engelbert Humperdinck’s was
Arnold George Dorsey. They had all renamed themselves, the article said, adding
that it was a right belonging to every American citizen. He read that tens of
thousands of Americans, on average, had their names changed each year. All it
took was a legal petition.
That
night at the dinner table, he brought it up with his parents. It was one thing
for Gogol to be the name penned in calligraphy on his high-school diploma, and
printed below his picture in the yearbook, he’d begun. But engraved, four years
from now, on a bachelor-of-arts degree? Written at the top of a résumé?
Centered on a business card? It would be the name his parents picked out for
him, he assured them, the good name they’d chosen for him when he was five.
“What’s
done is done,” his father had said. “It will be a hassle. Gogol has, in effect,
become your good name.”
“It’s
too complicated now,” his mother said, agreeing. “You’re too old.”
“I’m
not,” he persisted. “I don’t get it. Why did you have to give me a pet name in
the first place? What’s the point?”
“It’s
our way, Gogol,” his mother maintained. “It’s what Bengalis do.”
“But
it’s not even a Bengali name. How could you guys name me after someone so
strange? No one takes me seriously.”
“Who?
Who does not take you seriously?” his father wanted to know, lifting his
fingers from his plate, looking up at him. “People,” he said, lying to his
parents. 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.
“I
don’t know, Gogol,” his mother had said, shaking her head. “I really don’t
know.” She got up to clear the dishes. Sonia slinked away, up to her room.
Gogol remained at the table with his father. They sat there together, listening
to his mother scraping the plates, the water running in the sink.
“Then
change it,” his father said simply, quietly, after a while.
“Really?”
“In
America anything is possible. Do as you wish.”
With
relief, he types his name at the top of his freshman papers. He reads the
telephone messages his roommates leave for Nikhil on assorted scraps of paper.
He opens up a checking account, writes his new name into his course books. “Me
llamo Nikhil,” he says in his Spanish class. It is as Nikhil, that first
semester, that he grows a goatee, starts smoking Camel Lights at parties and,
while writing papers and before exams, discovers Brian Eno and Elvis Costello
and Charlie Parker. It is as Nikhil that he takes Metro-North into Manhattan
one weekend and gets himself a fake I.D. that allows him to be served liquor in
New Haven bars. It is as Nikhil that he loses his virginity at a party at Ezra
Stiles, with a girl wearing a plaid woollen skirt and combat boots and mustard
tights. By the time he wakes up, hung over, at three in the morning, she has
vanished from the room, and he is unable to recall her name.
There
is only one complication: he doesn’t feel like Nikhil. Not yet. Part of the
problem is that the people who now know him as Nikhil have no idea that he used
to be Gogol. They know him only in the present, not at all in the past. But,
after eighteen years of Gogol, two months of Nikhil feel scant,
inconsequential. At times he feels as if he’d cast himself in a play, acting
the part of twins, indistinguishable to the naked eye yet fundamentally
different. At times he still feels his old name, painfully and without warning,
the way his front tooth had unbearably throbbed in recent weeks after a
filling, threatening for an instant to sever from his gums when he drank
coffee, or ice water.
Even
more startling is when those who normally call him Gogol refer to him as
Nikhil. Though he has asked his parents to do precisely this, the fact of it
troubles him, making him feel in that instant that he is not related to them,
not their child. “Please come visit us with Nikhil one weekend,” Ashima says to
his roommates when she and Ashoke visit campus during parents’ weekend in
October, the suite hastily cleared of liquor bottles and ashtrays for the
occasion. The substitution sounds wrong to Gogol, correct but off key, the way
it sounds when his parents speak English to him instead of Bengali.
At
Thanksgiving, he takes the train up to Boston. He feels distracted for some
reason, impatient to be off the train; he does not bother to remove his coat,
does not bother to go to the café car for something to drink even though he is
thirsty. His mother and Sonia have gone to India for three weeks, to attend a
cousin’s wedding, and this year Gogol and his father will spend Thanksgiving at
the home of friends.
He
angles his head against the window and watches the autumnal landscape pass: the
spewing pink and purple waters of a dye mill, electrical power stations, a big
ball-shaped water tank covered with rust. Abandoned factories, with rows of
small square windows partly bashed in, ravaged as if by moths. On the trees the
topmost branches are bare, the remaining leaves yellow, paper-thin. The train
moves more slowly than usual, and when he looks at his watch he sees that they
are running well behind schedule. And then, somewhere outside Providence, in an
abandoned field, the train stops moving. For more than an hour they stand there
while a solid, scarlet disk of sun sinks into the tree-lined horizon. The
lights turn off, and the air inside the train turns uncomfortably warm. The
conductors rush anxiously through the compartments. “Probably a broken wire,”
the gentleman sitting beside Gogol remarks. Across the aisle a gray-haired
woman reads, a coat clutched like a blanket to her chest. Without the sound of
the engine Gogol can hear an opera playing faintly on someone’s Walkman. Through
the window he admires the darkening sapphire sky. He sees spare lengths of
rusted rails heaped in piles. It isn’t until they start moving again that an
announcement is made on the loudspeaker about a medical emergency. But the
truth, overheard by one of the passengers from a conductor, quickly circulates:
a suicide has been committed, a person has jumped in front of the train.
He
is shocked and discomforted by the news, feeling bad about his irritation and
impatience, wondering if the victim had been a man or a woman, young or old. He
imagines the person consulting the same schedule that’s in his backpack,
determining exactly when the train would be passing through. As a result of the
delay he misses his commuter-rail connection in Boston, waits another forty
minutes for the next one. He puts a call through to his parents’ house, but no
one answers. He tries his father’s department at the university, but there,
too, the phone rings and rings. At the station he sees his father waiting on
the darkened platform, wearing sneakers and corduroys, anxiousness in his face.
A trenchcoat is belted around his waist, a scarf knitted by Ashima wrapped at
his throat, a tweed cap on his head.
“Sorry
I’m late,” Gogol says. “How long have you been waiting?”
“Since
quarter to six,” his father says. Gogol looks at his watch. It is nearly eight.
“There
was an accident.”
“I
know. I called. What happened? Were you hurt?”
Gogol
shakes his head. “Someone jumped onto the tracks. Somewhere in Rhode Island. I
tried to call you. They had to wait for the police, I think.”
“I
was worried.”
“I
hope you haven’t been standing out in the cold all this time,” Gogol says, and
from his father’s lack of response he knows that this is exactly what he has
done.
The
night is windy, so much so that the car jostles slightly from time to time.
Normally on these rides back from the station his father asks questions, about
his classes, about his finances, about his plans for the future. But tonight
they are silent, Ashoke concentrating on driving. Gogol fidgets with the radio.
“I
want to tell you something,” his father says, once they have already turned
onto their road.
“What?”
Gogol asks.
“It’s
about your name.”
Gogol
looks at his father, puzzled. “My name?”
His
father shuts off the radio. “Gogol. There is a reason for it, you know.”
“Right,
Baba. Gogol’s your favorite author. I know.”
“No,”
his father says. He pulls in to the driveway and switches off the engine, then
the headlights. He undoes his seat belt, guiding it with his hand as it
retracts, back behind his left shoulder. “Another reason.”
And,
as they sit together in the car, his father revisits a field two hundred and
nine kilometres from Howrah. With his fingers lightly grasping the bottom of
the steering wheel, his gaze directed through the windshield at the garage
door, he tells Gogol the story of the train he’d ridden twenty-five years ago,
in October, 1961. He tells him about the night that had nearly taken his life,
and the book that had saved him, and about the year afterward, when he’d been
unable to move.
Gogol
listens, stunned, his eyes fixed on his father’s profile. Though there are only
inches between them, for an instant his father is a stranger, a man who has
kept a secret, has survived a tragedy, a man whose past he does not fully know.
A man who is vulnerable, who has suffered in an inconceivable way. He imagines
his father, a college student as Gogol is now, sitting on a train as Gogol had
just been, reading a story, and then suddenly nearly killed. He struggles to
picture the West Bengal countryside he has seen on only a few occasions, his
father’s mangled body, among hundreds of dead ones, being carried on a
stretcher, past a twisted length of maroon compartments. Against instinct he
tries to imagine life without his father, a world in which his father does not
exist.
“Why
don’t I know this about you?” Gogol says. His voice sounds harsh, accusing, but
his eyes well with tears. “Why haven’t you told me this until now?”
“It
never felt like the right time,” his father says.
“But
it’s like you’ve lied to me all these years.” When his father doesn’t respond,
he adds, “That’s why you have that limp, isn’t it?”
“It
happened so long ago. I didn’t want to upset you.”
“It
doesn’t matter. You should have told me.”
“Perhaps,”
his father concedes, glancing briefly in Gogol’s direction. He removes the keys
from the ignition. “Come, you must be hungry. The car is getting cold.”
But
Gogol doesn’t move. He sits there, still struggling to absorb the information,
feeling awkward, oddly ashamed, at fault. “I’m sorry, Baba.”
His
father laughs softly. “You had nothing to do with it, Gogol.”
And
suddenly the sound of his pet name, uttered by his father as he has been
accustomed to hearing it all his life, means something completely new, bound up
with a catastrophe he has unwittingly embodied for years. “Is that what you
think of when you think of me?” Gogol asks him. “Do I remind you of that
night?”
“Not
at all,” his father says eventually, one hand going to his ribs, a habitual
gesture that has baffled Gogol until now. “You remind me of everything that
followed.” ♦
