The Namesake

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  One Saturday, soon before he is scheduled to take the SAT, his family drives to Connecticut for the weekend, leaving Go gol at home alone overnight for the first time in his life. It never crosses his parents' minds that instead of taking timed practice tests in his room, Gogol will drive with Colin and Jason and Marc to a party. They are invited by Colin's older brother, who is a freshman at the university where Gogol's father teaches. He dresses for the party as he normally does, in Levi's and boat shoes and a checkered flannel shirt. For all the times he's been to the campus, to visit his father at the engineering department or for swimming lessons or to run laps around the track, he has never been in a dorm before. They approach nervously, a bit giddy, afraid to be caught. "If anyone asks, my brother said to say we're freshmen at Amherst," Colin advises them in the car.

  The party occupies an entire hallway, the doors of the individual rooms all open. They enter the first room they can manage to, crowded, dark, hot. No one notices as Gogol and his three friends make their way across the room to the keg. For a while, they stand in a circle, holding their plastic cups of beer, shouting over the music in order to be heard. But then Colin sees his brother in the hallway, and Jason needs to find a bathroom, and Marc needs another beer already. Gogol drifts into the hallway as well. Everyone seems to know everyone else, embroiled in conversations that are impossible to join. Music playing from the different rooms mingles unpleasantly in Gogol's ears. He feels too wholesome in this ripped jeans and T-shirt crowd, fears his hair was too recently washed and is too neatly combed. And yet it doesn't seem to matter, no one seems to care. At the end of the hallway, he climbs a set of stairs, and at the top there is another hallway, equally crowded and loud. In the corner he sees a couple kissing, pressed up against the wall. Instead of pushing his way through to the other end of the hallway, he decides to climb another set of stairs. This time the hallway is deserted, an expanse of dark blue carpeting and white wooden doors. The only presence in the space is the sound of muffled music and voices coming from below. He is about to turn back down the staircase when one of the doors opens and a girl emerges, a pretty, slender girl wearing a but-toned-up polka-dotted thrift store dress and scuffed Doc Martens. She has short, dark brown hair, curving in toward her cheeks and cut in a high fringe over her brows. Her face is heart-shaped, her lips painted a glamorous red.

  "Sorry," Gogol says. "Am I not supposed to be up here?"

  "Well, it's technically a girls' floor," the girl says. "But that's never stopped a guy before." She studies him thoughtfully, as no other girl has looked at him. "You don't go here, do you?"

  "No," he says, his heart pounding. And then he remembers his surreptitious identity for the evening: "I'm a freshman at Amherst."

  "That's cool," the girl says, walking toward him. "I'm Kim."

  "Nice to meet you." He extends his hand, and Kim shakes it, a bit longer than necessary. For a moment she looks at him expectantly, then smiles, revealing two front teeth that are slightly overlapping.

  "Come on," she says. "I can show you around." They walk together down the staircase. She leads him to a room where she gets herself a beer and he pours himself another. He stands awkwardly at her side as she pauses to say hello to friends. They work their way to a common area where there is a television, a Coke machine, a shabby sofa, and an assortment of chairs. They sit on the sofa, slouching, a considerable space between them. Kim notices a stray pack of cigarettes on the coffee table and lights one.

  "Well?" she says, turning to look at him, somewhat suspiciously this time.

  "What?"

  "Aren't you going to introduce yourself to me?"

  "Oh," he says. "Yeah." But he doesn't want to tell Kim his name. 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 eve ning. 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. There were a million names to choose from. But then he realizes there's no need to lie. Not technically. He remembers the other name that had once been chosen for him, the one that should have been.

  "I'm Nikhil," he says for the first time in his life. He says it tentatively, his voice sounding strained to his ears, the statement turning without his meaning it to into a question. He looks at Kim, his eyebrows furrowed, prepared for her to challenge him, to correct him, to laugh in his face. He holds his breath. His face tingles, whether from triumph or terror he isn't sure.

  But Kim accepts it gladly. "Nikhil," she says, blowing a thin plume of smoke toward the ceiling. Again she turns to him and smiles. "Nikhil," she repeats. "I've never heard that before. That's a lovely name."

  They sit awhile longer, the conversation continuing, Gogol stunned at how easy it is. His mind floats; he only half listens as Kim talks about her classes, about the town in Connecticut where she's from. He feels at once guilty and exhilarated, protected as if by an invisible shield. Because he knows he will never see her again, he is brave that evening, kissing her lightly on the mouth as she is talking to him, his leg pressing gently against her leg on the sofa, briefly running a hand through her hair. It is the first time he's kissed anyone, the first time he's felt a girl's face and body and breath so close to his own. "I can't believe you kissed her, Gogol," his friends exclaim as they drive home from the party. He shakes his head in a daze, as astonished as they are, elation still welling inside him. "It wasn't me," he nearly says. But he doesn't tell them that it hadn't been Gogol who'd kissed Kim. That Gogol had had nothing to do with it.

  5

  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 publication in the Literary Gazette. (He had alsoo published under the name Yanov, and once signed his work "OOOO" in honor of the four o's in his full name.)

  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 area is somewhat familiar: he has been to Lechmere countless times with his family, to buy new televisions and vacuum cleaners, and he has been to the Museum of Science on field trips from school. But he has never been to this neighborhood on his own, and in spite of the directions he's written on a sheet of paper he gets briefly lost on his way 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, old, 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. He had pictured a setting far less grand. And yet this is a place, he gathers, that people come to seek divorces, dispute wills. 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. He has forgotten to bring a book to read and so he picks up a discarded section of the Globe, skimming an article in the "Arts" section about Andrew Wyeth's Helga paintings. Eventually he begins to practice his new signature in the margins of the paper. He tries it in various styles, his hand unaccustomed to the angles of the N, the dotting of the two i's. He wonders how many times he has written his old name, at the tops of how many tests and quizzes, how many homework assignments, how many yearbook inscriptions to friends. How many times does a person write his name in a lifetime—a million? Two million?

  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. A list of names followed and, at the bottom of the page, printed in tiny letters upside down, the famous personalities they corresponded to. The only one he guessed correctly was Robert Zimmerman, Bob Dylan's real name. He had no idea that Molière had been born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin and 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 had their names changed each year. All it took was a legal petition, the article had said. And suddenly he envisioned "Gogol" added to the list of names, "Nikhil" printed in tiny letters upside down.

  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. It was one thing, even, for it to be typed on his applications to five Ivy League colleges, as well as to Stanford and Berkeley. 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."

  He told his parents what he'd learned in Mr. Lawson's class, about Gogol's lifelong unhappiness, his mental instability, about how he'd starved himself to death. "Did you know all this stuff about him?" he asked.

  "You forgot to mention that he was also a genius," his father said.

  "I don't get it. How could you guys name me after someone so strange? No one takes me seriously," Gogol said.

  "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. And yet he'd continued, saying that they should be glad, that his official name would be Bengali, not Russian.

  "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."

  And so he had obtained a Commonwealth of Massachusetts change-of-name form, to submit along with a certified copy of his birth certificate and a check to the Middlesex Probate and Family Court. He'd brought the form to his father, who had glanced at it only briefly before signing his consent, with the same resignation with which he signed a check or a credit card receipt, his eyebrows slightly raised over his glasses, inwardly calculating the loss. He'd filled out the rest of the form in his room, late at night when his family was asleep. The application consisted of a single side of a cream-colored sheet, and yet it had taken him longer to fill out than his applications for college. On the first line he filled out the name he wished to change, and his place and date of birth. He wrote in the new name he wished to adopt, then signed the form with his old signature. Only one part of the form had given him pause: in approximately three lines, he was asked to provide a reason for seeking the change. For nearly an hour he'd sat there, wondering what to write. He'd left it blank in the end.

  At the appointed time, his case is called. He enters a room and sits on an empty wooden bench at the back. The judge, a middle-aged, heavyset black woman wearing half-moon glasses, sits opposite, on a dais. The clerk, a thin young woman with bobbed hair, asks for his application, reviewing it before handing it to the judge. There is nothing decorating the room apart from the Massachusetts state and American flags and an oil portrait of a judge. "Gogol Ganguli," the clerk says, motioning for Gogol to approach the dais, and as eager as he is to go through with it, he is aware, with a twinge of sadness, that this is the last time in his life he will hear that name uttered in an official context. In spite of his parents' sanction he feels that he is overstepping them, correcting a mistake they've made.

  "What is the reason you wish to change your name, Mr. Ganguli?" the judge asks.

  The question catches him off-guard, and for several seconds he has no idea what to say. "Personal reasons," he says eventually.

  The judge looks at him, leaning forward, her chin cupped in her hand. "Would you care to be more specific?"

  At first he says nothing, unprepared to give any further explanation. 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 kinder garten. But instead he takes a deep breath and tells the people in the courtroom what he has never dared admit to his parents. "I hate the name Gogol," he says. "I've always hated it."

  "Very well," the judge says, stamping and signing the form, then returning it to the clerk. He is told that notice of the new name must be given to all other agencies, that it's his responsibility to notify the Registry of Motor Vehicles, banks, schools. He orders three certified copies of the name change decree, two for himself, and one for his parents to keep in their safe-deposit box. No one accompanies him on this legal rite of passage, and when he steps out of the room no one is waiting to commemorate the moment with flowers and Polaroid snapshots and balloons. In fact the procedure is entirely unmomentous, and when he looks at his watch he sees that from the time he'd entered the courtroom it had taken all of ten minutes. He emerges into the muggy afternoon, perspiring, still partly convinced it is a dream. He takes the T across the river to Boston. He walks with his blazer clasped by a finger over his shoulder, across the Common, through the Public Garden, over the bridges and along the curving paths that rim the lagoon. Thick clouds conceal the sky, which appears only here and there like the small lakes on a map, and the air threatens rain.

  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. He wanders up Newbury Street as drops begin to fall. He dashes into New-bury Comics, buys himself London Calling and Talking Heads: 77 with his birthday money, a Che poster for his dorm
room. He pockets an application for a student American Express card, grateful that his first credit card will not say Gogol in raised letters at the bottom. "I'm Nikhil," he is tempted to tell the attractive, nose-ringed cashier with dyed black hair and skin as pale as paper. The cashier hands him his change and looks past him to the next customer, but it doesn't matter; instead he thinks of how many more women he can now approach, for the rest of his life, with this same unobjectionable, uninteresting fact. Still, for the next three weeks, even though his new driver's license says "Nikhil," even though he's sliced up the old one with his mother's sewing scissors, even though he's ripped out the pages in front of his favorite books in which he'd written his name until now, there's a snag: everyone he knows in the world still calls him Gogol. He is aware that his parents, and their friends, and the children of their friends, and all his own friends from high school, will never call him anything but Gogol. He will remain Gogol during holidays and in summer; Gogol will revisit him on each of his birthdays. Everyone who comes to his going-away-to-college party writes "Good Luck, Gogol" on the cards.

  It isn't until his first day in New Haven, after his father and teary mother and Sonia are heading back up 95 toward Boston, that he begins to introduce himself as Nikhil. The first people to call him by his new name are his suitemates, Brandon and Jonathan, both of whom had been notified by mail over the summer that his name is Gogol. Brandon, lanky and blond, grew up in Massachusetts not far from Gogol, and went to An-dover. Jonathan, who is Korean and plays the cello, comes from L.A.