The Namesake

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  There are nonsensical names, like Jet and Tipper. These elicit groans. Someone claims to have once known a girl named Anna Graham—"Get it? Anagram!"—and everyone laughs.

  Moushumi argues that a name like hers is a curse, complains that no one can say it properly, that the kids at school pronounced it Moosoomi and shortened it to Moose. "I hated being the only Moushumi I knew," she says.

  "See now, I'd have loved that," Oliver tells her.

  Gogol pours himself another juice glass of Chianti. He hates contributing to these conversations, hates listening. A number of name books are passed around the table: Finding the Perfect Name, Alternative Baby Names, The Idiot's Guide to Naming Your Baby. One is called What Not to Name Your Baby. Pages are folded down, some with stars and checks in the margins. Someone suggests Zachary. Someone else says she once had a dog named Zachary. Everyone wants to look up his or her own name to see what it means, is by turns pleased and disappointed. Both Gogol and Moushumi are absent from these books, and for the first time all evening he feels a hint of that odd bond that had first drawn them together. He goes over to where she's sitting, takes one of her hands, which have been resting flat on the surface of the table, her arms extended. She turns to look at him.

  "Hey there," she says. She smiles at him, temporarily leaning her head on his shoulder, and he realizes that she's drunk.

  "What does Moushumi mean?" Oliver asks on the other side of her.

  "A damp southwesterly breeze," she says, shaking her head, rolling her eyes.

  "Sort of like the one outside?"

  "I always knew you were a force of nature," Astrid says, laughing.

  Gogol turns to Moushumi. "Really?" he says. He realizes that it's something he'd never thought to ask about her, something he hadn't known.

  "You never told me that," he says.

  She shakes her head, confused. "I haven't?"

  It bothers him, though he's not quite sure why. But it's not the time to dwell on it. Not in the middle of all this. He gets up to go to the bathroom. When he is finished, instead of returning to the dining room, he walks up a flight of stairs, to check out the renovations. He pauses at the doors to a series of whitewashed rooms with nothing but ladders in them. Others are filled with boxes, stacked six or seven deep. He stops to inspect some blueprints spread out on the floor. He remembers that when he and Moushumi were first dating they'd spent an entire afternoon, in a bar, drawing a plan of the ideal house. He'd argued for something modernist, full of glass and light, but she'd wanted a brownstone like this one. In the end they'd designed something implausible, a town house of poured concrete with a glass facade. It was before they'd slept together, and he remembers how they'd both grown embarrassed when deciding where the bedroom should go.

  He ends up in the kitchen, where Donald is only now beginning to prepare spaghetti alle vongole. It's an old kitchen from one of the former rental units, which they're using until their new one is ready. Dingy linoleum and appliances lining a single wall remind Gogol of his former place on Amsterdam Avenue. On the stove is an empty, gleaming stainless-steel stockpot so large that it covers two burners. Salad leaves are in a bowl covered with dampened paper towels. A heap of tiny pale green clams no larger than quarters soak in the deep porcelain sink.

  Donald is tall, wearing jeans and flip-flops and a paprika-colored shirt whose sleeves are rolled up to just above his elbows. He is handsome, with patrician features and swept-back, slightly greasy, light brown hair. He wears an apron over his clothes, and is busily plucking leaves from an excessively large bunch of parsley.

  "Hey there," Gogol says. "Need any help?"

  "Nikhil. Welcome." Donald hands over the parsley. "Be my guest."

  Gogol is grateful for something to do, to be occupied and productive, even in the role of sous-chef to Donald.

  "So, how are the renovations going?"

  "Don't ask," Donald says. "We just fired our contractor. At this rate our kid will already have moved out by the time the nursery's ready."

  Gogol watches as Donald begins to remove the clams from their bath, scrubbing the shells with something that looks like a tiny toilet bowl brush, then tossing them one by one into the stockpot. Gogol pokes his head into the pot and sees the vongole, their shells uniformly parted in a quietly foaming broth.

  "So when are you guys moving out to this neighborhood?" Donald asks.

  Gogol shrugs. He has no interest in moving to Brooklyn, not in such proximity to Donald and Astrid, anyway. "I haven't really considered it. I prefer Manhattan. Moushumi does too."

  Donald shakes his head. "You're wrong. Moushumi adores Brooklyn. We practically had to kick her out after the whole Graham thing."

  The mention of the name pricks him, deflates him as it always does.

  "She stayed here with you?"

  "Right down the hall. She was here for a couple of months. She was a real mess. I've never seen anyone so devastated."

  He nods. This was something else she'd never told him. He wonders why. He hates the house suddenly, aware that it was here, with Donald and Astrid, that she spent her darkest hour. That it was here she'd mourned for another man.

  "But you're much better for her," Donald concludes.

  Gogol looks up, surprised.

  "Don't get me wrong, Graham's a great guy. But they were too alike somehow, too intense together."

  Gogol does not find this observation particularly reassuring. He finishes plucking the last of the parsley leaves, watches as Donald grabs a knife and chops them, expertly and swiftly, a hand held flat over the top of the blade.

  Gogol feels incompetent all of a sudden. "I've never quite figured out how to do that," he says.

  "All you need is a really good knife," Donald tells him. "I swear by these."

  Gogol is sent off with a stack of plates, a bunch of forks and knives. On his way he pokes his head into the room down the hall where Moushumi had stayed. It's empty now, a drop cloth on the floor, a tangle of wires poking out of the center of the ceiling. He imagines her in a bed in the corner, sullen, emaciated, a cloud of smoke over her head. Downstairs, he takes his place beside Moushumi. She kisses his earlobe. "Where did you wander off to?"

  "Just keeping Donald company."

  The name conversation is still going full force. Colin says he likes names that signify a virtue: Patience, Faith, Chastity. He says his great-grandmother was named Silence, something nobody wants to believe.

  "What about Prudence? Isn't Prudence one of the virtues?" Donald says, coming down the stairs with a platter of spaghetti. The platter is lowered onto the table to scattered applause. The pasta is served, the plates passed around.

  "It just feels like such a huge responsibility to name a baby. What if he hates it," Astrid frets.

  "So he'll change it," Louise says. "By the way. Remember Joe Chapman from college? I heard he's a Joanne now."

  "God, I would never change my name," Edith says. "It's my grandmother's."

  "Nikhil changed his," Moushumi blurts out suddenly, and for the first time all evening, with the exception of the opera singers, the room goes completely quiet.

  He stares at her, stunned. He has never told her not to tell anyone. He simply assumed she never would. His expression is lost on her; she smiles back at him, unaware of what she's done. The dinner guests regard him, their mouths hanging open in confused smiles.

  "What do you mean he changed his name?" Blake asks slowly.

  "Nikhil. It wasn't the name he was born with." She nods, her mouth full, tossing a clamshell onto the table. "Not his name when we were kids."

  "What name were you born with?" Astrid says, looking at him suspiciously, her eyebrows furrowed for effect.

  For a few seconds he says nothing. "Gogol," he says finally. It has been years since he's been Gogol to anyone other than his family, their friends. It sounds as it always does, simple, impossible, absurd. He stares at Moushumi as he says it, but she's too drunk to absorb his reproach.

  "As in 'The
Overcoat'?" Sally asks.

  "I get it," Oliver says. "Nick-olai Gogol."

  "I can't believe you've kept this from us, Nick," Astrid chides.

  "What in the world made your parents choose that name?" Donald wants to know.

  He thinks back to the story he cannot bring himself to tell these people, at once as vivid and as elusive as it's always been: the capsized train in the middle of the night, his father's arm sticking through a window, the crumpled page of a book clutched in his fist. It's a story he'd told Moushumi, in the months after they'd first met. He'd told her of the accident, and then he'd told her about the night his father had told him, in the driveway at Pemberton Road. He'd confessed to her that he still felt guilty at times for changing his name, more so now that his father was dead. And she'd assured him that it was understandable, that anyone in his place would have done the same. But now it's become a joke to her. Suddenly he regrets having ever told Moushumi; he wonders whether she'll proclaim the story of his father's accident to the table as well. By morning, half the people in the room will have forgotten. It will be a tiny, odd fact about him, an anecdote, perhaps, for a future dinner party. This is what upsets him most.

  "My father was a fan," he says finally.

  "Then maybe we should call the baby Verdi," Donald muses, just as the opera surges to its closing bars, and the tape ends with a click.

  "You're not helping," Astrid says, petulant, kissing Donald on the nose. Gogol watches them, knowing that it's all in jest—they're not the type to do something so impulsive, so naive, to blunder, as his own parents had done.

  "Relax," Edith says. "The perfect name will come to you in time."

  Which is when Gogol announces, "There's no such thing."

  "No such thing as what?" Astrid says.

  "There's no such thing as a perfect name. I think that human beings should be allowed to name themselves when they turn eighteen," he adds. "Until then, pronouns."

  People shake their heads dismissively. Moushumi shoots him a look that he ignores. The salad is served. The conversation takes a new turn, carries on without him. And yet he can't help but recall a novel he'd once picked up from the pile on Moushumi's side of the bed, an English translation of something French, in which the main characters were simply referred to, for hundreds of pages, as He and She. He had read it in a matter of hours, oddly relieved that the names of the characters were never revealed. It had been an unhappy love story. If only his own life were so simple.

  10

  1999

  On the morning of their first anniversary, Moushumi's parents call, waking them, wishing them a happy anniversary before they've had the chance to say it to each other. In addition to their anniversary, there is something else to celebrate: Moushumi successfully passed her orals the week before, is now officially ABD. There's a third thing worth celebrating but which she hasn't mentioned—she's been awarded a research fellowship to work on her dissertation in France for the year. She'd applied for the grant secretly, just before the wedding, simply curious to see if she'd get it. It was always good practice, she'd reasoned, to strive for such things. Two years ago she would have said yes on the spot. But it's no longer possible to fly off to France for the year, now that she has a husband, a marriage, to consider. So when the good news came she decided it was easier to decline the fellowship quietly, to file away the letter, not to bring it up.

  She's taken the initiative for the evening, making reservations at a place in midtown, which Donald and Astrid have recommended. She feels a bit guilty for all these months of studying, aware that with her exams as an excuse, she has ignored Nikhil perhaps more than necessary. There were nights that she told him she was at her carrel in the library when really she'd met Astrid and her baby, Esme, in SoHo, or gone for a walk by herself. Sometimes she would sit at a restaurant alone, at the bar, ordering sushi or a sandwich and a glass of wine, simply to remind herself that she was still capable of being on her own. This assurance is important to her; along with the Sanskrit vows she'd repeated at her wedding, she'd privately vowed that she'd never grow fully dependent on her husband, as her mother has. For even after thirty-two years abroad, in England and now in America, her mother does not know how to drive, does not have a job, does not know the difference between a checking and a savings account. 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.

  They've both dressed up for the occasion—when she emerges from the bathroom she sees that he is wearing the shirt she's given him, moss-colored with a velvet Nehru collar of slightly darker green. It was only after the salesman had wrapped it that she'd remembered the rule about giving paper on the first anniversary. She considered saving the shirt for Christmas, going to Rizzoli and buying him an architecture book instead. But there hasn't been the time. She is wearing the black dress she'd worn the first time he'd come to dinner, the first time they'd slept together, and over it, a lilac pashmina shawl, Nikhil's anniversary present to her. She still remembers their very first date, liking the slightly untamed look of his hair as he'd approached her at the bar, the dark pine stubble on his cheeks, the shirt he'd worn with green stripes and thinner stripes of lavender, the collar beginning to fray. She still remembers her bewilderment, looking up from her book and seeing him, her heart skipping, feeling the attraction instantly, powerfully, in her chest. For she had been expecting an older version of the boy she remembered, distant, quiet, in corduroy jeans and a sweatshirt, a few pimples dotting his chin. The day before the date, she'd had lunch with Astrid. "I just don't see you with some Indian guy," Astrid had said dismissively over salads at City Bakery. At the time Moushumi had not protested, maintaining apologetically that it was just one date. 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. But she'd genuinely liked Nikhil. She'd liked that he was neither a doctor nor an engineer. She'd liked that he'd changed his name from Gogol to Nikhil; though she'd known him all those years, it was a thing that made him somehow new, not the person her mother had mentioned.

  They decide to walk to the restaurant, thirty blocks north of their apartment, four blocks west. Though it's dark already, the evening is pleasantly warm, so much so that she hesitates under the awning of their building, wondering if the pashmina is necessary. She has nowhere to put it, her evening bag is too small. She lets the shawl drop from her shoulders, gathers it up in her hands.

  "Maybe I should leave this upstairs."

  "What if we want to walk back?" he says. "You'll probably need it then."

  "I guess."

  "It looks nice on you, by the way."

  "Do you remember this dress?"

  He shakes his head. She's disappointed but not surprised. By now she's learned that his architect's mind for detail fails when it comes to everyday things. For example, he had not bothered to hide the receipt for the shawl, leaving it, along with change emptied from his pocket, on top of the bureau they share. She can't really blame him for not remembering. She herself can no longer remember the exact date of that evening. It had been a Saturday in November. But now those landmarks in their courtship have faded, have given way to the occasion they are now celebrating.

  They walk up Fifth Avenue, past the stores that sell Oriental carpets, unfurled in illuminated windows. Past the public library. Instead of proceeding to the restaurant, they decide to wander up the sidewalk for a while; there are still twenty minutes before their reservation. Fifth Avenue is eerily uncluttered, only a handful of people and cabs in a neighborhood usually choked with shoppers and tourists. She comes here seldom, only to buy make-up at Bendel's, or to see the odd movie at the Paris, and once, with Graham and his father and stepmother, to have drinks at the Plaza. They walk past the windows of closed shops displaying watches, luggage, trench coats. A pair of turquoise sandals causes Moushumi to stop. The shoes are arranged on a Lucite pedes
tal, glowing under a spotlight, the gladiator-style straps festooned with rhinestones.

  "Ugly or beautiful?" she asks him. It is a question she poses to him often, as they leaf together through apartments featured in Architectural Digest or the design section of the Times magazine. Often his answers surprise her, convincing her to appreciate an object she would have otherwise dismissed.

  "I'm pretty certain they're ugly. But I would have to see them on."

  "I agree. Guess how much they cost," she says.

  "Two hundred dollars."

  "Five. Can you believe it? I saw them featured in Vogue."

  She begins to walk away. After a few paces she turns back and sees that he's still standing there, bent down to see if there's a price tag on the bottom of the shoe. There is something at once innocent and irreverent about the gesture, and she is reminded, forcefully, of why she still loves him. It reminds her of how grateful she'd felt when he'd reappeared in her life. By the time she'd met him she'd begun to fear that she was retreating into her former self, before Paris—untouched, bookish, alone. She recalled the panic she'd felt, all her friends married. She'd even considered placing a personal ad. But he had accepted her, had obliterated her former disgrace. She believed that he would be incapable of hurting her as Graham had. After years of clandestine relationships, it felt refreshing to court in a fish-bowl, to have the support of her parents from the very start, the inevitability of an unquestioned future, of marriage, drawing them along. And yet the familiarity that had once drawn her to him has begun to keep her at bay. Though she knows it's not his fault, she can't help but associate him, at times, with a sense of resignation, with the very life she had resisted, had struggled so mightily to leave behind. He was not who she saw herself ending up with, he had never been that person. 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.