The Namesake

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  They can't find the restaurant at first. Though they have the exact address, written on a slip of folded paper in Moushumi's evening bag, it leads them only to a suite of offices in a town house. They press the buzzer, peer through the glass door into the empty, carpeted foyer, at a big vase of flowers at the foot of the stairs.

  "It can't be this," she says, putting her hands up to the glass, shielding either side of her face in order to block out the glare.

  "Are you sure you wrote down the address right?" Gogol asks.

  They wander partway up and down the block, look on the other side. They return to the town house, looking up at the darkened windows for signs of life.

  "There it is," he says, noticing a couple emerging from a basement door below the steps. There, in an entryway lit by a single sconce, they find a plaque nailed discreetly into the facade of the building bearing the restaurant's name, Antonia. A small fleet gathers to welcome them, to tick their names off a list at a podium, to lead them to their table. The fuss feels unwarranted as they step into a stark, sunken dining room. The atmosphere is somber, vaguely abandoned, as the streets had been. There is a family eating after the theater, she guesses, the two small daughters in absurdly fancy dresses with petticoats and large lacy collars. There are a few wealthy-looking middle-aged couples in suits. A well-dressed elderly gentleman is dining alone. She finds it suspicious that there are so many empty tables, that no music plays. She'd been hoping for something more bustling, warmer. Given that it's subterranean, the place seems surprisingly vast, the ceilings high. The air-conditioning is too strong, chilling her bare legs and arms. She wraps the pashmina tightly around her shoulders.

  "I'm freezing. Do you think they'd turn down the AC if I asked?"

  "I doubt that. Would you like my jacket?" Nikhil offers.

  "No, it's okay." She smiles at him. And yet she feels uncomfortable, depressed. She is depressed by the pair of teenaged Bangladeshi busboys who wear tapestry waistcoats and black trousers, serving them warm bread with silver tongs. It annoys her that the waiter, perfectly attentive, looks neither of them in the eye as he describes the menu, speaking instead to the bottle of mineral water positioned between them. She knows it's too late to change their plans now. But even after they place their order, a part of her has a nagging urge, feels like standing up, leaving. She had done something similar a few weeks ago, sitting in the chair of an expensive hair salon, walking out after the apron had been tied behind her neck, while the stylist had gone to check on another client, simply because something about the stylist's manner, the bored expression on her face as she'd lifted a lock of Moushumi's hair and studied it in the mirror, had felt insulting. She wonders what Donald and Astrid like about this place, decides it must be the food. But when it arrives, it too disappoints her. The meal, served on square white plates, is fussily arranged, the portions microscopically small. As usual they trade plates partway through the meal, but this time she doesn't like the taste of his so she sticks to her own. She finishes her entree of scallops too quickly, sits for a very long time, it seems, watching Nikhil work his way through his quail.

  "We shouldn't have come here," she says suddenly, frowning.

  "Why not?" He looks approvingly around the room. "It's nice enough."

  "I don't know. It's not what I thought it would be."

  "Let's just enjoy ourselves."

  But she is not able to enjoy herself. As they near the end of the meal, it occurs to her that she is neither very drunk nor full. In spite of two cocktails and the bottle of wine they'd shared she feels distressingly sober. She looks at the hair-thin quail bones Nikhil has discarded on his plate and is faintly repulsed, wishing he'd finish so that she could light her after-dinner cigarette.

  "Madam, your shawl," one of the busboys says, picking it up from the floor and handing it to her.

  "Sorry," she says, feeling clumsy, unkempt. Then she notices that her black dress is coated with lilac fibers. She brushes at the material, but the fibers cling stubbornly, like cat hair.

  "What's the matter?" Nikhil asks, looking up from his plate.

  "Nothing," she says, not wanting to hurt his feelings, to find fault with his costly gift.

  They are the last of the diners to leave. It's been wildly expensive, far more than they'd expected. They put down a credit card. Watching Nikhil sign the receipt, she feels cheap all of a sudden, irritated that they have to leave such a generous tip though there had been no real reason to fault the waiter's performance. She notices that a number of tables have already been cleared, chairs placed upside down on their surfaces.

  "I can't believe they're already stripping the tables."

  He shrugs. "It's late. They probably close early on Sundays."

  "You'd think they could wait for us to leave," she says. She feels a lump form in her throat, tears filming her eyes.

  "Moushumi, what's wrong? Is there something you want to talk about?"

  She shakes her head. She doesn't feel like explaining. She wants to be home, crawl into bed, put the evening behind her. Outside, she's relieved that it's drizzling, so that instead of walking back to the apartment as they'd planned they can hail a cab.

  "Are you sure nothing's wrong?" he says as they are riding home. He's beginning to lose patience with her, she can tell.

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

  Two days later, a new semester begins. It's Moushumi's eighth semester at NYU. She is finished with classes, will never in her life take a class again. Never again will she sit for an exam. This fact delights her—finally, a formal emancipation from studenthood. Though she still has a dissertation to write, still has an adviser to monitor her progress, she feels unmoored already, somehow beyond the world that has defined and structured and limited her for so long. This is the third time she's taught the class. Beginning French, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, a total of three hours a week. All she's had to do is look ahead in her calendar and change the date of the class meetings. Her biggest effort will be to learn her students' names. She is always flattered when they assume she herself is French, or half-French. She enjoys their looks of disbelief when she tells them she is from New Jersey, born to Bengali parents.

  Moushumi's been given an eight A.M. section, something that had annoyed her at first. But now that she's up, showered, dressed, walking down the street, a latte from the deli on their block in one hand, she's invigorated. Being out at this hour al ready feels like an accomplishment. When she'd left the apartment, Nikhil had still been asleep, undisturbed by the persistent beeping of the alarm. The night before, she'd laid out her clothes, her papers, something she had not done since she was a girl preparing for school. She likes walking through the streets so early, had liked rising by herself in semidarkness, liked the sense of promise it lent the day. It's a pleasant change from their usual routine—Nikhil showered, in his suit, flying out the door as she's just pouring herself a first cup of coffee. She's thankful not to have to face her desk in the corner of their bedroom first thing, surrounded as it is by sacks full of dirty clothes they keep meaning to drop off at the laundry but get around to only once a month, when buying new socks and underwear becomes necessary. Moushumi wonders how long she will live her life with the trappings of studenthood in spite of the fact that she is a married woman, that she's as far along in her studies as she is, that Nikhil has a respectable if not terribly lucrative job. It would have been different with Graham—he'd made more than enough money for the both of them. And yet that, too, had been frustrating, causing her to fear that her career was somehow an indulgence, unnecessary. Once she has a job, a real full-time tenure-track job, she reminds herself, things will be different. She imagines where that first job might take her, assumes it w
ill be in some far-flung town in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes she jokes with Nikhil about their having to pick up and move, in a few years, to Iowa, to Kalama-zoo. But they both know it's out of the question for him to leave New York, that she will be the one to fly back and forth on weekends. There is something appealing to her about this prospect, to make a clean start in a place where no one knows her, as she had done in Paris. It's the one thing about her parents' lives she truly admires—their ability, for better or for worse, to turn their back on their homes.

  As she approaches the department she sees that something is wrong. An ambulance is parked on the sidewalk, the doors at the back flung open. Static crackles from a paramedic's walkie-talkie. She peeks into the ambulance as she crosses the street, sees the resuscitative equipment but no people. The sight causes her to shudder nevertheless. Upstairs, the hallway is crowded. She wonders who's hurt, whether it's a student or a professor. She recognizes no one, only a group of bewildered-looking freshmen bearing add-drop forms. "I think someone fainted," people are saying. "I have no idea." A door opens and they are told to make way. She expects to see someone in a wheelchair, is startled to see a body covered by a sheet, being carried out on a stretcher. A number of onlookers cry out in alarm. Moushumi's hand goes to her mouth. Half the crowd is looking down, away, shaking their heads. From the splayed feet at one end of the stretcher, wearing a pair of beige flat-heeled shoes, she can tell that it's a woman. From a professor, she learns what happened: Alice, the administrative assistant, had fallen suddenly by the mailboxes. One minute she was sorting campus mail, the next minute she was out cold. By the time the paramedics had arrived she was dead from an aneurysm. She was in her thirties, unmarried, perpetually sipping herbal tea. Moushumi had never been particularly fond of her. There had been a brittle quality to her, something unyielding, a young person who carried about her a premonition of old age.

  Moushumi feels sick at the thought of it, of a death so sudden, of a woman so marginal and yet so central to her world. She enters the office she shares with the other TAs, empty now. She calls Nikhil at home, at work. No answer. She looks at her watch, realizes he must be on the subway, on his way to work. Suddenly she's glad he's unreachable—she's reminded of the way Nikhil's father had died, instantly, without warning. Surely this would remind him of that. She has the urge to leave campus, return to the apartment. But she has a class to teach in half an hour. She goes back to the Xerox room to copy her syllabus and a short passage from Flaubert to translate in class. She pushes the button to collate the syllabus but forgets to push the button for staples. She searches in the supply closet for a stapler, and when she fails to find one, goes instinctively to Alice's desk. The phone is ringing. A cardigan is draped over the back of the chair. She opens up Alice's drawer, afraid to touch anything. She finds a stapler behind paper clips and Sweet'N Low packets in the drawer. ALICE is written on masking tape stuck to the top. The faculty mailboxes are still half-empty, the mail piled in a bin.

  Moushumi goes to her mailbox to look for her class roster. Her box is empty, so she roots through the bin for her mail. As she picks up each piece of mail, addressed to this or that faculty member or TA, she begins putting it into the appropriate box, matching name to name. Even after she's found her roster, she continues, completing the task Alice left undone. The mindlessness soothes her nerves. As a child she always had a knack for organization; she would take it upon herself to neaten closets and drawers, not only her own but her parents' as well. She had organized the cutlery drawer, the refrigerator. These self-appointed tasks would occupy her during quiet, hot days of her summer vacation, and her mother would look on in disbelief, sipping watermelon sherbet in front of the fan. There is just a handful of items left in the bin. She bends over to pick them up. And then another name, a sender's name typed in the upper left-hand corner of a business-sized envelope, catches her eye.

  She takes the stapler and the letter and the rest of her things into her office. She shuts the door, sits at her desk. The envelope is addressed to a professor of Comparative Literature who teaches German as well as French. She opens the envelope. Inside she finds a cover letter and a résumé. For a minute she simply stares at the name centered at the top of the résumé, laser-printed in an elegant font. She remembers the name, of course. The name alone, when she'd first learned it, had been enough to seduce her. Dimitri Desjardins. He pronounced Desjardins the English way, the s's intact, and in spite of her training in French this is how she still thinks of it. Underneath the name is an address on West 164 th Street. He is looking for an adjunct position, teaching German part-time. She reads through the résumé, learns exactly where he's been and what he's done for the past decade. Travels in Europe. A job working with the BBC. Articles and reviews published in Der Spiegel, Critical Inquiry. A Ph.D. in German literature from the University of Heidelberg.

  She had met him years ago, in her final months of high school. It was a period in which she and two of her friends, in their eagerness to be college students, in desperation over the fact that no one their own age was interested in dating them, would drive to Princeton, loiter on the campus, browse in the college bookstore, do their homework in buildings they could enter without an ID. Her parents had encouraged these expeditions, believing she was at the library, or attending lectures—they hoped she would go to Princeton for college, live with them at home. One day, as she and her friends were sitting on the grass, they were invited to join a student coalition from the university, a coalition protesting apartheid in South Africa. The group was planning a march on Washington, calling for sanctions.

  They took a chartered overnight bus to D.C. in order to be at the rally by early morning. Each of them had lied to their parents, claiming to be sleeping over at one another's homes. Everyone on the bus was smoking pot and listening to the same Crosby, Stills, and Nash album continuously, on a tape player running on batteries. Moushumi had been facing backward, leaning over and talking to her friends, who were in the two seats behind her, and when she turned back around he was in the neighboring seat. He seemed aloof from the rest of the group, not an actual member of the coalition, somehow dismissive of it all. He was wiry, slight, with small, downward-sloping eyes and an intellectual, ravaged-looking face that she found sexy though not handsome. His hairline was already receding, his hair curly and fair. He needed a shave; his finger nails needed paring. He was wearing a white button-down shirt, faded Levi's with threadbare knees, pliable gold-framed spectacles that wrapped around his ears. Without introducing himself he began talking to her, as if they were already acquainted. He was twenty-seven, had gone to Williams College, was a student of European history. He was taking a German course at Princeton now, living with his parents, both of whom taught at the university, and he was going out of his mind. He had spent the years after college traveling around Asia, Latin America. He told her he probably wanted to get a Ph.D., eventually. The randomness of all this had appealed to her. He asked her what her name was and when she told him he had leaned toward her, cupping his ear, even though she knew he had heard it perfectly well. "How in the world do you spell that?" he'd asked, and when she told him, he mispronounced it, as most people did. She corrected him, saying that "Mou" rhymed with "toe," but he shook his head and said, "I'll just call you Mouse."

  The nickname had irritated and pleased her at the same time. It made her feel foolish, but she was aware that in renaming her he had claimed her somehow, already made her his own. As the bus grew quiet, as everyone began to fall asleep, she had let him lean his head against her shoulder. Dimitri was asleep, or so she thought. And so she pretended to fall asleep too. After a while she felt his hand on her leg, on top of the white denim skirt she was wearing. And then slowly, he began to unbutton the skirt. Several minutes passed between his undoing of one button and the next, his eyes closed all the while, his head still on her shoulder, as the bus hurtled down the empty, dark highway. It was the first time in her life a man had touched her. She held herself per
fectly still. She was desperate to touch him too, but she was terrified. Finally Dimitri opened his eyes. She felt his mouth near her ear, and she turned to him, prepared to be kissed, at seventeen, for the very first time. But he had not kissed her. He had only looked at her, and said, "You're going to break hearts, you know." And then he leaned back, in his own seat this time, removed his hand from her lap, and closed his eyes once again. She had stared at him in disbelief, angry that he assumed she hadn't broken any hearts yet, and at the same time flattered. For the rest of the journey she kept her skirt unbuttoned, hoping he would return to the task. But he didn't touch her after that, and in the morning there was no acknowledgment of what had passed between them. At the demonstration he had wandered off, paid her no attention. On the way back they had sat apart.

  Afterward she returned to the university every day to try to run into him. After some weeks she saw him striding across campus, alone, holding a copy of The Man Without Qualities. They shared some coffee and sat on a bench outside. He had asked her to see a movie, Goddard's Alphaville, and to have Chinese food. She had worn an outfit that still causes her to wince, an old blazer of her father's that was too long for her, over jeans, the sleeves of the blazer rolled up as if it were a shirt, to reveal the striped lining inside. It had been the first date of her life, strategically planned on an evening her parents were at a party. She recalled nothing of the movie, had eaten nothing at the restaurant, part of a small shopping complex off Route 1. And then, after watching Dimitri eat both of their fortune cookies without reading either prediction, she had made her error: she had asked him to be her date to her senior prom. He had declined, driven her home, kissed her lightly on her cheek in the driveway, and then he never called her again. The evening had humiliated her; he had treated her like a child. Sometime over the summer she bumped into him at the movies. He was with a date, a tall freckled girl with hair to her waist. Moushumi had wanted to flee, but he'd made a point of introducing her to the girl. "This is Moushumi," Dimitri had said deliberately, as if he'd been waiting for the opportunity to say her name for weeks. He told her he was going to Europe for a while, and from the look on the date's face she realized that she was going with him. Moushumi told him she'd been accepted at Brown. "You look great," he told her when the date wasn't listening.