The Namesake (23 page)

Now she does the laundry once a month. She no longer dusts, or notices dust, for that matter. She eats on the sofa, in front of the television, simple meals of buttered toast and dal, a single pot lasting her a week and an omelette to go with it if she has energy to bother. Sometimes she eats the way Gogol and Sonia do when they visit, standing in front of the refrigerator, not bothering to heat up the food in the oven or to put it on a plate. Her hair is thinning, graying, still parted in the middle, worn in a bun instead of a braid. She's been fitted for bifocals recently, and they hang against the folds of her sari on a chain around her neck. Three afternoons a week and two Saturdays a month, she works at the public library, just as Sonia had done when she was in high school. It is Ashima's first job in America, the first since before she was married. She signs her small paychecks over to Ashoke, and he deposits them for her at the bank into their account. She works at the library to pass the time—she has been going regularly for years, taking her children to story hour when they were young and checking out magazines and books of knitting patterns for herself, and one day Mrs. Buxton, the head librarian, asked if she would be interested in a part-time position. At first her responsibilities were the same as those of the high school girls, shelving the books that people returned, making sure that sections of shelves were in precise alphabetical order, sometimes running a feather duster along the spines. She mended old books, put protective covers on new arrivals, organized monthly displays on subjects such as gardening, presidential biographies, poetry, African-American history. Lately she's begun to work at the main desk, greeting the regular patrons by name as they walk through the doors, filling out forms for interlibrary loans. She is friendly with the other women who work at the library, most of them also with grown children. A number of them live alone, as Ashima does now, because they are divorced. They are the first American friends she has made in her life. Over tea in the staff room, they gossip about the patrons, about the per
ils of dating in middle age. On occasion she has her library friends over to the house for lunch, goes shopping with them on weekends to outlet stores in Maine.

Every three weekends her husband comes home. He arrives by taxi—though she is willing to drive herself around their town, she is not willing to get on the highway and drive to Logan. When her husband is in the house, she shops and cooks as she used to. If there is a dinner invitation at friends', they go together, driving along the highway without the children, sadly aware that Gogol and Sonia, now both grown, will never sit with them in the back seat again. During his visits, Ashoke keeps his clothes in his suitcase, his shaving things in a bag by the sink. He does the things she still doesn't know how to do. He pays all the bills, and rakes the leaves on the lawn, and puts gas from the self-service station into her car. His visits are too short to make a difference, and, within hours it seems, Sunday comes, and she is on her own again. When they are apart, they speak by phone every night, at eight o'clock. Sometimes, not knowing what to do with herself after dinner, she is already in bed by then, in her nightgown, watching the small black-and-white television they've owned for decades that lives on her side of the bed, the picture gradually disappearing, a rim of black perpetually framing the screen. If there is nothing decent on television she leafs through books she takes out of the library, books that occupy the space Ashoke normally does on the bed.

Now it is three in the afternoon, the sun's strength already draining from the sky. It is the sort of day that seems to end minutes after it begins, defeating Ashima's intentions to spend it fruitfully, the inevitability of nightfall distracting her. The sort of day when Ashima craves her dinner by five. It's one of the things she's always hated about life here: these chilly, abbreviated days of early winter, darkness descending mere hours after noon. She expects nothing of days such as this, simply waits for them to end. She is resigned to warming dinner for
herself in a little while, changing into her nightgown, switching on the electric blanket on her bed. She takes a sip of her tea, now stone cold. She gets up to refill the kettle, make another cup. The petunias in her window box, planted Memorial Day weekend, the last time Gogol and Sonia were home together, have withered to shuddering brown stalks that she's been meaning, for weeks, to root from the soil. Ashoke will do it, she thinks to herself, and when the phone rings, and her husband says hello, this is the first thing she tells him. She hears noises in the background, people speaking. "Are you watching television?" she asks him.

"I'm in the hospital," he tells her.

"What's happened?" She turns off the whistling kettle, startled, her chest tightening, terrified that he's been in some sort of accident.

"My stomach's been bothering me since morning." He tells Ashima it's probably something he's eaten, that he'd been invited the previous evening to the home of some Bengali students he'd met in Cleveland who are still teaching themselves to cook, where he was subjected to a suspicious-looking chicken biryani.

She exhales audibly, relieved that it's nothing serious. "So take an Alka-Seltzer."

"I did. It didn't help. I just came to the emergency room because all the doctors' offices are closed today."

"You're working too hard. You're no longer a student, you know. I hope you're not getting an ulcer," she says.

"No. I hope not."

"Who drove you there?"

"No one. I'm here on my own. Really, it's not that bad."

Nevertheless she feels a wave of sympathy for him, at the thought of him driving to the hospital alone. She misses him suddenly, remembering afternoons years ago when they'd first moved to this town, when he would surprise her and come home from the university in the middle of the day. They would
indulge in a proper Bengali lunch instead of the sandwiches they'd gotten used to by then, boiling rice and warming the previous night's leftovers, filling their stomachs, sitting and talking at the table, sleepy and sated, as their palms turned yellow and dry.

"What does the doctor say?" she asks Ashoke now.

"I'm waiting to see him. It's a rather long wait. Do me one thing."

"What?"

"Call Dr. Sandler tomorrow. I'm due for a physical anyway. Make an appointment for me next Saturday, if he has an opening."

"All right."

"Don't worry. I'm feeling better already. I'll call you when I get home."

"All right." She hangs up the phone, prepares her tea, returns to the table. She writes "Call Dr. Sandler" on one of the red envelopes, propping it up against the salt and pepper shakers. She takes a sip of tea and winces, detecting a faint film of dishwashing liquid on this section of the rim, chiding herself for being careless about rinsing. She wonders if she ought to call Gogol and Sonia, to tell them that their father is in the hospital. But quickly she reminds herself that he is not technically in the hospital, that if this were any other day but Sunday he'd be at a doctor's office having an ordinary checkup. He had spoken to her normally, sounding a bit tired, perhaps, but not in great pain.

And so she returns to her project. At the bottom of the cards, over and over, she signs their names: her husband's name, which she has never once uttered in his presence, followed by her own, and then the names of her children, Gogol and Sonia. She refuses to write Nikhil, even though she knows that's what he would prefer. No parent ever called a child by his good name. Good names had no place within a family. She writes the names one below the other, in order of age, Ashoke
Ashima Gogol Sonia. She decides to send a card to each of them, shifting the respective name to the top of the card: to her husband's apartment in Cleveland, to Gogol in New York, adding Maxine's name, too. Though she'd been polite enough the one time Gogol had brought Maxine to the house, Ashima doesn't want her for a daughter-in-law. She'd been startled that Maxine had addressed her as Ashima, and her husband as Ashoke. And yet Gogol has been dating her for over a year now. By now Ashima knows that Gogol spends his nights with Maxine, sleeping under the same roof as her parents, a thing Ashima refuses to admit to her Bengali friends. She even has his number there; she'd called it once, listening to the voice of the woman who must be Maxine's mother, not leaving any message. She knows the relationship is something she must be willing to accept. Sonia has told her this, and so have her American friends at the library. She addresses a card to Sonia and the two girlfriends she lives with in San Francisco. Ashima looks forward to Christmas, the four of them being together. It still bothers her that neither Gogol nor Sonia had come home for Thanksgiving this year. Sonia, who is working for an environmental agency and studying for her LSAT, had said it was too far to travel. Gogol, who had to work the following day because of a project at his firm, had spent the holiday with Maxine's family in New York. Having been deprived of the company of her own parents upon moving to America, her children's independence, their need to keep their distance from her, is something she will never understand. Still, she had not argued with them. This, too, she is beginning to learn. She had complained to her friends at the library, and they had told her it was inevitable, that eventually parents had to stop assuming that their children would return faithfully for the holidays. And so she and Ashoke had spent Thanksgiving together, not bothering, for the first time in years, to buy a turkey. "Love, Ma," she writes now at the bottom of the cards to her children. And at the bottom of the one for Ashoke, simply, "Ashima."

She passes over two pages filled only with the addresses of her daughter, and then her son. She has given birth to vagabonds. She is the keeper of all these names and numbers now, numbers she once knew by heart, numbers and addresses her children no longer remember. She thinks of all the dark, hot apartments Gogol has inhabited over the years, beginning with his first dorm room in New Haven, and now the apartment in Manhattan with the peeling radiator and cracks in the walls. Sonia has done the same as her brother, a new room every year ever since she was eighteen, new roommates Ashima must keep track of when she calls. She thinks of her husband's apartment in Cleveland, which she had helped him settle into one weekend when she visited. She'd bought him inexpensive pots and plates, the kind she used back in Cambridge, as opposed to the gleaming ones from Williams-Sonoma her children buy for her these days as gifts. Sheets and towels, some sheer curtains for the windows, a big sack of rice. In her own life Ashima has lived in only five houses: her parents' flat in Calcutta, her in-laws' house for one month, the house they rented in Cambridge, living below the Montgomerys, the faculty apartment on campus, and, lastly, the one they own now. One hand, five homes. A lifetime in a fist.

From time to time, she looks out the window, at the lilac sky of early evening, vividly tinged with two parallel stripes of pink. She looks up at the phone on the wall, wishing it would ring. She will buy her husband a cell phone for Christmas, she decides. She continues to work in the silent house, in the waning light, not bothering to rest, though her wrist has begun to ache, not bothering to get up and turn on the lamp over the table, or the lights on the lawn or in any of the other rooms, until the telephone rings. She answers after half a ring, but it's only a telemarketer, some poor soul on weekend duty, asking reluctantly if a Mrs., um—

"Ganguli," Ashima replies tartly before hanging up.

At twilight the sky turns a pale but intense blue, and the
trees on the lawn and the shapes of the neighboring houses become silhouettes, solidly black. At five o'clock her husband still hasn't called. She calls his apartment and gets no answer. She calls ten minutes later, then ten minutes after that. It is her own voice on the answering machine, reciting the number and asking the caller to leave a message. Each time she calls she listens to the tone, but she doesn't leave a message. She considers the places he may have stopped on his way home—the pharmacy to pick up a prescription, the supermarket for food. By six o'clock she can no longer distract herself by sealing and stamping the envelopes she's spent all day addressing. She calls directory assistance, asking for an operator in Cleveland, then calls the number of the hospital he told her he'd gone to. She asks for the emergency room, is connected to one part of the hospital after another. "He's just there for an examination," she tells the people who answer and tell her to hold. She spells the last name as she has hundreds of thousands of times by now, "G like green," "N like napkin." She holds the line until she is tempted to hang up, wondering all the while if her husband is trying to reach her from home, regretting not having call waiting. She is disconnected, calls again. "Ganguli," she says. Again she is told to hold. Then a person comes on the line, a young woman's voice, no older than Sonia probably. "Yes. I do apologize for the wait. To whom am I speaking?"

"Ashima Ganguli," Ashima says. "Ashoke Ganguli's wife. To whom am I speaking, please?"

"I see. I'm sorry, ma'am. I'm the intern who first examined your husband."

"I've been holding on for nearly half an hour. Is my husband still there or has he gone?"

"I'm very sorry, ma'am," the young woman repeats. "We've been trying to reach you."

And then the young woman tells her that the patient, Ashoke Ganguli, her husband, has expired.

Expired. A word used for library cards, for magazine sub
scriptions. A word which, for several seconds, has no effect whatsoever on Ashima.

"No, no, it must be a mistake," Ashima says calmly, shaking her head, a small laugh escaping from her throat. "My husband is not there for an emergency. Only for a stomachache."

"I'm sorry, Mrs.... Ganguli, is it?"

She listens to something about a heart attack, that it had been massive, that all attempts to revive him had failed. Did she wish to have any of her husband's organs donated? she is asked. And then, is there anyone in the Cleveland area to identify and claim the body? Instead of answering, Ashima hangs up the phone as the woman is still speaking, pressing down the receiver as hard as she can into the cradle, keeping her hand there for a full minute, as if to smother the words she's just heard. She stares at her empty teacup, and then at the kettle on the stove, which she'd had to turn off in order to hear her husband's voice just a few hours ago. She begins to shiver violently, the house instantly feeling twenty degrees colder. She pulls her sari tightly around her shoulders, like a shawl. She gets up and walks systematically through the rooms of the house, turning on all the light switches, turning on the lamppost on the lawn and the floodlight over the garage, as if she and Ashoke are expecting company. She returns to the kitchen and stares at the pile of cards on the table, in the red envelopes it had pleased her so much to buy, most of them ready to be dropped in the mailbox. Her husband's name is on all of them. She opens her address book, suddenly unable to remember her son's phone number, a thing she can normally dial in her sleep. There is no answer at his office or at his apartment and so she tries the number she has written down for Maxine. It's listed, along with the other numbers, under
G,
both for
Ganguli
and for
Gogol.