The Namesake (30 page)

One night, in a taxi stuck in midtown traffic, she had impulsively asked him to marry her. Looking back on it, she supposed it was all those years of people attempting to claim her, choose her, of feeling an invisible net cast around her, that had led her to this proposal. Graham had accepted, gave her his grandmother's diamond. He had agreed to fly with her and her parents to Calcutta, to meet her extended family and ask for her grandparents' blessing. He had charmed them all, learned to sit on the floor and eat with his fingers, take the dust from her grandparents' feet. He had visited the homes of dozens of her relatives, eaten the plates full of syrupy mishti, patiently posed for countless photographs on rooftops, surrounded by her cousins. He had agreed to a Hindu wedding, and so she and her mother had gone shopping in Gariahat and New Market, selected a dozen saris, gold jewelry in red cases with purple velvet linings, a dhoti and a topor for Graham that her mother carried by hand on the plane ride back. The wedding was planned for summer in New Jersey, an engagement party thrown, a few gifts already received. Her mother had typed up an explanation of Bengali wedding rituals on the computer and mailed it to all the Americans on the guest list. A photograph
of the two of them was taken for the local paper in her parents' town.

A few weeks before the wedding, they were out to dinner with friends, getting happily drunk, and she heard Graham talking about their time in Calcutta. To her surprise, he was complaining about it, commenting that he found it taxing, found the culture repressed. All they did was visit her relatives, he said. Though he thought the city was fascinating, the society, in his opinion, was somewhat provincial. People tended to stay at home most of the time. There was nothing to drink. "Imagine dealing with fifty in-laws without alcohol. I couldn't even hold her hand on the street without attracting stares," he had said. She had listened to him, partly sympathetic, partly horrified. For it was one thing for her to reject her background, to be critical of her family's heritage, another to hear it from him. She realized that he had fooled everyone, including her. On their walk home from the restaurant, she brought it up, saying that his comments had upset her, why hadn't he told her these things? Was he only pretending to enjoy himself all that time? They'd begun to argue, a chasm opening up between them, swallowing them, and suddenly, in a rage, she had removed his grandmother's ring from her finger and tossed it into the street, into oncoming traffic, and then Graham had struck her on the face as pedestrians watched. By the end of the week, he had moved out of the apartment they shared. She stopped going to school, filed for incompletes in all her classes. She swallowed half a bottle of pills, was forced to drink charcoal in an emergency room. She was given a referral to a therapist. She called her adviser at NYU, told him she'd had a nervous breakdown, took off the rest of the semester. The wedding was canceled, hundreds of phone calls made. They lost the deposit they'd paid to Shah Jahan caterers, as well as to their honeymoon destination, Palace on Wheels. The gold was taken to a bank vault, the saris and blouses and petticoats put away in a mothproof box.

Her first impulse was to move back to Paris. But she was
in school, too invested to drop out, and besides, she had no money for that. She fled the apartment on York Avenue, unable to afford it on her own. She refused to go home to her parents. Some friends in Brooklyn took her in. It was painful, she told him, living with a couple at that particular time, listening to them shower together in the mornings, watching them kiss and shut the door to their bedroom at the end of each night, but in the beginning she could not face being alone. She started temping. By the time she'd saved enough to move to her own place in the East Village, she was thankful to be alone. All summer she went to movies by herself, sometimes as many as three a day. She bought
TV Guide
every week and read it from cover to cover, planning her nights around her favorite shows. She began to subsist on a diet of raita and Triscuits. She grew thinner than she'd ever been in her life, so that in the few pictures taken of her in that period her face is faintly unrecognizable. She went to end-of-summer sales and bought everything in a size four; six months later she would be forced to donate it all to a thrift shop. When autumn came, she threw herself into her studies, catching up on all the work she had abandoned that spring, began every now and then to date. And then one day her mother called, asking if she remembered a boy named Gogol.

They marry within a year, at a DoubleTree hotel in New Jersey, close to the suburb where her parents live. It's not the type of wedding either of them really wants. They would have preferred the sorts of venues their American friends choose, the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens or the Metropolitan Club or the Boat House in Central Park. They would have preferred a sit-down dinner, jazz played during the reception, black-and-white photographs, keeping things small. But their parents insist on inviting close to three hundred people, and serving Indian food, and providing easy parking for all the guests. Gogol and Moushumi agree that it's better to give in to these expectations than to put up a fight. It's what they deserve, they joke, for having listened to their mothers, and for getting together in the first place, and the fact that they are united in their resignation makes the consequences somewhat bearable. Within weeks of announcing their engagement, the date is settled, the hotel booked, the menu decided, and though for a while there are nightly phone calls, her mother asking if they prefer a sheet cake or layers, sage- or rose-colored napkins, Chardonnay or Chablis, there is little for either Gogol or Moushumi to do other than listen and say yes, whichever seems best, it all sounds fine. "Consider yourselves lucky," Gogol's coworkers tell him. Planning a wedding is in
credibly stressful, the first real trial of a marriage, they say. Still, it feels a little strange to be so uninvolved in his own wedding, and he is reminded of the many other celebrations in his life, all the birthdays and graduation parties his parents had thrown when he was growing up, in his honor, attended by his parents' friends, occasions from which he had always felt at a slight remove.

The Saturday of the wedding they pack suitcases, rent a car, and drive down to New Jersey, separating only when they get to the hotel, where they are claimed one last time by their respective families. Starting tomorrow, he realizes with a shock, he and Moushumi will be regarded as a family of their own. They have not seen the hotel beforehand. Its most memorable feature is a glass elevator that rises and falls ceaselessly at its center, much to the amusement of children and adults alike. The rooms are gathered around successive elliptical balconies that can be seen from the lobby, reminding Gogol of a parking garage. He has a room to himself, on a floor with his mother and Sonia and a few of the Gangulis' closest family friends. Moushumi stays chastely on the floor above, next door to her parents, though by now she and Gogol are practically living together at her place. His mother has brought him the things he is to wear, a parchment-colored Punjabi top that had once belonged to his father, a prepleated dhoti with a drawstring waist, a pair of nagrai slippers with curling toes. His father had never worn the punjabi, and Gogol has to hang it in the bathroom, hot water running in the shower, to get the creases out. "His blessings are always with you," his mother says, reaching up and placing both her hands for a moment on his head. For the first time since his father's death, she is dressed with care, wearing a pretty pale green sari, a pearl necklace at her throat, has agreed to let Sonia put some lipstick on her lips. "Is it too much?" his mother worries, regarding herself in the mirror. Still, he has not seen her looking this lovely, this happy, this excited, in years. Sonia wears a sari, too, fuchsia with silver em
broidery, a red rose stuck into her hair. She gives him a box wrapped in tissue.

"What's this?" he asks.

"You didn't think I forgot your thirtieth birthday, did you?"

It had been a few days ago, a weeknight he and Moushumi had both been too busy to celebrate properly. Even his mother, preoccupied with last-minute wedding details, had forgotten to call him first thing in the morning, as she normally did.

"I think I'm officially at the age when I want people to forget my birthday," he says, accepting the gift.

"Poor Goggles."

Inside he finds a small bottle of bourbon and a red leather flask. "I had it engraved," she says, and when he turns the flask over he sees the letters
ng
. He remembers poking his head into Sonia's room years ago, telling her about his decision to change his name to Nikhil. She'd been thirteen or so, doing her homework on her bed. "You can't do that," she'd told him then, shaking her head, and when he'd asked her why not she'd simply said, "Because you can't. Because you're Gogol." He watches her now, applying her make-up in his room, pulling at the skin next to her eye and painting a thin black line on the lid, and he recalls photographs of his mother at her own wedding.

"You're next, you know," he says.

"Don't remind me." She grimaces, then laughs. Their shared giddiness, the excitement of the preparations, saddens him, all of it reminding him that his father is dead. He imagines his father wearing an outfit similar to his own, a shawl draped over one shoulder, as he used to during pujo. The ensemble he fears looks silly on himself would have looked dignified, elegant, befitting his father in a way he knows it does not him. The nagrais are a size too large and need to be stuffed with tissues. Unlike Moushumi, who is having her hair and make-up professionally styled and applied, Gogol is ready in a matter of minutes. He regrets not having brought his running
shoes along; he could have done a few miles on the treadmill before preparing himself for the event.

There is an hour-long watered-down Hindu ceremony on a platform covered with sheets. Gogol and Moushumi sit cross-legged, first opposite each other, then side by side. The guests sit facing them in folding metal chairs; the accordion wall between two windowless banquet rooms, with dropped ceilings, has been opened up to expand the space. A video camera and hand-held white lights hover above their faces. Shenai music plays on a boom box. Nothing has been rehearsed or explained to them beforehand. A cluster of mashis and meshos surround them, telling them continually what to do, when to speak or stand or throw flowers at a small brass urn. The priest is a friend of Moushumi's parents, an anesthesiologist who happens to be a Brahmin. Offerings are made to pictures of their grandparents and his father, rice poured into a pyre that they are forbidden by the management of the hotel to ignite. He thinks of his parents, strangers until this moment, two people who had not spoken until after they were actually wed. Suddenly, sitting next to Moushumi, he realizes what it means, and he is astonished by his parents' courage, the obedience that must have been involved in doing such a thing.

It's the first time he's seen Moushumi in a sari, apart from all those pujos years ago, which she had suffered through silently. She has about twenty pounds of gold on her—at one point, when they are sitting face to face, their hands wrapped up together in a checkered cloth, he counts eleven necklaces. Two enormous paisleys have been painted in red and white on her cheeks. Until now, he has continued to call Moushumi's father Shubir Mesho, and her mother Rina Mashi, as he always has, as if they were still his uncle and aunt, as if Moushumi were still a sort of cousin. But by the end of the night he will become their son-in-law and so be expected to address them as his second set of parents, an alternative Baba and Ma.

For the reception he changes into a suit, she into a red Ba
narasi gown with spaghetti straps, something she'd designed herself and had made by a seamstress friend. She wears the gown in spite of her mother's protests—what was wrong with a salwar kameeze, she'd wanted to know—and when Moushumi happens to forget her shawl on a chair and bares her slim, bronze shoulders, which quietly sparkle from a special powder she's applied to them, her mother manages, in the midst of that great crowd, to shoot her reproachful glances, which Moushumi ignores. Countless people come to congratulate Gogol, saying they had seen him when he was so little, asking him to pose for photographs, to wrap his arms around families and smile. He is numbly drunk through it all, thanks to the open bar her parents have sprung for. Moushumi is horrified, in the banquet room, to see the tables wreathed with tulle, the ivy and baby's breath twisted around the columns. They bump into each other on her way out of the ladies' room and exchange a quick kiss, the smoke on her breath faintly masked by the mint she is chewing. He imagines her smoking in the stall, the lid of the toilet seat down. They've barely said a word to each other all evening; throughout the ceremony she'd kept her eyes lowered, and during the reception, each time he'd looked at her, she'd been deep in conversation with people he didn't know. He wants to be alone with her suddenly, wishes they could sneak off to her room or his, ignore the rest of the party as he would when he was a boy. "Come on," he urges, motioning toward the glass elevator, "fifteen minutes. No one will notice." But the dinner has begun, and table numbers are being called one by one on the loudspeaker. "I'd need someone to redo my hair," she says. The heated silver chafing dishes are labeled for the American guests. It's typical north Indian fare, mounds of hot pink tandoori, aloo gobi in thick orange sauce. He overhears someone in the line saying the chickpeas have gone bad. They sit at the head table in the center of the room, with his mother and Sonia, her parents and a handful of her relatives visiting from Calcutta, and her brother, Samrat, who is missing
out on his orientation at the University of Chicago in order to attend the wedding. There are awkward champagne toasts and speeches by their families, their parents' friends. Her father stands up, smiling nervously, forgets to raise his glass, and says, "Thank you very much for coming," then turns to Gogol and Moushumi: "Okay, be happy." Forks are tapped against glasses by giggling, sari-clad mashis, instructing them when to kiss. Each time he obliges them and kisses his bride tamely on the cheek.