even, alongside a slice of bakery cake.
He is photographed by his father and friends, frowning, as he searches for his mother’s face in the crowd. She is busy setting up the buffet. She wears a silvery sari, a wedding gift worn for the first time, the sleeves of her blouse reaching the crook of her elbow. His father wears a transparent white Punjabi top over bell-bottom trousers. Ashima sets out paper plates that have to be tripled to hold the weight of the biryani, the carp in yogurt sauce, the dal, the six different vegetable dishes she’d spent the past week preparing. The guests will eat standing, or sitting cross-legged on the floor. They’ve invited Alan and Judy from upstairs, who look as they always do, in jeans and thick sweaters because it is cold, leather sandals buckled over woolly socks. Judy eyes the buffet, bites into something that turns out to be a shrimp cutlet. “I thought Indians were supposed to be vegetarian,” she whispers to Alan.
Gogol’s feeding begins. It’s all just a touch, a gesture. No one expects the boy to eat anything more than a grain of rice here, a drop of dal there—it is all meant to introduce him to a lifetime of consumption, a meal to inaugurate the tens of thousands of unremembered meals to come. A handful of women ululate as the proceedings begin. A conch shell is repeatedly tapped and passed around, but no one in the room is able to get it to emit a sound. Blades of grass and a pradeep’s slim, steady flame are held to Gogol’s head. The child is entranced, doesn’t squirm or turn away, opens his mouth obediently for each and every course. He takes his payesh three times. Ashima’s eyes fill with tears as Gogol’s mouth eagerly invites the spoon. She can’t help wishing her own brother were here to feed him, her own parents to bless him with their hands on his head. And then the grand finale, the moment they have all been waiting for. To predict his future path in life, Gogol is offered a plate holding a clump of cold Cambridge soil dug up from the backyard, a ballpoint pen, and a dollar bill, to see if he will be a landowner, scholar, or businessman. Most children will grab at one of them, sometimes all of them, but Gogol touches nothing. He shows no interest in the plate, instead turning away, briefly burying his face in his honorary uncle’s shoulder.
“Put the money in his hand!” someone in the group calls out. “An American boy must be rich!”
“No!” his father protests. “The pen. Gogol, take the pen.”
Gogol regards the plate doubtfully. Dozens of dark heads hover expectantly. The material of the Punjabi pajama set begins to scratch his skin.
“Go on, Gogol, take something,” Dilip Nandi says, drawing the plate close. Gogol frowns, and his lower lip trembles. Only then, forced at six months to confront his destiny, does he begin to cry.
Another August. Gogol is one, grabbing, walking a little, repeating words in two languages. He calls his mother “Ma,” his father “Baba.” If a person in the room says “Gogol,” he turns his head and smiles. He sleeps through the night and between noon and three each day. He has seven teeth. He constantly attempts to put the tiniest scraps of paper and lint and whatever else he finds on the floor into his mouth. Ashoke and Ashima are planning their first trip to Calcutta, in December, during Ashoke’s winter break. The upcoming journey inspires them to try to come up with a good name for Gogol, so they can submit his passport application. They turn to their Bengali friends for suggestions. Long evenings are devoted to considering this name or that. But nothing appeals to them. By then they’ve given up on the letter from Ashima’s grandmother. They’ve given up on her grandmother remembering the name, for Ashima’s grandmother, they are told, cannot even remember Ashima. Still, there is time. The trip to Calcutta is four months away. Ashima regrets that they can’t go earlier, in time for Durga pujo, but it will be years before Ashoke is eligible for a sabbatical, and three weeks in December is all they can manage. “It is like going home a few months after your Christmas,” Ashima explains to Judy one day over the clothesline. Judy replies that she and Alan are Buddhists.
At breakneck speed Ashima knits sweater-vests for her father, her father-in-law, her brother, her three favorite uncles. They are all the same, V-necked, pine green yarn, knit five, purl two, on number-nine needles. The exception is her father’s, done in a double-seed stitch with two thick cables and buttons down the front; he prefers cardigans to pullovers, and she remembers to put in pockets for the deck of cards he always carries with him, to play patience at a moment’s notice. In addition to the sweater, she buys him three sable-haired paint-brushes from the Harvard Coop, sizes he’s requested by mail. Though they are wildly expensive, more so than anything else she’s ever bought in America, Ashoke says nothing when he sees the bill. One day Ashima goes shopping in downtown Boston, spending hours in the basement of Jordan Marsh as she pushes Gogol in his stroller, spending every last penny. She buys mismatched teaspoons, percale pillowcases, colored candles, soaps on ropes. In a drugstore she buys a Timex watch for her father-in-law, Bic pens for her cousins, embroidery thread and thimbles for her mother and her aunts. On the train home she is exhilarated, exhausted, nervous with anticipation of the trip. The train is crowded and at first she stands, struggling to hang on to all the bags and the stroller and the overhead strap, until a young girl asks if she’d like to sit down. Ashima thanks her, sinking gratefully into the seat, pushing the bags protectively behind her legs. She is tempted to sleep as Gogol does. She leans her head against the window and closes her eyes and thinks of home. She pictures the black iron bars in the windows of her parents’ flat, and Gogol, in his American baby clothes and diapers, playing beneath the ceiling fan, on her parents’ four-poster bed. She pictures her father missing a tooth, lost after a recent fall, her mother has written, on the stairs. She tries to imagine how it will feel when her grandmother doesn’t recognize her.
When she opens her eyes she sees that the train is standing still, the doors open at her stop. She leaps up, her heart racing. “Excuse me, please,” she says, pushing the stroller and herself through the tightly packed bodies. “Ma’am,” someone says as she struggles past, about to step onto the platform, “your things.” The doors of the subway clamp shut as she realizes her mistake, and the train rolls slowly away. She stands there watching until the rear car disappears into the tunnel, until she and Gogol are the only people remaining on the platform. She pushes the stroller back down Massachusetts Avenue, weeping freely, knowing that she can’t possibly afford to go back and buy it all again. For the rest of the afternoon she is furious with herself, humiliated at the prospect of arriving in Calcutta empty-handed apart from the sweaters and the paint-brushes. But when Ashoke comes home he calls the MBTA lost and found; the following day the bags are returned, not a teaspoon missing. Somehow, this small miracle causes Ashima to feel connected to Cambridge in a way she has not previously thought possible, affiliated with its exceptions as well as its rules. She has a story to tell at dinner parties. Friends listen, amazed at her luck. “Only in this country,” Maya Nandi says.
One night not long after, they are fast asleep when the telephone rings. The sound rouses them instantly, their hearts hammering as if from the same frightening dream. Ashima knows even before Ashoke answers that it’s a call from India. A few months ago, her family had asked in a letter for the phone number in Cambridge, and she had sent it reluctantly in her reply, aware that it would only be a way for bad news to reach her. As Ashoke sits up and takes the receiver, answering in a weary, weakened voice, Ashima prepares herself. She pushes down the crib railing to comfort Gogol, who has begun stirring as a result of the telephone’s rings, and reviews the facts in her head. Her grandmother is in her eighties, bedridden, all but senile, unable to eat or talk. The last few months of her life, according to her parents’ most recent letter, have been painful, for her grandmother, for those who know her. It was no way to live. She pictures her mother saying all this gently into the next-door neighbors’ phone, standing in the neighbors’ sitting room. Ashima prepares herself for the news, to accept the fact that Gogol will never meet his great-grandmother, the giver of his lost name.
The room is unpleasantly cold. She picks up Gogol and gets back into bed, under the blanket. She presses the baby to her body for strength, puts him to her breast. She thinks of the cream-colored cardigan bought with her grandmother in mind, sitting in a shopping bag in the closet. She hears Ashoke speaking, saying soberly but loudly enough so that she fears he will wake Alan and Judy upstairs, “Yes, all right, I see. Don’t worry, yes, I will.” For a while he is silent, listening. “They