Born to Bengali parents, she lived in England until just before her thirteenth birthday, when her family moved to Massachusetts. As Bengalis in the same community, the Mazoomdars and Gangulis are friends, but Moushumi and Gogol ignore each other as children. She goes to college at Brown University, studying chemistry and French; after graduation, she impulsively moves to Paris, where she becomes engaged to an American named Graham. At his insistence, she moves to New York City to begin a Ph.
Their engagement is called off, and Moushumi spends a year alone in New York City before her parents and Ashima set her up with Gogol. They begin dating and marry within a year. Within another year, Moushumi feels stifled by the marriage and begins an affair with an old friend named Dmitri. When Gogol discovers the affair after a few months, they divorce.
Moushumi moves back to Paris. An art historian by education, Maxine works as an assistant editor for an art book publisher and lives with her wealthy parents in a five-story house. Maxine pursues Gogol and the two begin dating.
Soon Gogol is living with the Ratliffs in their mansion. At Yale, Nikhil is able to pursue his love of architecture most directly, and this leads him to graduate study in New York, and a job at a firm there. And Lahiri is careful, too, to give these female characters emotional three-dimensionality of their own. Through these romantic relationships, then, Gogol tests out different identities, different ways of relating to himself and his family, over time. SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook.
He had a second-class sleeper, in the seventh bogie behind the air-conditioned coach. Because of the season, the train was especially crowded, filled with families on holiday. Small children were wearing their best clothing, the girls with brightly colored ribbons in their hair.
He shared his compartment with three others. There was a middle-aged Bihari couple who, he gathered from overhearing their conversation, had just married off their eldest daughter, and a friendly, potbellied, middle-aged Bengali businessman wearing a suit and tie, by the name of Ghosh.
Ghosh told Ashoke that he had recently spent two years in England on a job voucher, but that he had come back home because his wife was inconsolably miserable abroad. Ghosh spoke reverently of England.
The sparkling, empty streets, the polished black cars, the rows of gleaming white houses, he said, were like a dream. Trains departed and arrived according to schedule, Ghosh said. No one spat on the sidewalks. It was in a British hospital that his son had been born. He pulled a packet of Dunhill cigarettes from his jacket pocket, offering them around the compartment before lighting one for himself.
You will not regret it. One day it will be too late. He tipped his head politely to one side, letting the last of the cigarette drop from his fingertips. He reached into a bag by his feet and took out his diary, turning to the twentieth of October. The page was blank, and on it, with a fountain pen whose cap he ceremoniously unscrewed, he wrote his name and address. He ripped out the page and handed it to Ashoke. I live in Tollygunge, just behind the tram depot. He pulled out a well-worn deck from his suit pocket, with an image of Big Ben on the back.
But Ashoke politely declined. One by one the passengers brushed their teeth in the vestibule, changed into their pajamas, fastened the curtain around their compartments, and went to sleep. Ghosh offered to take the upper berth, climbing barefoot up the ladder, his suit carefully folded away, so that Ashoke had the window to himself. The Bihari couple shared some sweets from a box and drank water from the same cup without either of them putting their lips to the rim, then settled into their berths as well, switching off the lights and turning their heads to the wall.
Only Ashoke continued to read, still seated, still dressed. A single small bulb glowed dimly over his head. From time to time he looked through the open window at the inky Bengal night, at the vague shapes of palm trees and the simplest of homes. Carefully he turned the soft yellow pages of his book, a few delicately tunnelled by worms. The steam engine puffed reassuringly, powerfully.
Deep in his chest he felt the rough jostle of the wheels. Sparks from the smokestack passed by his window. A fine layer of sticky soot dotted one side of his face, his eyelid, his arm, his neck; his grandmother would insist that he scrub himself with a cake of Margo soap as soon as he arrived. Immersed in the sartorial plight of Akaky Akakyevich, lost in the wide, snow-white, windy avenues of St.
Petersburg, unaware that one day he was to dwell in a snowy place himself, Ashoke was still reading at two-thirty in the morning, one of the few passengers on the train who was awake, when the locomotive engine and seven bogies derailed from the broad-gauge line. The sound was like a bomb exploding. The first four bogies capsized into a depression alongside the track.
The fifth and sixth, containing the first-class and air-conditioned passengers, telescoped into each other, killing the passengers in their sleep. The seventh, where Ashoke was sitting, capsized as well, flung by the speed of the crash farther into the field. The accident occurred two hundred and nine kilometres from Calcutta, between the Ghatshila and Dhalbumgarh stations. More than an hour passed before the rescuers arrived, bearing lanterns and shovels and axes to pry bodies from the cars.
Ashoke can still remember their shouts, asking if anyone was alive. He remembers trying to shout back, unsuccessfully, his mouth emitting nothing but the faintest rasp. He remembers the sound of people half-dead around him, moaning and tapping on the walls of the train, whispering hoarsely for help, words that only those who were also trapped and injured could possibly hear.
Blood drenched his chest and the left arm of his shirt. He had been thrust partway out the window. He remembers the acrid odor of flames, the buzzing of flies, children crying, the taste of dust and blood on his tongue. They were nowhere, somewhere in a field. Milling about them were villagers, police inspectors, a few doctors. He remembers believing that he was dying, that perhaps he was already dead. He could not feel the lower half of his body, and so was unaware that the mangled limbs of Ghosh were draped over his legs.
Eventually he saw the cold, unfriendly blue of earliest morning, the moon and a few stars still lingering in the sky. The pages of his book, which had been tossed from his hand, fluttered in two sections a few feet away from the train.
The glare from a search lantern briefly caught the pages, momentarily distracting one of the rescuers. I saw him move. He was pulled from the wreckage, placed on a stretcher, transported on another train to a hospital in Tatanagar.
He had broken his pelvis, his right femur, and three of his ribs on the right side. For the next year of his life he lay flat on his back, ordered to keep as still as possible while the bones of his body healed. There was a risk that his right leg might be permanently paralyzed. He was transferred to Calcutta Medical College, where two screws were put into his hips.
Three times a day he was spoon-fed. He urinated and defecated into a tin pan. Doctors and visitors came and went. Even his blind grandfather from Jamshedpur paid a visit. His family had saved the newspaper accounts.
In a photograph, Ashoke observed the train smashed to shards, piled jaggedly against the sky, security guards sitting on the unclaimed belongings. He learned that fishplates and bolts had been found several feet from the main track, giving rise to the suspicion, never subsequently confirmed, of sabotage.
During the day he was groggy from painkillers. At night he dreamed either that he was still trapped inside the train or, worse, that the accident had never happened, that he was walking down a street, taking a bath, sitting cross-legged on the floor and eating a plate of food. And then he would wake up, coated in sweat, tears streaming down his face, convinced that he would never live to do such things again.
Eventually, in an attempt to avoid his nightmares, he began to read, late at night, which was when his motionless body felt most restless, his mind agile and clear. Yet he refused to read the Russians his grandfather had brought to his bedside, or any novels, for that matter. Those books, set in countries he had never seen, reminded him only of his confinement.
Instead he read his engineering books, trying his best to keep up with his courses, solving equations by flashlight. In those silent hours, he thought often of Ghosh.
He remembered the address Ghosh had written, somewhere behind the tram depot in Tollygunge. Now it was the home of a widow, a fatherless son. Each day, to bolster his spirits, his family reminded him of the future, the day he would stand unassisted, walk across the room.
It was for this, each day, that his father and mother prayed. But, as the months passed, Ashoke began to envision another sort of future. He imagined not only walking, but walking away, as far as he could, from the place where he was born and where he had nearly died. The following year, walking with a cane, he returned to college and graduated, and without telling his parents he applied to continue his engineering studies abroad. His siblings had pleaded and wept. His mother, speechless, had refused food for three days.
Seven years later, there are still certain images that wipe him flat. They lurk around a corner as he rushes through the engineering department at M. At every turning point in his life—at his wedding, in Calcutta, when he stood behind Ashima, encircling her waist and peering over her shoulder as they poured puffed rice into a fire, or during his first hours in America, seeing a small gray city caked with snow—he has tried but failed to push these images away: the twisted, battered, capsized bogies of the train, his body twisted below it, the terrible crunching sound he had heard but not comprehended, his bones crushed as fine as flour.
It is not the memory of pain that haunts him; he has no memory of that. It is the memory of waiting before he was rescued, and the persistent fear, rising up in his throat, that he might not have been rescued at all. At times he still presses his ribs to make sure they are solid. He presses them now, in the hospital, shaking his head in relief, disbelief. Although it is Ashima who carries the child, he, too, feels heavy, with the thought of life, of his life and the life about to come from it.
He was raised without running water, nearly killed at twenty-two. He was born twice in India, and then a third time, in America. Three lives by thirty. For this he thanks his parents, and their parents, and the parents of their parents. He does not thank God; he openly reveres Marx and quietly refuses religion. Instead of thanking God he thanks Gogol, the Russian writer who had saved his life, when the nurse enters the waiting room.
The baby, a boy, is born at half past five in the morning. He measures twenty inches long, weighs seven pounds nine ounces. Her skin is faintly yellow, the color missing from her lips. She has circles beneath her eyes, and her hair, spilling from its braid, looks as though it had not been combed for days. In the process, the child pierces the silence in the room with a short-lived cry.
His parents react with mutual alarm, but the nurse laughs approvingly. At first Ashoke is more perplexed than moved, by the pointiness of the head, the puffiness of the lids, the small white spots on the cheeks, the fleshy upper lip that droops prominently over the lower one. The scalp is covered by a mass of wispy black hair. He attempts to count the eyelashes. He feels gently through the flannel for the hands and feet. They sit in silence, the three of them as still as stones.
Was it all right? When he looks back to the child, the eyes are open, staring up at him, unblinking, as dark as the hair on its head. The face is transformed; Ashoke has never seen a more perfect thing.
He imagines himself as a dark, grainy, blurry presence. Gogol assumes it will be a large, anonymous affair, but when they He is awestruck by her elegance and the beauty of the Almost effortlessly, Gogol becomes integrated into their lives. He is in love with Maxine, and with her lifestyle—expensive, Gerald and Lydia leave for their annual summer trip to New Hampshire, leaving Maxine and Gogol alone in the hot New York house, which they quickly colonize, making love in every Gogol is annoyed that she has called, at first lying and then admitting that he had Gogol agrees that they will stop off at Pemberton Road for lunch on their way to Gogol is embarrassed by their fear of disaster and by the too-formal lunch they have prepared, Gogol and Maxine take up residence in a small, unfinished cabin outside the main house.
Gogol falls in love with the pattern of the days here, disconnected from the world. He thinks of his life at fourteen, when he was still Gogol —he has told her about this name now, which for her is merely a cute and Chapter 7.
She writes Gogol instead of Nikhil , even though she knows he would object. She addresses a card to Maxine had offered to accompany him, but he refused. He had not Gogol calls home, but Sonia and Ashima are already asleep. He calls Maxine, who regrets not The next morning, after disposing of the last few things, Gogol boards a flight to Boston, dreading the moment when he must face his mother and They observe the traditional ten days of mourning, eating only rice and dal.
Gogol remembers being annoyed by this custom as a child, but now these meals in their The two women come As the train hugs the coastline, Gogol remembers a past journey to Cape Cod, and walking with his father all the way Chapter 8.
Gogol and Maxine are no longer together—the argument that ended their unraveling relationship had to do Out for drinks with his classmates one night, Gogol begins talking with an architecture student named Bridget. She is married, and her husband is Gogol knows that Ashima They walk to a small French restaurant, where Gogol insists on paying the bill, and then he walks Moushumi home, surprised at how much In the next few days, Gogol recalls images of Moushumi from years ago that he had forgotten—the books she always brought A week later they have lunch, meeting at his work, where Gogol shows her around the office proudly.
They go to an Italian restaurant he knows, and They walk out into the cold New York winter. Moushumi sees Gogol shivering, and insists that they go to buy a hat. He enjoys the way she She looks for a Moushumi admits that Gogol is exactly the type of man she has avoided all her life.
From a young She began to date again, intermittently—and then she met Gogol. Chapter 9. Gogol and Moushumi largely acquiesce as just punishment for having listened to their mothers and having As they both unwind in their hotel room afterward, Gogol remembers his engagement proposal. Sometimes in the apartment Gogol finds remnants of Graham, like an inscription in a book of poetry, or a postcard The weather is gray, and Gogol feels acutely the eyes of passing men watching his wife.
It is his first time For some reason that Gogol cannot understand, the approval of these people is important to Moushumi, and he has noticed Gogol feels his bond with Moushumi return for a moment, because neither of them will be Returning downstairs, Gogol finds the name conversation still continuing, and sees that Moushumi is somewhat drunk.
Suddenly she Chapter Her parents call to wish the couple a happy first anniversary before they But he does not remember the dress when she She tries to hide this from Gogol whom she thinks of as Nikhil , but he begins to lose patience.
As they leave, She finally finds it, and begins to reread it at every opportunity, reading in bed They begin to see each other twice a week in his apartment, eating elaborately cooked
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