Plenty of people changed their names: actors, writers, revolutionaries, transvestites. In history class, Gogol has learned that European immigrants had their names changed at Ellis Island, that slaves renamed themselves once they were emancipated. Though Gogol doesn’t know it, even Nikolai Gogol renamed himself, simplifying his surname at the age of twenty-two from Gogol-Yanovsky to Gogol upon publication in the Literary Gazette. (He had alsoo published under the name Yanov, and once signed his work “OOOO” in honor of the four o’s in his full name.)
One day in the summer of 1986, in the frantic weeks before moving away from his family, before his freshman year at Yale is about to begin, Gogol Ganguli does the same. He rides the commuter rail into Boston, switching to the Green Line at North Station, getting out at Lechmere. The area is somewhat familiar: he has been to Lechmere countless times with his family, to buy new televisions and vacuum cleaners, and he has been to the Museum of Science on field trips from school. But he has never been to this neighborhood on his own, and in spite of the directions he’s written on a sheet of paper he gets briefly lost on his way to the Middlesex Probate and Family Court. He wears a blue oxford shirt, khakis, a camel-colored corduroy blazer bought for his college interviews that is too warm for the sultry day. Knotted around his neck is his only tie, maroon with yellow stripes on the diagonal.
By now Gogol is just shy of six feet tall, his body slender, his thick brown- black hair slightly in need of a cut. His face is lean, intelligent, suddenly handsome, the bones more prominent, the pale gold skin clean-shaven and clear. He has inherited Ashima’s eyes, large, penetrating, with bold, elegant brows, and shares with Ashoke the slight bump at the very top of his nose.
The courthouse is an imposing, old, pillared brick building occupying a full city block, but the entrance is off to the side, down a set of steps. Inside, Gogol empties his pockets and steps through a metal detector, as if he were at an airport, about to embark on a journey. He is soothed by the chill of the air- conditioning, by the beautifully carved plaster ceiling, by the voices that echo pleasantly in the marbled interior. He had pictured a setting far less grand.
And yet this is a place, he gathers, that people come to seek divorces, dispute wills. A man at the information booth tells him to wait upstairs, in an area filled with round tables, where people sit eating their lunch. Gogol sits impatiently, one long leg jiggling up and down. He has forgotten to bring a book to read and so he picks up a discarded section of the Globe, skimming an article in the “Arts” section about Andrew Wyeth’s Helga paintings.
Eventually he begins to practice his new signature in the margins of the paper. He tries it in various styles, his hand unaccustomed to the angles of the N, the dotting of the two i’s. He wonders how many times he has written his old name, at the tops of how many tests and quizzes, how many homework assignments, how many yearbook inscriptions to friends. How many times does a person write his name in a lifetime—a million? Two million?
The idea to change his name had first occurred to him a few months ago. He was sitting in the waiting room of his dentist, flipping through an issue of Reader’s Digest. He’d been turning the pages at random until he came to an article that caused him to stop. The article was called “Second Baptisms.” “Can you identify the following famous people?” was written beneath the headline. A list of names followed and, at the bottom of the page, printed in tiny letters upside down, the famous personalities they corresponded to. The only one he guessed correctly was Robert Zimmerman, Bob Dylan’s real name. He had no idea that Molière had been born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin and that Leon Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein. That Gerald Ford’s name was Leslie Lynch King, Jr., and that Engelbert Humperdinck’s was Arnold George Dorsey. They had all renamed themselves, the article said, adding that it was a right belonging to every American citizen. He read that tens of thousands of Americans had their names changed each year. All it took was a legal petition, the article had said. And suddenly he envisioned “Gogol” added to the list of names, “Nikhil” printed in tiny letters upside down.
That night at the dinner table, he brought it up with his parents. It was one thing for Gogol to be the name penned in calligraphy on his high school diploma, and printed below his picture in the yearbook, he’d begun. It was one thing, even, for it to be typed on his applications to five Ivy League colleges, as well as to Stanford and Berkeley. But engraved, four years from now, on a bachelor of arts degree? Written at the top of a résumé? Centered on a business card? It would be the name his parents picked out for him, he assured them, the good name they’d chosen for him when he was five.
“What’s done is done,” his father had said. “It will be a hassle. Gogol has, in effect, become your good name.”
“It’s too complicated now,” his mother said, agreeing. “You’re too old.” “I’m not,” he persisted. “I don’t get it. Why did you have to give me a pet
name in the first place? What’s the point?”
“It’s our way, Gogol,” his mother maintained. “It’s what Bengalis do.”
“But it’s not even a Bengali name.”
He told his parents what he’d learned in Mr. Lawson’s class, about Gogol’s lifelong unhappiness, his mental instability, about how he’d starved himself to death. “Did you know all this stuff about him?” he asked.
“You forgot to mention that he was also a genius,” his father said.
“I don’t get it. How could you guys name me after someone so strange?
No one takes me seriously,” Gogol said.
“Who? Who does not take you seriously?” his father wanted to know, lifting his fingers from his plate, looking up at him.
“People,” he said, lying to his parents. For his father had a point; the only person who didn’t take Gogol seriously, the only person who tormented him, the only person chronically aware of and afflicted by the embarrassment of his name, the only person who constantly questioned it and wished it were otherwise, was Gogol. And yet he’d continued, saying that they should be glad, that his official name would be Bengali, not Russian.
“I don’t know, Gogol,” his mother had said, shaking her head. “I really don’t know.” She got up to clear the dishes. Sonia slinked away, up to her room. Gogol remained at the table with his father. They sat there together, listening to his mother scraping the plates, the water running in the sink.
“Then change it,” his father said simply, quietly, after a while. “Really?”
“In America anything is possible. Do as you wish.”
And so he had obtained a Commonwealth of Massachusetts change-of- name form, to submit along with a certified copy of his birth certificate and a check to the Middlesex Probate and Family Court. He’d brought the form to his father, who had glanced at it only briefly before signing his consent, with the same resignation with which he signed a check or a credit card receipt, his eyebrows slightly raised over his glasses, inwardly calculating the loss. He’d filled out the rest of the form in his room, late at night when his family was asleep. The application consisted of a single side of a cream-colored sheet, and yet it had taken him longer to fill out than his applications for college. On the first line he filled out the name he wished to change, and his place and
date of birth. He wrote in the new name he wished to adopt, then signed the form with his old signature. Only one part of the form had given him pause: in approximately three lines, he was asked to provide a reason for seeking the change. For nearly an hour he’d sat there, wondering what to write. He’d left it blank in the end.
At the appointed time, his case is called. He enters a room and sits on an empty wooden bench at the back. The judge, a middle-aged, heavyset black woman wearing half-moon glasses, sits opposite, on a dais. The clerk, a thin young woman with bobbed hair, asks for his application, reviewing it before handing it to the judge. There is nothing decorating the room apart from the Massachusetts state and American flags and an oil portrait of a judge. “Gogol Ganguli,” the clerk says, motioning for Gogol to approach the dais, and as eager as he is to go through with it, he is aware, with a twinge of sadness, that this is the last time in his life he will hear that name uttered in an official context. In spite of his parents’ sanction he feels that he is overstepping them, correcting a mistake they’ve made.
“What is the reason you wish to change your name, Mr. Ganguli?” the judge asks.
The question catches him off-guard, and for several seconds he has no idea what to say. “Personal reasons,” he says eventually.
The judge looks at him, leaning forward, her chin cupped in her hand. “Would you care to be more specific?”
At first he says nothing, unprepared to give any further explanation. He wonders whether to tell the judge the whole convoluted story, about his great- grandmother’s letter that never made it to Cambridge, and about pet names and good names, about what had happened on the first day of kinder garten.
But instead he takes a deep breath and tells the people in the courtroom what he has never dared admit to his parents. “I hate the name Gogol,” he says. “I’ve always hated it.”
“Very well,” the judge says, stamping and signing the form, then returning it to the clerk. He is told that notice of the new name must be given to all other agencies, that it’s his responsibility to notify the Registry of Motor Vehicles, banks, schools. He orders three certified copies of the name change decree, two for himself, and one for his parents to keep in their safe-deposit box. No one accompanies him on this legal rite of passage, and when he steps out of the room no one is waiting to commemorate the moment with flowers and Polaroid snapshots and balloons. In fact the procedure is entirely
unmomentous, and when he looks at his watch he sees that from the time he’d entered the courtroom it had taken all of ten minutes. He emerges into the muggy afternoon, perspiring, still partly convinced it is a dream. He takes the T across the river to Boston. He walks with his blazer clasped by a finger over his shoulder, across the Common, through the Public Garden, over the bridges and along the curving paths that rim the lagoon. Thick clouds conceal the sky, which appears only here and there like the small lakes on a map, and the air threatens rain.
He wonders if this is how it feels for an obese person to become thin, for a prisoner to walk free. “I’m Nikhil,” he wants to tell the people who are walking their dogs, pushing children in their strollers, throwing bread to the ducks. He wanders up Newbury Street as drops begin to fall. He dashes into New-bury Comics, buys himself London Calling and Talking Heads: 77 with his birthday money, a Che poster for his dorm room. He pockets an application for a student American Express card, grateful that his first credit card will not say Gogol in raised letters at the bottom. “I’m Nikhil,” he is tempted to tell the attractive, nose-ringed cashier with dyed black hair and skin as pale as paper. The cashier hands him his change and looks past him to the next customer, but it doesn’t matter; instead he thinks of how many more women he can now approach, for the rest of his life, with this same unobjectionable, uninteresting fact. Still, for the next three weeks, even though his new driver’s license says “Nikhil,” even though he’s sliced up the old one with his mother’s sewing scissors, even though he’s ripped out the pages in front of his favorite books in which he’d written his name until now, there’s a snag: everyone he knows in the world still calls him Gogol. He is aware that his parents, and their friends, and the children of their friends, and all his own friends from high school, will never call him anything but Gogol. He will remain Gogol during holidays and in summer; Gogol will revisit him on each of his birthdays. Everyone who comes to his going-away-to-college party writes “Good Luck, Gogol” on the cards.
It isn’t until his first day in New Haven, after his father and teary mother and Sonia are heading back up 95 toward Boston, that he begins to introduce himself as Nikhil. The first people to call him by his new name are his suitemates, Brandon and Jonathan, both of whom had been notified by mail over the summer that his name is Gogol. Brandon, lanky and blond, grew up in Massachusetts not far from Gogol, and went to An-dover. Jonathan, who is Korean and plays the cello, comes from L.A.
“Is Gogol your first name or your last?” Brandon wants to know.
Normally that question agitates him. But today he has a new answer. “Actually, that’s my middle name,” Gogol says by way of explanation, sitting with them in the common room to their suite. “Nikhil is my first name. It got left out for some reason.”
Jonathan nods in acceptance, distracted by the task of setting up his stereo components. Brandon nods, too. “Hey, Nikhil,” Brandon says awhile later, after they have arranged the furniture in the common room to their liking. “Want to smoke a bowl?” Since everything else is suddenly so new, going by a new name doesn’t feel so terribly strange to Gogol. He lives in a new state, has a new telephone number. He eats his meals off a tray in Commons, shares a bathroom with a floor full of people, showers each morning in a stall. He sleeps in a new bed, which his mother had insisted on making before she left.
He spends the days of orientation rushing around campus, back and forth along the intersecting flagstone path, past the clock tower, and the turreted, crenelated buildings. He is too harried, at first, to sit on the grass in Old Campus as the other students do, perusing their course catalogues, playing Frisbee, getting to know one another among the verdigris-covered statues of robed, seated men. He makes a list of all the places he has to go, circling the buildings on his campus map. When he is alone in his room he types out a written request on his Smith Corona, notifying the registrar’s office of his name change, providing examples of his former and current signatures side by side. He gives these documents to a secretary, along with a copy of the
change-of-name form. He tells his freshman counselor about his name change; he tells the person in charge of processing his student ID and his library card. He corrects the error in stealth, not bothering to explain to Jonathan and Brandon what he’s so busy doing all day, and then suddenly it is over. After so much work it is no work at all. By the time the upperclassmen arrive and classes begin, he’s paved the way for a whole university to call him Nikhil: students and professors and TAs and girls at parties. Nikhil registers for his first four classes: Intro to the History of Art, Medieval History, a semester of Spanish, Astronomy to fulfill his hard science requirement. At the last minute he registers for a drawing class in the evenings. He doesn’t tell his parents about the drawing class, something they would consider frivolous at this stage of his life, in spite of the fact that his own grandfather was an artist. They are already distressed that he hasn’t settled on a major and a profession. Like the rest of their Bengali friends, his parents expect him to be, if not an engineer, then a doctor, a lawyer, an economist at the very least. These were the fields that brought them to America, his father repeatedly reminds him,
the professions that have earned them security and respect.
But now that he’s Nikhil it’s easier to ignore his parents, to tune out their concerns and pleas. With relief, he types his name at the tops of his freshman papers. He reads the telephone messages his suitemates leave for Nikhil on assorted scraps in their rooms. He opens up a checking account, writes his new name into course books. “Me llamo Nikhil,” he says in his Spanish class. It is as Nikhil, that first semester, that he grows a goatee, starts smoking Camel Lights at parties and while writing papers and before exams, discovers Brian Eno and Elvis Costello and Charlie Parker. It is as Nikhil that he takes Metro-North into Manhattan one weekend with Jonathan and gets himself a fake ID that allows him to be served liquor in New Haven bars. It is as Nikhil that he loses his virginity at a party at Ezra Stiles, with a girl wearing a plaid woolen skirt and combat boots and mustard tights. By the time he wakes up, hung-over, at three in the morning, she has vanished from the room, and he is unable to recall her name.
There is only one complication: he doesn’t feel like Nikhil. Not yet. Part of the problem is that the people who now know him as Nikhil have no idea that he used to be Gogol. They know him only in the present, not at all in the past. But after eighteen years of Gogol, two months of Nikhil feel scant, inconsequential. At times he feels as if he’s cast himself in a play, acting the part of twins, indistinguishable to the naked eye yet fundamentally different. At times he still feels his old name, painfully and without warning, the way his front tooth had unbearably throbbed in recent weeks after a filling, threatening for an instant to sever from his gums when he drank coffee, or iced water, and once when he was riding in an elevator. He fears being discovered, having the whole charade somehow unravel, and in nightmares his files are exposed, his original name printed on the front page of the Yale Daily News. Once, he signs his old name by mistake on a credit card slip at the college bookstore. Occasionally he has to hear Nikhil three times before he answers.
Even more startling is when those who normally call him Gogol refer to him as Nikhil. For example, when his parents call on Saturday mornings, if Brandon or Jonathan happens to pick up the phone, they ask if Nikhil is there. Though he has asked his parents to do precisely this, the fact of it troubles him, making him feel in that instant that he is not related to them, not their child. “Please come to our home with Nikhil one weekend,” Ashima says to his roommates when she and Ashoke visit campus during parents weekend in October, the suite hastily cleared of liquor bottles and ashtrays and Brandon’s bong for the occasion. The substitution sounds wrong to Gogol, correct but
off-key, the way it sounds when his parents speak English to him instead of Bengali. Stranger still is when one of his parents addresses him, in front of his new friends, as Nikhil directly: “Nikhil, show us the buildings where you have your classes,” his father suggests. Later that evening, out to dinner with Jonathan at a restaurant on Chapel Street, Ashima slips, asking, “Gogol, have you decided yet what your major will be?” Though Jonathan, listening to something his father is saying, doesn’t hear, Gogol feels helpless, annoyed yet unable to blame his mother, caught in the mess he’s made.
During his first semester, obediently but unwillingly, he goes home every other weekend, after his last Friday class. He rides Amtrak to Boston and then switches to a commuter rail, his duffel bag stuffed with course books and dirty laundry. Somewhere along the two-and-a-half-hour journey, Nikhil evaporates and Gogol claims him again. His father comes to the station to fetch him, always calling ahead to check whether the train is on time.
Together they drive through the town, along the familiar tree-lined roads, his father asking after his studies. Between Friday night and Sunday afternoon the laundry, thanks to his mother, gets done, but the course books are neglected; in spite of his intentions, Gogol finds himself capable of doing little at his parents’ but eat and sleep. The desk in his room feels too small. He is distracted by the telephone ringing, by his parents and Sonia talking and moving through the house. He misses Sterling Library, where he studies every night after dinner, and the nocturnal schedule of which he is now a part. He misses being in his suite in Farnam, smoking one of Brandon’s cigarettes, listening to music with Jonathan, learning how to tell the classical composers apart.
At home he watches MTV with Sonia as she doctors her jeans, cutting inches off the bottoms and inserting zippers at the newly narrowed ankles. One weekend, the washing machine is occupied because Sonia is in the process of dyeing the vast majority of her clothing black. She is in high school now, taking Mr. Lawson’s English class, going to the dances Gogol never went to himself, already going to parties at which both boys and girls are present. Her braces have come off her teeth, revealing a confident, frequent, American smile. Her formerly shoulder-length hair has been chopped asymmetrically by one of her friends. Ashima lives in fear that Sonia will color a streak of it blond, as Sonia has threatened on more than one occasion to do, and that she will have additional holes pierced in her earlobes at the mall. They argue violently about such things, Ashima crying, Sonia
slamming doors. Some weekends his parents are invited to parties, and they insist that both Gogol and Sonia go with them. The host or hostess shows him to a room where he can study alone while the party thunders below, but he always ends up watching television with Sonia and the other children, just as he has done all his life. “I’m eighteen,” he says once to his parents as they drive back from a party, a fact that makes no difference to them. One weekend Gogol makes the mistake of referring to New Haven as home. “Sorry, I left it at home,” he says when his father asks if he remembered to buy the Yale decal his parents want to paste to the rear window of their car. Ashima is outraged by the remark, dwelling on it all day. “Only three months, and listen to you,” she says, telling him that after twenty years in America, she still cannot bring herself to refer to Pemberton Road as home.
But now it is his room at Yale where Gogol feels most comfortable. He likes its oldness, its persistent grace. He likes that so many students have occupied it before him. He likes the solidity of its plaster walls, its dark wooden floorboards, however battered and stained. He likes the dormer window he sees first thing in the mornings when he opens his eyes and looking at Battell Chapel. He has fallen in love with the Gothic architecture of the campus, always astonished by the physical beauty that surrounds him, that roots him to his environs in a way he had never felt growing up on Pemberton Road. For his drawing class, in which he is required to make half a dozen sketches every week, he is inspired to draw the details of buildings: flying buttresses, pointed archways filled with flowing tracery, thick rounded doorways, squat columns of pale pink stone. In the spring semester he takes an introductory class in architecture. He reads about how the pyramids and Greek temples and Medieval cathedrals were built, studying the plans of churches and palaces in his textbook. He learns the endless terms, the vocabulary that classifies the details of ancient buildings, writing them on separate index cards and making illustrations on the back: architrave, entablature, tympanum, voussoir. Together the words form another language he longs to know. He files these index cards in a shoebox, reviews them before the exam, memorizing far more terms than he needs to, keeping the box of cards even after the exam is done, adding to them in his spare time.
In the autumn of his sophomore year, he boards a particularly crowded train at Union Station. It is the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. He edges through the compartments, his duffel bag heavy with books for his Renaissance architecture class, for which he has to write a paper over the next five days.
Passengers have already staked out parts of the vestibule, sitting glumly on their luggage. “Standing room only,” the conductor hollers. “I want my money back,” a passenger complains. Gogol keeps walking, from one compartment to the next, looking for an uncrowded vestibule in which he might sit. In the very last car of the train he sees an empty seat. A girl is seated next to the window, reading a folded-back issue of The New Yorker. Arranged on the seat beside her is a chocolate brown, shearling-lined suede coat, which is what had caused the person in front of Gogol to move on. But something tells Gogol the coat belongs to the girl, and so he stops and says, “Is that yours?”
She lifts up her narrow body and in a single, swift motion arranges the coat beneath her buttocks and legs. It’s a face he recognizes from campus, someone he’s crossed paths with in the corridors of buildings as he walks to and from class. He remembers that freshman year she’d had hair dyed an emphatic shade of cranberry red, cut to her jaw. She’s grown it to her shoulders now, and allowed it to resume what appears to be its natural shade, light brown with bits of blond here and there. It is parted just off-center, a bit crooked at the base. The hair of her eyebrows is darker, lending her otherwise friendly features a serious expression. She wears a pair of nicely faded jeans, brown leather boots with yellow laces and thick rubber soles. A cabled sweater the same flecked gray of her eyes is too large for her, the sleeves coming partway up her hands. A man’s billfold bulges prominently from the front pocket of her jeans.
“Hi, I’m Ruth,” she says, recognizing him in that same vague way. “I’m Nikhil.” He sits, too exhausted to put his duffel bag away in the
luggage rack overhead. He shoves it as best he can under his seat, his long legs bent awkwardly, aware that he is perspiring. He unzips his blue down parka. He massages his fingers, crisscrossed with welts from the leather straps of the bag.
“Sorry,” Ruth says, watching him. “I guess I was just trying to put off the inevitable.”
Still seated, he pries his arms free of the parka. “What do you mean?” “Making it look like someone was sitting here. With the coat.”
“It’s pretty brilliant, actually. Sometimes I pretend to fall asleep for the same reason,” he admits. “No one wants to sit next to me if I’m sleeping.”
She laughs softly, putting a strand of her hair behind her ear. Her beauty is
direct, unassuming. She wears no make-up apart from something glossy on her lips; two small brown moles by her right cheekbone are the only things that distract from the pale peach of her complexion. She has slim, small hands with unpolished nails and ragged cuticles. She leans over to put the magazine away and get a book from the bag at her feet, and he briefly glimpses the skin above her waistband.
“Are you going to Boston?” he asks.
“Maine. That’s where my dad lives. I have to switch to a bus at South Station. It’s another four hours from there. What college are you in?”
“J.E.”
He learns that she is in Silliman, that she is planning to be an English major. Comparing notes of their experiences at college so far, they discover that they had both taken Psychology 110 the previous spring. The book in her hands is a paperback copy of Timon of Athens, and though she keeps a finger marking her page she never reads a word of it. Nor does he bother to open up the volume on perspective he’s pulled out of his duffel. She tells him she was raised on a commune in Vermont, the child of hippies, educated at home until the seventh grade. Her parents are divorced now. Her father lives with her stepmother, raising llamas on a farm. Her mother, an anthropologist, is doing fieldwork on midwives in Thailand.
He cannot imagine coming from such parents, such a background, and when he describes his own upbringing it feels bland by comparison. But Ruth expresses interest, asking about his visits to Calcutta. She tells him her parents went to India once, to an ashram somewhere, before she was born.
She asks what the streets are like, and the houses, and so on the blank back page of his book on perspective Gogol draws a floor plan of his maternal grandparents’ flat, navigating Ruth along the verandas and the terrazzo floors, telling her about the chalky blue walls, the narrow stone kitchen, the sitting room with cane furniture that looked as if it belonged on a porch. He draws with confidence, thanks to the drafting course he is taking this term. He shows her the room where he and Sonia sleep when they visit, and describes the view of the tiny lane lined with corrugated tin-roofed businesses. When he is finished, Ruth takes the book from him and looks at the drawing he’s made, trailing her finger through the rooms. “I’d love to go,” she says, and suddenly he imagines her face and arms tan, a backpack strapped to her shoulders, walking along Chowringhee as other Western tourists do, shopping in New Market, staying at the Grand.
As they are talking a woman across the aisle reprimands them; she’s been trying to take a nap, she says. This only goads them into talking further, in lowered voices, their heads leaning in toward each other. Gogol is unaware of which state they are in, which stations they’ve passed. The train rumbles over a bridge; the setting sun is feverishly beautiful, casting a striking pink glow on the facades of the clapboard houses that dot the water’s edge. In minutes these shades fade, replaced by the pallor that precedes dusk. When it is dark he sees that their images are reflected at an angle in the glass, hovering as if outside the train. Their throats are parched from talking and at one point he offers to go to the café car. She asks him to get her a bag of potato chips and a cup of tea with milk. He likes that she doesn’t bother to pull the billfold out of her jeans, that she allows him to buy them for her. He returns with a coffee for himself, and the chips and the tea, along with a paper cup of milk the bartender has given him instead of the regulation container of cream. They continue talking, Ruth eating the chips, brushing the salt from around her lips with the back of her hand. She offers some to Gogol, pulling them out for him one by one. He tells her about the meals he’d eaten on Indian trains the time he traveled with his family to Delhi and Agra, the rotis and slightly sour dal ordered at one station and delivered hot at the next, the thick vegetable cutlets served with bread and butter for breakfast. He tells her about the tea, how it was bought through the window from men on the platform who poured it from giant aluminum kettles, the milk and sugar already mixed in, and how it was drunk in crude clay cups that were smashed afterward on the tracks. Her appreciation for these details flatters him; it occurs to him that he has never spoken of his experiences in India to any American friend.
They part suddenly, Gogol working up the nerve to ask for her number at the last minute, writing it into the same book where he’d drawn her the floor plan. He wishes he could wait with her at South Station for her bus to Maine, but he has a commuter train to catch in ten minutes to take him to the suburbs. The days of the holiday feel endless; all he can think of is getting back to New Haven and calling Ruth. He wonders how many times they’ve crossed paths, how many meals they’ve unwittingly shared in Commons. He thinks back to Psychology 110, wishing his memory would yield some image of her, taking notes on the other side of the law school auditorium, her head bent over her desk. Most often he thinks of the train, longs to sit beside her again, imagines their faces flushed from the heat of the compartment, their bodies cramped in the same way, her hair shining from the yellow lights overhead.
On the ride back he looks for her, combing each and every compartment, but she is nowhere and he ends up sitting next to an elderly nun with a brown habit and prominent white down on her upper lip, who snores all the way.
The following week, back at Yale, Ruth agrees to meet him for coffee at the Atticus bookshop. She is a few minutes late and dressed in the same jeans and boots and chocolate suede coat she’d worn when they met. Again she asks for tea. At first he senses an awkwardness he hadn’t felt on the train. The café feels loud and hectic, the table between them too wide. Ruth is quieter than before, looking down at her cup and playing with the sugar packets, her eyes occasionally wandering to the books that line the walls. But soon enough they are conversing easily, as they had before, exchanging tales of their respective holidays. He tells her about how he and Sonia occupied the kitchen on Pemberton Road for a day, stuffing a turkey and rolling out dough for pies, things his mother did not particularly like to do. “I looked for you on my way back,” he admits to her, telling her about the snoring nun. Afterward they walk together through the Center for British Art; there is an exhibit of Renaissance works on paper, which they’ve both been meaning to see. He walks her back to Silliman, and they arrange to have coffee a few days later.
After saying good night, Ruth lingers by the gate, looking down at the books pressed up to her chest, and he wonders if he should kiss her, which is what he’s been wanting to do for hours, or whether, in her mind, they are only friends. She starts walking backward toward her entryway, smiling at him, taking an impressive number of steps before giving a final wave and turning away.
He begins to meet her after her classes, remembering her schedule, looking up at the buildings and hovering casually under the archways. She always seems pleased to see him, stepping away from her girlfriends to say hello. “Of course she likes you,” Jonathan tells Gogol, patiently listening to a minute account of their acquaintance one night in the dining hall. A few days later, following Ruth back to her room because she’s forgotten a book she needs for a class, he places his hand over hers as she reaches for the doorknob. Her roommates are out. He waits for her on the sofa in the common room as she searches for the book. It is the middle of the day, overcast, lightly raining. “Found it,” she says, and though they both have classes, they remain in the room, sitting on the sofa and kissing until it is too late to bother going.
Every evening they study together at the library, sitting at either end of a table to keep from whispering. She takes him to her dining hall, and he to hers. He takes her to the sculpture garden. He thinks of her constantly, while leaning over the slanted board in his drafting class, under the strong white lights of the studio, and in the darkened lecture hall of his Renaissance architecture class, as images of Palladian villas flash onto the screen from a slide projector. Within weeks the end of the semester is upon them, and they
are besieged by exams and papers and hundreds of pages of reading. Far more than the amount of work he faces, he dreads the month of separation they will have to endure at winter break. One Saturday afternoon, just before exams, she mentions to him in the library that both her roommates will be out all day. They walk together through Cross Campus, back to Silliman, and he sits with her on her unmade bed. The room smells as she does, a powdery floral smell that lacks the acridness of perfume. Postcards of authors are taped to the wall over her desk, Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf. Their lips and faces are still numb from the cold, and at first they still keep their coats on. They lie together against the shearling lining of hers, and she guides his hand beneath her bulky sweater. It had not been like this the first time, the only other time, that he’d been with a girl. He recalled nothing from that episode, only being thankful, afterward, that he was no longer a virgin.
But this time he is aware of everything, the warm hollow of Ruth’s abdomen, the way her lank hair rests in thick strands on the pillow, the way her features change slightly when she is lying down. “You’re great, Nikhil,” she whispers as he touches small breasts set wide apart, one pale nipple slightly larger than the other. He kisses them, kisses the moles scattered on her stomach as she arcs gently toward him, feels her hands on his head and then on his shoulders, guiding him between her parted legs. He feels inept, clumsy, as he tastes and smells her there, and yet he hears her whispering his name, telling him it feels wonderful. She knows what to do, unzipping his jeans, standing up at one point and getting a diaphragm case from her bureau drawer.
A week later he is home again, helping Sonia and his mother decorate the tree, shoveling the driveway with his father, going to the mall to buy last- minute gifts. He mopes around the house, restless, pretending to be coming down with a cold. He wishes he could simply borrow his parents’ car and drive up to Maine to see Ruth after Christmas, or that she could visit him. He was perfectly welcome, she’d assured him, her father and stepmother wouldn’t mind. They’d put him in the guest room, she’d said; at night he’d creep into her bed. He imagines himself in the farmhouse she’s described to him, waking up to eggs frying in a skillet, walking with her through snowy, abandoned fields. But such a trip would require telling his parents about Ruth, something he has no desire to do. He has no patience for their surprise, their nervousness, their quiet disappointment, their questions about what Ruth’s parents did and whether or not the relationship was serious. As much as he longs to see her, he cannot picture her at the kitchen table on Pemberton Road, in her jeans and her bulky sweater, politely eating his mother’s food. He cannot imagine being with her in the house where he is still Gogol.
He speaks to her when his family is asleep, quietly in the empty kitchen, charging the calls to his telephone at school. They arrange to meet one day in Boston and spend the day together in Harvard Square. There is a foot of snow on the ground, and the sky is a piercing blue. They go first to a movie at the Brattle, buying tickets for whatever is about to begin, sitting at the back of the balcony and kissing, causing people to turn back and stare. They have lunch at Cafe Pamplona, eating pressed ham sandwiches and bowls of garlic soup off in a corner. They exchange presents: she gives him a small used book of drawings by Goya, and he gives her a pair of blue woolen mittens and a mixed tape of his favorite Beatles songs. They discover a store just above the café that sells nothing but architecture books, and he browses the aisles, treating himself to a paperback edition of Le Corbusier’s Journey to the East, for he is thinking of declaring himself an architecture major in the spring.
Afterward they wander hand in hand, kissing now and then against a building, along the very streets he was pushed up and down in his stroller as a child. He shows her the American professor’s house where he and his parents once lived, a time before Sonia was born, years that he has no memory of. He’s seen the house in pictures, knows from his parents the name of the street.
Whoever lives there now appears to be away; the snow hasn’t been cleared from the porch steps, and a number of rolled-up newspapers have collected on the doormat. “I wish we could go inside,” he says. “I wish we could be alone together.” Looking at the house now, with Ruth at his side, her mittened hand in his, he feels strangely helpless. Though he was only an infant at the time, he feels nevertheless betrayed by his inability to know then that one day, years later, he would return to the house under such different circumstances, and that he would be so happy.
By the following year his parents know vaguely about Ruth. Though he has been to the farmhouse in Maine twice, meeting her father and her stepmother, Sonia, who secretly has a boyfriend these days, is the only person in his family to have met Ruth, during a weekend when Sonia came to New Haven. His parents have expressed no curiosity about his girlfriend. His relationship with her is one accomplishment in his life about which they are not in the least bit proud or pleased. Ruth tells him she doesn’t mind his parents’ disapproval, that she finds it romantic. But Gogol knows it isn’t right. He wishes his parents could simply accept her, as her family accepts him, without pressure of any kind. “You’re too young to get involved this way,” Ashoke and Ashima tell him. They’ve even gone so far as to point out examples of Bengali men they know who’ve married Americans, marriages that have
ended in divorce. It only makes things worse when he says that marriage is the last thing on his mind. At times he hangs up on them. He pities his parents when they speak to him this way, for having no experience of being young and in love. He suspects that they are secretly glad when Ruth goes away to Oxford for a semester. She’d mentioned her interest in going there long ago, in the first weeks of their courtship, when the spring of junior year had felt like a remote speck on the horizon. She’d asked him if he minded if she applied, and though the idea of her being so far had made him queasy he’d said no, of course not, that twelve weeks would go like that.
He is lost that spring without her. He spends all his time in the studio, especially the Friday nights and weekends he would normally have been with her, the two of them eating at Naples and going to see movies in the law school auditorium. He listens to the music she loves: Simon and Garfunkel, Neil Young, Cat Stevens, buying himself brand-new copies of the albums she’d inherited from her parents. It sickens him to think of the physical distance between them, to think that when he is asleep at night she is leaning over a sink somewhere, brushing her teeth and washing her face to start the next day. He longs for her as his parents have longed, all these years, for the people they love in India—for the first time in his life, he knows this feeling. But his parents refuse to give him the money to fly to England on his spring break. He spends what little money he has from working in the dining hall on transatlantic phone calls to Ruth twice a week. Twice a day he checks his campus mailbox for letters and postcards stamped with the multicolored profiles of the queen. He carries these letters and postcards wherever he goes, stuck into his books. “My Shakespeare class is the best I’ve ever taken,” she’s written in violet-colored ink. “The coffee is undrinkable. Everyone constantly says ‘cheers.’ I think of you all the time.”
One day he attends a panel discussion about Indian novels written in English. He feels obligated to attend; one of the presenters on the panel, Amit, is a distant cousin who lives in Bombay, whom Gogol has never met. His mother has asked him to greet Amit on her behalf. Gogol is bored by the panelists, who keep referring to something called “marginality,” as if it were some sort of medical condition. For most of the hour, he sketches portraits of the panelists, who sit hunched over their papers along a rectangular table. “Teleologically speaking, ABCDs are unable to answer the question ‘Where are you from?'” the sociologist on the panel declares. Gogol has never heard the term ABCD. He eventually gathers that it stands for “American-born confused deshi.” In other words, him. He learns that the C could also stand for “conflicted.” He knows that deshi, a generic word for “countryman,” means “Indian,” knows that his parents and all their friends always refer to India
simply as desh. But Gogol never thinks of India as desh. He thinks of it as Americans do, as India.
Gogol slouches in his seat and ponders certain awkward truths. For instance, although he can understand his mother tongue, and speak it fluently, he cannot read or write it with even modest proficiency. On trips to India his American-accented English is a source of endless amusement to his relatives, and when he and Sonia speak to each other, aunts and uncles and cousins always shake their heads in disbelief and say, “I didn’t understand a word!” Living with a pet name and a good name, in a place where such distinctions do not exist—surely that was emblematic of the greatest confusion of all. He searches the audience for someone he knows, but it isn’t his crowd—lots of lit majors with leather satchels and gold-rimmed glasses and fountain pens, lots of people Ruth would have waved to. There are also lots of ABCDs. He has no idea there are this many on campus. He has no ABCD friends at college.
He avoids them, for they remind him too much of the way his parents choose to live, befriending people not so much because they like them, but because of a past they happen to share. “Gogol, why aren’t you a member of the Indian association here?” Amit asks later when they go for a drink at the Anchor. “I just don’t have the time,” Gogol says, not telling his well-meaning cousin that he can think of no greater hypocrisy than joining an organization that willingly celebrates occasions his parents forced him, throughout his childhood and adolescence, to attend. “I’m Nikhil now,” Gogol says, suddenly depressed by how many more times he will have to say this, asking people to remember, reminding them to forget, feeling as if an errata slip were perpetually pinned to his chest.
Thanksgiving of his senior year he takes the train, alone, up to Boston. He and Ruth are no longer together. Instead of coming back from Oxford after those twelve weeks, she’d stayed on to do a summer course, explaining that a professor she admired would be retiring after that. Gogol had spent the summer on Pemberton Road. He had had an unpaid internship at a small architecture firm in Cambridge, where he’d run errands at Charrette for the designers, been sent to photograph nearby sites, lettered a few drawings. To make money he worked nights washing dishes at an Italian restaurant in his parents’ town. Late in August he’d gone to Logan to welcome Ruth home. He had waited for her at the arrival gate, taken her to a hotel for one night, paying for it with the money he’d made at the restaurant. The room overlooked the Public Garden, its walls covered with thickly striped pink-and-cream paper.
They’d made love for the first time in a double bed. They’d gone out for their meals, neither of them able to afford the items on the room service menu.
They walked up Newbury Street and went to a Greek restaurant with tables on the sidewalk. The day was blazing hot. Ruth looked the same, but her speech was peppered with words and phrases she’d picked up in England, like “I imagine” and “I suppose” and “presumably.” She spoke of her semester and how much she’d liked England, the traveling she’d done in Barcelona and Rome. She wanted to go back to England for graduate school, she said. “I imagine they’ve got good architecture schools,” she’d added. “You could come as well.” The next morning he’d put her on the bus to Maine. But within days of being together again in New Haven, in an apartment he’d rented on Howe Street with friends, they’d begun fighting, both admitting in the end that something had changed.
They avoid each other now, when they happen to cross paths in the library and on the streets. He’s scratched out her phone number and the addresses he’d written down for her at Oxford and in Maine. But boarding the train it is impossible not to think of the afternoon, two years ago, they’d met. As usual the train is incredibly crowded, and this time he sits for half the journey in the vestibule. After Westerly he finds a seat, and settles down with the course selection guide for next semester. But he feels distracted for some reason, gloomy, impatient to be off the train; he does not bother to remove his coat, does not bother to go to the café car for something to drink even though he is thirsty. He puts away the course guide and opens up a library book that might be helpful for his senior thesis project, a comparison between Renaissance Italian and Mughal palace design. But after a few paragraphs he closes this book as well. His stomach growls and he wonders what there will be for dinner at home, what his father has prepared. His mother and Sonia have gone to India for three weeks, to attend a cousin’s wedding, and this year Gogol and his father will spend Thanksgiving at the home of friends.
He angles his head against the window and watches the autumnal landscape pass: the spewing pink and purple waters of a dye mill, electrical power stations, a big ball-shaped water tank covered with rust. Abandoned factories, with rows of small square windows partly bashed in, ravaged as if by moths. On the trees the topmost branches are bare, the remaining leaves yellow, paper-thin. The train moves more slowly than usual, and when he looks at his watch he sees that they are running well behind schedule. And then, somewhere outside Providence, in an abandoned, grassy field, the train stops. For over an hour they stand there as a solid, scarlet disk of sun sinks into the tree-lined horizon. The lights turn off, and the air inside the train turns uncomfortably warm. The conductors rush anxiously through the
compartments. “Probably a broken wire,” the gentleman sitting beside Gogol remarks. Across the aisle a gray-haired woman reads, a coat clutched like a blanket to her chest. Behind him two students discuss the poems of Ben Jonson. Without the sound of the engine Gogol can hear an opera playing faintly on someone’s Walkman. Through the window he admires the darkening sapphire sky. He sees spare lengths of rusted rails heaped in piles. It isn’t until they start moving again that an announcement is made on the loudspeaker about a medical emergency. But the truth, overheard by one of the passengers from a conductor, quickly circulates: a suicide had been committed, a person had jumped in front of the train.
He is shocked and discomfited by the news, feeling bad about his irritation and impatience, wondering if the victim had been a man or a woman, young or old. He imagines the person consulting the same schedule that’s in his backpack, determining exactly when the train would be passing through. The approach of the train’s headlights. As a result of the delay he misses his commuter rail connection in Boston, waits another forty minutes for the next one. He puts a call through to his parents’ house, but no one answers. He tries his father’s department at the university, but there too the phone rings and rings. At the station he sees his father waiting on the darkened platform, wearing sneakers and corduroys, anxiousness in his face. A trench coat is belted around his waist, a scarf knitted by Ashima wrapped at his throat, a tweed cap on his head.
“Sorry I’m late,” Gogol says. “How long have you been waiting?” “Since quarter to six,” his father says. Gogol looks at his watch. It is
nearly eight.
“There was an accident.”
“I know. I called. What happened? Were you hurt?”
Gogol shakes his head. “Someone jumped onto the tracks. Somewhere in Rhode Island. I tried to call you. They had to wait for the police, I think.”
“I was worried.”
“I hope you haven’t been standing out in the cold all this time,” Gogol says, and from his father’s lack of response he knows that this is exactly what he has done. Gogol wonders what it is like for his father to be without his mother and Sonia. He wonders if he is lonely. But his father is not the type to admit such things, to speak openly of his desires, his moods, his needs. They
walk to the parking lot, get into the car, and begin the short drive home.
The night is windy, so much so that the car jostles slightly from time to time, and brown leaves as large as human feet fly across the road in the headlights’ glare. Normally on these rides back from the station his father asks questions, about his classes, about his finances, about his plans after graduation. But tonight they are silent, Ashoke concentrating on driving.
Gogol fidgets with the radio, switching from the AM news station to NPR.
“I want to tell you something,” his father says when the piece ends, once they have already turned onto Pemberton Road.
“What?” Gogol asks. “It’s about your name.”
Gogol looks at his father, puzzled. “My name?” His father shuts off the radio. “Gogol.”
These days he is called Gogol so seldom that the sound of it no longer upsets him as it used to. After three years of being Nikhil the vast majority of the time, he no longer minds.
“There is a reason for it, you know,” his father continues. “Right, Baba. Gogol’s your favorite author. I know.”
“No,” his father says. He pulls into the driveway and switches off the engine, then the headlights. He undoes his seat belt, guiding it with his hand as it retracts, back behind his left shoulder. “Another reason.”
And as they sit together in the car, his father revisits a field 209 kilometers from Howrah. With his fingers lightly grasping the bottom of the steering wheel, his gaze directed through the windshield at the garage door, he tells Gogol the story of the train he’d ridden twenty-eight years ago, in October 1961, on his way to visit his grandfather in Jamshedpur. He tells him about the night that had nearly taken his life, and the book that had saved him, and about the year afterward, when he’d been unable to move.
Gogol listens, stunned, his eyes fixed on his father’s profile. Though there are only inches between them, for an instant his father is a stranger, a man who has kept a secret, has survived a tragedy, a man whose past he does not
fully know. A man who is vulnerable, who has suffered in an inconceivable way. He imagines his father, in his twenties as Gogol is now, sitting on a train as Gogol had just been, reading a story, and then suddenly nearly killed. He struggles to picture the West Bengal countryside he has seen on only a few occasions, his father’s mangled body, among hundreds of dead ones, being carried on a stretcher, past a twisted length of maroon compartments. Against instinct he tries to imagine life without his father, a world in which his father does not exist.
“Why don’t I know this about you?” Gogol says. His voice sounds harsh, accusing, but his eyes well with tears. “Why haven’t you told me this until now?”
“It never felt like the right time,” his father says.
“But it’s like you’ve lied to me all these years.” When his father doesn’t respond, he adds, “That’s why you have that limp, isn’t it?”
“It happened so long ago. I didn’t want to upset you.” “It doesn’t matter. You should have told me.”
“Perhaps,” his father concedes, glancing briefly in Gogol’s direction. He removes the keys from the ignition. “Come, you must be hungry. The car is getting cold.”
But Gogol doesn’t move. He sits there, still struggling to absorb the information, feeling awkward, oddly ashamed, at fault. “I’m sorry, Baba.”
His father laughs softly. “You had nothing to do with it.” “Does Sonia know?”
His father shakes his head. “Not yet. I’ll explain it to her one day. In this country, only your mother knows. And now you. I’ve always meant for you to know, Gogol.”
And suddenly the sound of his pet name, uttered by his father as he has been accustomed to hearing it all his life, means something completely new, bound up with a catastrophe he has unwittingly embodied for years. “Is that what you think of when you think of me?” Gogol asks him. “Do I remind you of that night?”
“Not at all,” his father says eventually, one hand going to his ribs, a habitual gesture that has baffled Gogol until now. “You remind me of everything that followed.”
