Chapter One
1968
On a sticky August evening two weeks before her due date, Ashima
Ganguli stands in the kitchen of a Central Square apartment, combining Rice
Krispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion in a bowl. She adds
salt, lemon juice, thin slices of green chili pepper, wishing there were
mustard oil to pour into the mix. Ashima has been consuming this
concoction throughout her pregnancy, a humble approximation of the snack
sold for pennies on Calcutta sidewalks and on railway platforms throughout
India, spilling from newspaper cones. Even now that there is barely space
inside her, it is the one thing she craves. Tasting from a cupped palm, she
frowns; as usual, there's something missing. She stares blankly at the
pegboard behind the countertop where her cooking utensils hang, all slightly
coated with grease. She wipes sweat from her face with the free end of her
sari. Her swollen feet ache against speckled gray linoleum. Her pelvis aches
from the baby's weight. She opens a cupboard, the shelves lined with a grimy
yellow-and-white-checkered paper she's been meaning to replace, and
reaches for another onion, frowning again as she pulls at its crisp magenta
skin. A curious warmth floods her abdomen, followed by a tightening so
severe she doubles over, gasping without sound, dropping the onion with a
thud on the floor.
The sensation passes, only to be followed by a more enduring
spasm of discomfort. In the bathroom she discovers, on her underpants, a
solid streak of brownish blood. She calls out to her husband, Ashoke, a
doctoral candidate in electrical engineering at MIT, who is studying in the
bedroom. He leans over a card table; the edge of their bed, two twin
mattresses pushed together under a red and purple batik spread, serves as
his chair. When she calls out to Ashoke, she doesn't say his name.
Ashima never thinks of her husband's name when she thinks of her husband,
even though she knows perfectly well what it is. She has adopted his
surname but refuses, for propriety's sake, to utter his first. It's not the type of
thing Bengali wives do. Like a kiss or caress in a Hindi movie, a husband's
name is something intimate and therefore unspoken, cleverly patched over.
And so, instead of saying Ashoke's name, she utters the interrogative that
has come to replace it, which translates roughly as "Are you listening to me?"
At dawn a taxi is called to ferry them through deserted Cambridge streets,
up Massachusetts Avenue and past Harvard Yard, to Mount Auburn Hospital.
Ashima registers, answering questions about the frequency and duration of
the contractions, as Ashoke fills out the forms. She is seated in a
wheelchair and pushed through the shining, brightly lit corridors, whisked into
an elevator more spacious than her kitchen. On the maternity floor she is
assigned to a bed by a window, in a room at the end of the hall. She is asked
to remove her Murshidabad silk sari in favor of a flowered cotton gown that, to
her mild embarrassment, only reaches her knees. A nurse offers to fold up
the sari but, exasperated by the six slippery yards, ends up stuffing the
material into Ashima's slate blue suitcase. Her obstetrician, Dr. Ashley,
gauntly handsome in a Lord Mountbatten sort of way, with fine sand-colored
hair swept back from his temples, arrives to examine her progress. The
baby's head is in the proper position, has already begun its descent. She is
told that she is still in early labor, three centimeters dilated, beginning to
efface. "What does it mean, dilated?" she asks, and Dr. Ashley holds up
two fingers side by side, then draws them apart, explaining the unimaginable
thing her body must do in order for the baby to pass. The process will take
some time, Dr. Ashley tells her; given that this is her first pregnancy, labor
can take twenty-four hours, sometimes more. She searches for Ashoke's
face, but he has stepped behind the curtain the doctor has drawn. "I'll be
back," Ashoke says to her in Bengali, and then a nurse adds: "Don't you
worry, Mr. Ganguli. She's got a long ways to go. We can take over from
here."
Now she is alone, cut off by curtains from the three other women
in the room. One woman's name, she gathers from bits of conversation, is
Beverly. Another is Lois. Carol lies to her left. "Goddamnit, goddamn you,
this is hell," she hears one of them say. And then a man's voice: "I love
you, sweetheart." Words Ashima has neither heard nor expects to hear from
her own husband; this is not how they are. It is the first time in her life she
has slept alone, surrounded by strangers; all her life she has slept either in a
room with her parents, or with Ashoke at her side. She wishes the curtains
were open, so that she could talk to the American women. Perhaps one of
them has given birth before, can tell her what to expect. But she has
gathered that Americans, in spite of their public declarations of affection, in
spite of their miniskirts and bikinis, in spite of their hand-holding on the
street and lying on top of each other on the Cambridge Common, prefer their
privacy. She spreads her fingers over the taut, enormous drum her middle
has become, wondering where the baby's feet and hands are at this
moment. The child is no longer restless; for the past few days, apart from the
occasional flutter, she has not felt it punch or kick or press against her ribs.
She wonders if she is the only Indian person in the hospital, but a gentle
twitch from the baby reminds her that she is, technically speaking, not
alone. Ashima thinks it's strange that her child will be born in a place most
people enter either to suffer or to die. There is nothing to comfort her in the offwhite
tiles of the floor, the off-white panels of the ceiling, the white sheets
tucked tightly into the bed. In India, she thinks to herself, women go home to
their parents to give birth, away from husbands and in-laws and household
cares, retreating briefly to childhood when the baby arrives.
Another contraction begins, more violent than the last. She cries
out, pressing her head against the pillow. Her fingers grip the chilly rails of
the bed. No one hears her, no nurse rushes to her side. She has been
instructed to time the duration of the contractions and so she consults her
watch, a bon voyage gift from her parents, slipped over her wrist the last
time she saw them, amid airport confusion and tears. It wasn't until she was
on the plane, flying for the first time in her life on a BOAC VC-10 whose
deafening ascent twenty-six members of her family had watched from the
balcony at Dum Dum Airport, as she was drifting over parts of India she'd
never set foot in, and then even farther, outside India itself, that she'd
noticed the watch among the cavalcade of matrimonial bracelets on both her
arms: iron, gold, coral, conch. Now, in addition, she wears a plastic bracelet
with a typed label identifying her as a patient of the hospital. She keeps the
watch face turned to the inside of her wrist. On the back, surrounded by the
words waterproof, antimagnetic, and shock-protected, her married initials,
A.G., are inscribed.
American seconds tick on top of her pulse point. For half a
minute, a band of pain wraps around her stomach, radiating toward her
back and shooting down her legs. And then, again, relief. She calculates the
Indian time on her hands. The tip of her thumb strikes each rung of the brown
ladders etched onto the backs of her fingers, then stops at the middle of the
third: it is nine and a half hours ahead in Calcutta, already evening, half past
eight. In the kitchen of her parents' flat on Amherst Street, at this very
moment, a servant is pouring after-dinner tea into steaming glasses,
arranging Marie biscuits on a tray. Her mother, very soon to be a
grandmother, is standing at the mirror of her dressing table, untangling
waist-length hair, still more black than gray, with her fingers. Her father
hunches over his slanted ink-stained table by the window, sketching,
smoking, listening to the Voice of America. Her younger brother, Rana,
studies for a physics exam on the bed. She pictures clearly the gray cement
floor of her parents' sitting room, feels its solid chill underfoot even on the
hottest days. An enormous black-and-white photograph of her deceased
paternal grandfather looms at one end against the pink plaster wall; opposite,
an alcove shielded by clouded panes of glass is stuffed with books and
papers and her father's watercolor tins. For an instant the weight of the baby
vanishes, replaced by the scene that passes before her eyes, only to be
replaced once more by a blue strip of the Charles River, thick green
treetops, cars gliding up and down Memorial Drive.
In Cambridge it is eleven in the morning, already lunchtime in the
hospital's accelerated day. A tray holding warm apple juice, Jell-O, ice
cream, and cold baked chicken is brought to her side. Patty, the friendly
nurse with the diamond engagement ring and a fringe of reddish hair
beneath her cap, tells Ashima to consume only the Jell-O and the apple
juice. It's just as well. Ashima would not have touched the chicken, even if
permitted; Americans eat their chicken in its skin, though Ashima has
recently found a kind butcher on Prospect Street willing to pull it off for her.
Patty comes to fluff the pillows, tidy the bed. Dr. Ashley pokes in his head
from time to time. "No need to worry," he chirps, putting a stethoscope to
Ashima's belly, patting her hand, admiring her various bracelets. "Everything
is looking perfectly normal. We are expecting a perfectly normal delivery,
Mrs. Ganguli."
But nothing feels normal to Ashima. For the past eighteen
months, ever since she's arrived in Cambridge, nothing has felt normal at
all. It's not so much the pain, which she knows, somehow, she will survive.
It's the consequence: motherhood in a foreign land. For it was one thing to be
pregnant, to suffer the queasy mornings in bed, the sleepless nights, the
dull throbbing in her back, the countless visits to the bathroom.
Throughout the experience, in spite of her growing discomfort,
she'd been astonished by her body's ability to make life, exactly as her
mother and grandmother and all her great-grandmothers had done. That it
was happening so far from home, unmonitored and unobserved by those
she loved, had made it more miraculous still. But she is terrified to raise a
child in a country where she is related to no one, where she knows so little,
where life seems so tentative and spare.
"How about a little walk? It might do you good," Patty asks when
she comes to clear the lunch tray.
Ashima looks up from a tattered copy of Desh magazine that
she'd brought to read on her plane ride to Boston and still cannot bring
herself to throw away. The printed pages of Bengali type, slightly rough to
the touch, are a perpetual comfort to her. She's read each of the short stories
and poems and articles a dozen times. There is a pen-and-ink drawing on
page eleven by her father, an illustrator for the magazine: a view of the North
Calcutta skyline sketched from the roof of their flat one foggy January
morning. She had stood behind her father as he'd drawn it, watching as he
crouched over his easel, a cigarette dangling from his lips, his shoulders
wrapped in a black Kashmiri shawl.
"Yes, all right," Ashima says.
Patty helps Ashima out of bed, tucks her feet one by one into
slippers, drapes a second nightgown around her shoulders. "Just think,"
Patty says as Ashima struggles to stand. "In a day or two you'll be half the
size." She takes Ashima's arm as they step out of the room, into the
hallway. After a few feet Ashima stops, her legs trembling as another wave
of pain surges through her body. She shakes her head, her eyes filling with
tears. "I cannot."
"You can. Squeeze my hand. Squeeze as tight as you like."
After a minute they continue on, toward the nurses'
station. "Hoping for a boy or a girl?" Patty asks.
"As long as there are ten finger and ten toe," Ashima replies. For
these anatomical details, these particular signs of life, are the ones she has
the most difficulty picturing when she imagines the baby in her arms.
Patty smiles, a little too widely, and suddenly Ashima realizes
her error, knows she should have said "fingers" and "toes." This error pains
her almost as much as her last contraction. English had been her subject. In
Calcutta, before she was married, she was working toward a college
degree. She used to tutor neighborhood schoolchildren in their homes, on
their verandas and beds, helping them to memorize Tennyson and
Wordsworth, to pronounce words like sign and cough, to understand the
difference between Aristotelian and Shakespearean tragedy. But in Bengali, a
finger can also mean fingers, a toe toes.
It had been after tutoring one day that Ashima's mother had met
her at the door, told her to go straight to the bedroom and prepare herself; a
man was waiting to see her. He was the third in as many months. The first
had been a widower with four children. The second, a newspaper cartoonist
who knew her father, had been hit by a bus in Esplanade and lost his left
arm. To her great relief they had both rejected her. She was nineteen, in the
middle of her studies, in no rush to be a bride. And so, obediently but
without expectation, she had untangled and rebraided her hair, wiped away
the kohl that had smudged below her eyes, patted some Cuticura powder
from a velvet puff onto her skin. The sheer parrot green sari she pleated and
tucked into her petticoat had been laid out for her on the bed by her mother.
Before entering the sitting room, Ashima had paused in the corridor. She
could hear her mother saying, "She is fond of cooking, and she can knit
extremely well. Within a week she finished this cardigan I am wearing."
Ashima smiled, amused by her mother's salesmanship; it had
taken her the better part of a year to finish the cardigan, and still her mother
had had to do the sleeves. Glancing at the floor where visitors customarily
removed their slippers, she noticed, beside two sets of chappals, a pair of
men's shoes that were not like any she'd ever seen on the streets and
trams and buses of Calcutta, or even in the windows of Bata. They were
brown shoes with black heels and off-white laces and stitching. There was a
band of lentil-sized holes embossed on either side of each shoe, and at the
tips was a pretty pattern pricked into the leather as if with a needle. Looking
more closely, she saw the shoemaker's name written on the insides, in gold
lettering that had all but faded: something and sons, it said. She saw the
size, eight and a half, and the initials U.S.A. And as her mother continued
to sing her praises, Ashima, unable to resist a sudden and overwhelming
urge, stepped into the shoes at her feet. Lingering sweat from the owner's
feet mingled with hers, causing her heart to race; it was the closest thing she
had ever experienced to the touch of a man. The leather was creased, heavy,
and still warm.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Namesake
by Jhumpa Lahiri
Copyright © 2003 by Jhumpa Lahiri
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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The Namesake