The Namesake (39 page)

At seven-thirty the bell rings, and the front door is left open as people and cold air stream into the house. Guests are speaking in Bengali, hollering, arguing, talking on top of one another,
the sound of their laughter filling the already crowded rooms. The croquettes are fried in crackling oil and arranged with a red onion salad on plates. Sonia serves them with paper napkins. Ben, the jamai-to-be, is introduced to each of the guests. "I'll never keep all these names straight," he says at one point to Gogol. "Don't worry, you'll never need to," Gogol says. These people, these honorary aunts and uncles of a dozen different surnames, have seen Gogol grow, have surrounded him at his wedding, his father's funeral. He promises to keep in touch with them now that his mother is leaving, not to forget them. Sonia shows off her ring, six tiny diamonds surrounding an emerald, to the mashis, who wear their red and green saris. "You will have to grow your hair for the wedding," they tell Sonia. One of the meshos is sporting a Santa hat. They sit in the living room, on the furniture and on the floor. Children drift down into the basement, the older ones to rooms upstairs. He recognizes his old Monopoly game being played, the board in two pieces, the racecar missing ever since Sonia dropped it into the baseboard heater when she was little. Gogol does not know to whom these children belong—half the guests are people his mother has befriended in recent years, people who were at his wedding but whom he does not recognize. People talk of how much they've come to love Ashima's Christmas Eve parties, that they've missed them these past few years, that it won't be the same without her. They have come to rely on her, Gogol realizes, to collect them together, to organize the holiday, to convert it, to introduce the tradition to those who are new. It has always felt adopted to him, an accident of circumstance, a celebration not really meant to be. And yet it was for him, for Sonia, that his parents had gone to the trouble of learning these customs. It was for their sake that it had come to all this.

In so many ways, his family's life feels like a string of accidents, unforeseen, unintended, one incident begetting another. It had started with his father's train wreck, paralyzing him at first, later inspiring him to move as far as possible, to make a
new life on the other side of the world. There was the disappearance of the name Gogol's great-grandmother had chosen for him, lost in the mail somewhere between Calcutta and Cambridge. This had led, in turn, to the accident of his being named Gogol, defining and distressing him for so many years. He had tried to correct that randomness, that error. And yet it had not been possible to reinvent himself fully, to break from that mismatched name. His marriage had been something of a misstep as well. And the way his father had slipped away from them, that had been the worst accident of all, as if the preparatory work of death had been done long ago, the night he was nearly killed, and all that was left for him was one day, quietly, to go. And yet these events have formed Gogol, shaped him, determined who he is. They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end.

"Gogol, the camera," his mother calls out over the crowd. "Take some pictures tonight, please? I want to remember this Christmas. Next year at this time I'll be so far away." He goes upstairs to get his father's Nikon, still sitting on the top shelf of Ashoke's closet. There is practically nothing else there. No clothes hang from the rod. The emptiness upsets him, but the weight of the camera is solid, reassuring in his hands. He takes the camera into his room to load a fresh battery, a new roll of film. Last year he and Moushumi slept in the guest room, on the double bed, with its folded towels and a fresh bar of soap on top of the dresser, what his mother always left out for guests. But now that Sonia is here with Ben, the guest room is theirs, and Gogol is back in his room, with a bed he's never shared with Moushumi, or with anyone.

The bed is narrow, covered by a solid brown quilt. He can reach up and touch the frosted white light fixture suspended from the ceiling, filled with dead moths. The stains of Scotch
tape once attached to his posters are visible on the walls. His desk was the folding square card table in the corner. Here he had done his homework under the dusty black gooseneck lamp. There is a thin, peacock blue carpet on the floor, slightly too large so that one side curls up against the wall. The shelves and drawers are mostly empty. Unwanted, miscellaneous things are in boxes already: essays written in high school, under the name Gogol. A report done in elementary school on Greek and Roman architecture, Corinthian and Ionic and Doric columns copied from an encyclopedia onto tracing paper. Cross pen-and-pencil sets, records listened to twice and then abandoned, clothes that were too large, too small—that never seemed worth transporting to the increasingly cramped apartments he inhabited over the years. All his old books, the ones he read by flashlight under the covers, and the ones required for college, only half-read, some with yellow
USED
stickers on the spines. His mother is going to donate them all to the library where she works, for their annual book sale in the spring. She has told him to go through them, make sure there's nothing he wants for himself. He pokes through the box.
The Swiss Family Robinson. On the Road. The Communist Manifesto. How to Get into an Ivy League School.

And then another book, never read, long forgotten, catches his eye. The jacket is missing, the title on the spine practically faded. It's a thick clothbound volume topped with decades-old dust. The ivory pages are heavy, slightly sour, silken to the touch. The spine cracks faintly when he opens it to the title page.
The Short Stories of Nikolai Gogol.
"For Gogol Ganguli," it says on the front endpaper in his father's tranquil hand, in red ballpoint ink, the letters rising gradually, optimistically, on the diagonal toward the upper right-hand corner of the page. "The man who gave you his name, from the man who gave you your name" is written within quotation marks. Underneath the inscription, which he has never before seen, is his birthday, and the year, 1982. His father had stood in the doorway, just there,
an arm's reach from where he sits now. He had left him to discover the inscription on his own, never again asking Gogol what he'd thought of the book, never mentioning the book at all. The handwriting reminds him of the checks his father used to give him all through college, and for years afterward, to help him along, to put down a security deposit, to buy his first suit, sometimes for no reason at all. The name he had so detested, here hidden and preserved—that was the first thing his father had given him.

The givers and keepers of Gogol's name are far from him now. One dead. Another, a widow, on the verge of a different sort of departure, in order to dwell, as his father does, in a separate world. She will call him, once a week, on the phone. She will learn to send e-mail, she says. Once or twice a week, he will hear "Gogol" over the wires, see it typed on a screen. As for all the people in the house, all the mashis and meshos to whom he is still, and will always be, Gogol—now that his mother is moving away, how often will he see them? Without people in the world to call him Gogol, no matter how long he himself lives, Gogol Ganguli will, once and for all, vanish from the lips of loved ones, and so, cease to exist. Yet the thought of this eventual demise provides no sense of victory, no solace. It provides no solace at all.

Gogol gets up, shuts the door to his room, muffling the noise of the party that swells below him, the laughter of the children playing down the hall. He sits cross-legged on the bed. He opens the book, glances at an illustration of Nikolai Gogol, and then at the chronology of the author's life on the facing page. Born March 20, 1809. The death of his father, 1825. Publishes his first story, 1830. Travels to Rome, 1837. Dies 1852, one month before his forty-third birthday. In another ten years, Gogol Ganguli will be that age. He wonders if he will be married again one day, if he will ever have a child to name. A month from now, he will begin a new job at a smaller architectural practice, producing his own designs.
There is a possibility, eventually, of becoming an associate, of the firm incorporating his name. And in that case Nikhil will live on, publicly celebrated, unlike Gogol, purposely hidden, legally diminished, now all but lost.

He turns to the first story. "The Overcoat." In a few minutes his mother will come upstairs to find him. "Gogol," she will say, opening the door without knocking, "where is the camera? What's taking so long? This is no time for books," she will scold, hastily noting the volume open against the covers, unaware, as her son has been all these years, that her husband dwells discreetly, silently, patiently, within its pages. "There is a party downstairs, people to talk to, food to be taken out of the oven, thirty glasses of water to fill and line up on the sideboard. To think that we will never again all be here together. If only your father could have stayed with us a bit longer," she will add, her eyes growing momentarily damp. "But come, see the children under the tree."

He will apologize, put the book aside, a small corner of a page turned over to mark his place. He will walk downstairs with his mother, join the crowded party, photographing the people in his parents' life, in this house, one last time, huddled on the sofas, plates held in their laps, eating with their hands. Eventually, at his mother's insistence, he will eat as well, seated cross-legged on the floor, and speak to his parents' friends, about his new job, about New York, about his mother, about Sonia and Ben's wedding. After dinner he will help Sonia and Ben scrape bay leaves and lamb bones and cinnamon sticks from plates, pile them on the counters and two burners of the stove. He will watch his mother do what his father used to do toward the end of every party, spooning fine-leaf Lopchu tea into two kettles. He will watch her give away leftovers in the cooking pots themselves. As the hours of the evening pass he will grow distracted, anxious to return to his room, to be alone, to read the book he had once forsaken, has abandoned until now. Until moments ago it was destined to disappear from his
life altogether, but he has salvaged it by chance, as his father was pulled from a crushed train forty years ago. He leans back against the headboard, adjusting a pillow behind his back. In a few minutes he will go downstairs, join the party, his family. But for now his mother is distracted, laughing at a story a friend is telling her, unaware of her son's absence. For now, he starts to read.