From Calcutta to Boston to the borderless kingdom of words

Sunday, October 05, 2003

By Sherri Hallgren

Jhumpa Lahiri won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for her first book, the luminous and richly praised story collection "Interpreter of Maladies." While writing about the complications faced by Indian immigrants and their first-generation American children, Lahiri's deeper interest was to explore relationships between women and men, a territory without borders.

	"The Namesake" By Jhumpa Lahiri Houghton Mifflin ($24)

Now, in her much-anticipated first novel, she focuses on the cultural dislocations of one family, immigrants from Calcutta who settle in Boston to study, work and raise a family.

Like her subtle, precise stories, this novel moves quietly, eloquently across its central arc from the birth of a son to the death of the father.

And as with those stories, its appeal is cross-cultural, with an impact that accrues, chapter by chapter, until its final poignant insights.

It begins in 1968, when Ashoke Ganguli and his wife, Ashima, newlyweds in an arranged marriage, arrive in Cambridge, where Ashoke is a doctoral candidate in electrical engineering at MIT. For Ashoke, this is a journey of liberation; for Ashima it is exile from family at the worst imaginable time because she is pregnant.

Lahiri simultaneously chronicles the adjustments of the parents as she tells the story of their son, Gogol, named haphazardly (because the hospital needed a name for the birth certificate) for Ashoke's favorite writer, the Russian Nikolai Gogol.

As the Gangulis prosper and move to the suburbs, Gogol grows up being in, but not of, two cultures at once. He attends American schools but passively spends weekends in his parents' extended circle of Bengali friends.

He and his sister are taken to occasional Hindu celebrations they don't understand, even as Gogol's sari-wearing mother capitulates to Christmas trees and Thanksgiving turkeys (rubbed with cumin and cayenne).

Lahiri's narrative moves lightly through time, landing on selected years, as one would move through the pages of a photo album. Her point of view shuttles between the parents and their son, and is richly sympathetic to both generations.

We understand the sensibility of Ashoke and Ashima, for whom an eight-month sabbatical in Calcutta is reunion with everything that is meaningful, as we do the dismay felt by a teenage American boy separated from all that is familiar to him.

Gogol focuses all his adolescent agitation on his odd name, neither American nor Bengali, but Russian, and a last name at that. And so, entering Yale, he changes it, to Nikhil.

As Nikhil, he studies architecture, not engineering, and then begins his career in New York, where he was allowed out of the car "only once they got to Lexington Avenue, to eat lunch at an Indian restaurant and then to buy Indian groceries, and polyester saris and 220-volt appliances to give to relatives in Calcutta."

Lahiri chronicles his relationships with a commune-raised daughter of hippies, with a cultured intellectual still living with her fashionable parents in Chelsea and finally, in a difficult marriage to a Bengali woman from his parents' crowd, raised in England, now teaching French, as culturally adroit and adrift as he.

Through all his efforts to find an identity, a relationship, a place where he is Nikhil, Gogol remains Gogol at home. What he does not know is that Ashoke's attachment to the name runs deeper than literary affection; as a college student in Calcutta, Ashoke had been on a train that derailed, killing hundreds of passengers, and was saved only because someone saw paper fluttering in his immobile hand -- a few pages from the volume of Gogol's stories he had been reading.

That Gogol resents -- and then rejects -- the name that represents life itself to his father is the tragedy of missed meaning and misunderstanding that happens in houses all over the United States, probably all over the world.

In this post-modern era, culture fragments and ties of blood disappoint. Lahiri honors a bond stronger, and more transcendent than either of those. When Ashoke was a child in India, his grandfather read to him, saying "Read all the Russians, and then reread them."

Later, as Ashoke is reading his well worn copy of Gogol's stories moments before his train derails, Lahiri writes: "Just as Akaky's ghost haunted the final pages, so did it haunt a place deep in Ashoke's soul, shedding light on all that was irrational, all that was inevitable about the world."

Later yet, as a father, Ashoke gives his son a copy of Gogol's stories for his 14th birthday, and the book will lie unopened on a shelf until the day Gogol finds it again, at a party for his father's funeral, and begins at last to read.

Against all that is irrational and inevitable about life, Lahiri posits the timeless, borderless eloquence and permanence of great writing.

Sherri Hallgren, former director of the graduate creative writing program at Saint Mary's College of California, teaches writing in the North Hills.

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