soopastryheart

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 his 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.”

— excerpt from The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri