The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

It's been a while since I've read a non-Book-Club book. But, in deference to my new year's resolutions, I picked up The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri. It helps that there is no book for Feb's meeting - only poems, which are easy enough to swallow in one sitting, while waiting for time-shifted shows to catch up to me. I was very much looking forward to this book as it has had such critical acclaim and the movie looked very promising (but I hadn't watched it). Also, it features a Bengali family (from Calcutta, not Bangladesh) living in the west, so I was intrigued. The movie trailer features a quick cut scene had left a vague impression on me, and whatever it was, it was completely different from what the book turned out to be.

First of all, there are no life-altering trips to India - there are trips (many, in fact), but they're all talked about in hindsight and brushed off quickly. I guess the movie does this great job of juxtaposing father and son while the book doesn't seem to do that at all. What the book does do is capture the vague embarrassment that immigrant kids feel around their parents (not just the embarrassment that we all feel when we're hitting puberty, but the nails-on-chalkboard kind when you realise that the funny smell emanating from the coat hooks at school belongs to you). It really is cringe-worthy. And there's really only two ways of dealing with it: you either find others like you or you shun your heritage and try to blend in as much as possible. Had we the maturity to walk the fine line in between - to embrace our native and adopted culture - it would be different... but asking school-aged kids to do that? Impossible.

That's why - when I read the passage about Gogol keeping his pet name and refusing his good one, I couldn't help but think: "you're going to regret that..." ... and he does. In that delicious irony that is hindsight, he then spends the rest of his life fighting against that decision.

What really gets me - what always gets me - is the earnestness with which immigrant parents try so hard for their kids: Ashima and Ashoke even celebrate Christmas, though they're Hindu. It's like they feel that embarrassment on behalf of their children and try to work around it as best they can. My parents were such the same - they never forced me to take Bengali heritage class or read Tagore. Though we were Catholics and therefore could easily celebrate in a predominantly Christian society, they did things that they've never done before moving here: buying us Halloween costumes and valentine cards and cutting up carrot sticks for our lunches. It's amazing how little we appreciate this as children and how we take it for granted as adults.

With the Family Day long weekend here, I suppose I'm feeling a bit maudlin, just a little nostalgic, for all the efforts of my parents. For my dad who bussed to four different "Consumers' Distributing"s all over the city in search of that kitchen set, for his taking me to Marineland and Wonderland and the Ex (where I promptly abandoned him for my friend), for his playing Monopoly and Clue, for his swimming lessons. For my mom, who faithfully packed my lunches every morning while I, faithfully, I threw them out every afternoon (I only started eating them in high school), who sewed me costumes for plays and dances and trick-or-treating, who swabbed my chicken-pocked body in camomile lotion, who took the day off for my first day of school and whom I abandoned at the gate, without tears or even a glance back. For my parents, who were thanked so infrequently for the things they did.

If Lahiri's book does nothing else, it certainly makes me appreciate family.