The Namesake

The Husband and I finally watched the Namesake. I had intended to see it while it was in theaters, but well, life sort of got in the way. I taught this book when I taught at a certain University south of here. I love this book. It's bittersweet and beautifully written, so I was a bit nervous about the film. I need not have been, it's amazing. Beautiful and faithful and wonderfully sad in all the right ways.







Mira Nair directed it and she included one of my all time favorite parts from the book. It seems like a minor scene at first, it's only a childhood memory after all, but it means so much more than what it is.

And now that the Husband and I are on this totally different journey, both together and with the Boy, I was thinking about that passage. I got it down this morning and read it to the Boy while trying to tire him out for his nap (it didn't work, he's still wide awake and hanging out here beside me...c'est la vie).

Gogol and his father walk to the end of a jetty off of Cape Cod together. Gogol is maybe 5 years old and his father is bemoaning the forgotten camera--they will now have no picture of this moment. Jhumpa Lahiri writes,

"All this way and no picture," he'd said, shaking his head. He reached into his pocket and began to throw the striped stones into the water. "We will have to remember it, then." They looked around, at the gray and white town that glowed across the harbor. Then they started back again, for a while trying not to make an extra set of footsteps, inserting their shoes into the ones they had just made. A wind had picked up, so strong that it forced them to stop now and then.

"Will you remember this day, Gogol?" his father had asked, turning back to look at him, his hands pressed like earmuffs to either side of his head.

"How long do I have to remember it?"

Over the rise and fall of the wind, he could hear his father's laughter. He was standing there waiting for Gogol to catch up, putting out a hand as Gogol drew near.

"Try to remember it always," he said once Gogol had reached him, leading him slowly back across the breakwater, to where his mother and Sonia stood waiting. "Remember that you and I made this journey, that we went together to a place where there was nowhere left to go." (187)

It was one of those passages I made my students analyze again and again and again and every time I got wonderfully different responses. I always managed to lose myself in Lahiri's description of the landscape and completely overlooked the father and the son and the journey that they are on in the course of the book. I had to take my own journey to find that one.