In Chapter 8, Gogol is set up with Moushumi and there’s quite a whirlwind affair. Lahiri at long last seems to have Gogol actually caring for someone. There is a quick escalation of the relationship and for some reason, we’re given a blow by blow of Moushumi’s past which includes a broken engagement–yes, this point would be important enough–and the rather stark realization that while she lived in Paris, she slept with just about anybody. Sometimes two and three in one day. I’m not sure she told Gogol this, but Lahiri does tell us, in one of her “tell, don’t show” episodes. Of which the next chapter is a shining example.
Chapter 9 is quite possibly the worst chapter in this book so far. With Gogol and Moushumi dating through the work of their parents, they get married. There is the wedding, a trip to Paris, and a dinner party with friends of Moushumi.
We get such minute details of the wedding, the guests, the food, and yet not much of the ceremony. Here again, it’s almost like a reporting of an event that misses the meaning, the feeling behind it. Even when they go to Paris for a brief stay, we get a description of the apartment of a friend where they’re staying:
Instead of staying at a hotel, they stay in an apartment in the Bastille which belongs to a friend of Moushumi’s, a male friend named Emanuel, a journalist, who is on holiday in Greece. The apartment is barely heated, minuscule, at the top of six steep flights of stairs, with a bathroom the size of a phone booth. There is a loft bed just inches from the ceiling, so that sex is a serious hazard. An espresso pot nearly fills the narrow two-burner stove. Apart from two chairs at the dining table, there is no place to sit. (p. 230)
I only wish that Lahiri had allowed as much time to the reason that Moushumi was so vague and distant after she delivered her presentation that she’d worked so hard on.
He sits down, orders a coffee. “How was it? How did it go?”
She lights a cigarette. “Okay. Over with, at any rate.”
She looks more regretful than relieved, her eyes lingering over the small round table between them, the veins in the marble bluish, like those in cheese.
Normally she wants a full account of his adventures, but today they sit silently, watching the passers-by. (p. 233)
We may assume that Paris reminds her of a time in her life when she was happy, independent, and in love. But she’s newly married and it seems a little odd. It’s likely that the presentation makes it obvious to her that she’ll be leaving Paris again, but we just don’t have the fullness of the scene that would have made it notable.
The last segment of the chapter is the dinner party at her friends–and here Lahiri gives us more information about the guests and what they do for a living and the description of the house, the meal, and their former ties to her ex fiancee that its all unnecessary information. Meanwhile, the changes that are seeping into the couple’s relationship is sort of passed over. Even with a (rather convenient) discussion among all the couples about baby names, and the blurting out by Moushumi that Nikhil’s name was originally Gogol elicits a rather strange response from him. He is thirty years old by now and should have come to terms with it by now. The name, more than anything, still seems to irk him.
The final lines in this scenario, and of the chapter, leave me wincing.
And yet he can’t help but recall a novel he’d once picked up from the pile on Moushumi’s side of the bed, an English translation of something French, in which the main characters were simply referred to, for hundreds of pages, as He and She. He had read it in a matter of hours, oddly relieved that the names of the characters were never revealed. It had been an unhappy love story. If only his own life were so simple. (p. 245)
Huh? How complicated is his life? He’s been raised by loving parents, gotten all the education he could desire, has a good job, never gone hungry, had a few sexual affairs that didn’t require any emotional input from him, married a woman who he was genuinely attracted to and felt something for. Poor Gogol!
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