‘The Namesake’ and The Stories We Tell About Our Parents

I have learned every square inch of the story of how my parents met. They told it to me over and over across the years: My father took a fluke trip to India, thinking it was a vacation. His uncle took one look at him and said, “You’re old enough to be married.” A matrimonial ad was placed in the newspaper. My mother said, “Alright, I’ll meet one more boy.” She didn’t like him at first as much as she liked his sisters, Vini and Vina, with their sweetly complementary names, like characters in a novel. And, within weeks of my parents’ first meeting, they were wed. My father came back to the US with a wife. I even once met the uncle who had a hand in setting it up—he had gray hair and square glasses and was very proud of his role. And each year I learn something more that fills the domestic myth of my parents’ fateful meeting out further. The bones of the story stay the same in each retelling, though the story is always affected by the mood of the teller. Sometimes in awe, sometimes annoyed, sometimes languid.

My dad also told me about the first time he heard American music, how Motown exploded out of the used car his family just bought when the ignition was turned and it was like his brain was exploding too. I have fussed over pictures of him as a long-haired youth in the ’70s. He had a big mustache and huge sideburns, as if everyone just casually looked like a rock star who fell out of a documentary.

There is something resplendent in the stories of our parents. It is as if the lives they have lived are accessories to our own. The fact that they did these things, they lived there, they saw that, means that we have done those things in some small way or that we may want to replicate those experiences. This endless pursuit of our parents’ stories is, to me, the core of The Namesake.

Mira Nair’s 2007 The Namesake, an adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s book of the same name, begins with a family’s mythology: Ashoke Ganguli is reading aboard a train traveling from Calcutta to Jamshedpur in the 1970s. An older man advises him to see the world instead of staying in India. “You are still young, free. Do yourself a favor,” he says. Ashoke, played by Irrfan Khan, shrugs him off and returns to his book. Then, suddenly, the small world he knows is capsized as the train flies off the rails. As Ashoke emerges from the wreckage that spares no one else, he clutches pages of the book he was reading—The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol—and a burning need to travel to see everything before it’s too late.

It is as if the lives they have lived are accessories to our own. 

Then, later, there’s the softly romantic scene of Ashima, played by Tabu, slipping her feet into Ashoke’s white-and-brown brogues, their “Made in USA” stamp embossed in shiny gold. He has come as a suitor to meet her family. She hasn’t even seen his face, they don’t even know each other, but her feet fit in his foreign shoes. She knows nothing about him, but this act demonstrates an intimacy the film builds on as the two get married and raise children together in America.

My parents have stories like these. Not so many near-death experiences, but those touching pre-now times where everything is invested with meaning even though you don’t know it yet.

But at the same time, when parents first tell us these stories, we cannot promise we will receive them. There are so many stories wrapped in throwaway comments about hard times at college or a first van trip to New Orleans that are lost to me now because I wasn’t keen enough when they were tossed out. Ashoke’s son Gogol, played by Kal Penn and named for the author of that life-saving text, is a grumpy teenager when his father tries to patiently explain why he loves the writer he named his son after. “He has spent most of his life outside his homeland, like me,” Ashoke says. Everything feels like a lecture, an interminable and exhausting display of adult out-of-touch-ness. Who cares that Nikolai Gogol, that dead Russian writer, has a thin connection to your father? Why does this man in front of you care so much? It is the same feeling you get when you’ve worked through a calculus problem for the fifth time to no avail: “When will I ever use this?”

Something changes over time. Maybe when we leave home and we miss the meals we ate day in and day out at the kitchen table and the stories we heard. Or maybe everything takes on the rippled gold patina of age and looking backward is a bittersweet thing. Maybe when we finally have a backward look, that’s when we realize we are too late.

Everything is the past, and the past is what forms us.

*

There are perhaps a few billion immigrant stories that fit the contours of “I came to this place with no friends, no money, only ambition.” Or, like my mother, “I came here when I got married to raise my family.” Or, like my grandfather, “I came here to study and work and build something.” I may have taken some liberties, but the core is the same––I was once there and now I am here and it has been a struggle.

Then there’s the moment of truth that tests the whole hero’s journey: when the children are born. Providing “a better life” is the motivation for all manner of sacrifice, hurt, harm perpetrated, unfairness, and on and on. This dream of a better life is as romantic as our notions of poverty building character. It’s a creation myth—without it, we don’t have renewed streams of immigrants coming to this country to build it in our image.

The myth is seductive though. It alters the language and our behavior. When Gogol is of the age when he’s all elbows and knees, his little sister has her Mukhe Bhaat ceremony, where her whole future is laid out on a tray with items like a dollar bill and a pen. Picking one over the other means a career as a teacher or wealth.

“Put the dollar in her hand! American girl must be rich,” someone cheers as she blinks her big doll eyes.

With the fervor of these dreams for the children comes the eventual fall, when we reject our parents. This is the time when everything they do makes us angry, even what they named us. Names are sensitive things, a part of our own myths. They are a projection of us, in as much as we allow them to be. They belong to our parents who name us until they belong to us firmly. There’s a moment of change when we name ourselves, and sometimes it’s the name we were given.

Gogol goes through phases through the film. When he’s a child, he comes home with a note saying the school will call him Gogol, his pet name, at his insistence rather than the more palatable Nikhil, his good name. And so he embraces his parents with his entire heart.

As a crossed-arms teenager, he can’t imagine how he can seduce someone with a name like Gogol Ganguli. His friends moan it to him as a joke. It’s appalling. It contorts the mouth and sounds cartoonish. Now the story of how his father survived with the pages of Gogol’s book in his hand doesn’t matter. The mythos pales against the pressing reality of getting girls. When he goes to school, he changes his name back to Nikhil. It will look better on a resume or a credit card application, he tells his annoyed father. Later, he blows out the candles on a birthday cake given to him by his WASP girlfriend’s family that says “Happy Birthday Nick.” He’s going through iterations of himself.

As someone with a Romanian namesake in gymnast Nadia Comăneci and a Russian name that befuddles every well-meaning white person, I understand. When I was about three, I insisted on being called Kathy, like the blonde girl from Barney. The way I followed her with my eyes every time I sprawled out in front of the TV—I was besotted with her. In my child’s way, I was preoccupied with what the ease of looking like her might feel like. I wanted to put her on like a costume and get a turn at being an uncomplicated American sweetheart.

There was another time when I wanted something more romantic and storied like Jasmine, named after a flower or a gemstone, the heroine in an unwritten drama. But I didn’t have names to bounce between and so I stuck it out. My parents never obliged me with these phases. They were firm in their belief that they knew me better than I knew myself and that one day I’d like my name as it was. And that too chafed.

Isn’t it a great betrayal when our parents are right all along? How much are we fitting their plan and how much is the plan changing to fit us? I can never know. I didn’t become a gymnast. Breaking my collarbone with one bad throw in Judo was enough for my parents to pull me out. Who knows what would have happened if I had a shred of the dexterity needed to fly around the bars? But the romance I yearned for was there. As was the universality—it would just take me a few decades to meet dozens of Nadias, Nadjas, and Nadyas. Now I can’t turn on a TV show without hearing my name. If there is irony here, I’ve found it.

*

In the diaspora there is a much-ridiculed tradition of referring to your parents as “my immigrant parents” or else “my South Asian parents,” as if we only understand them in the context that reflects on us. We invest them with political purpose so that our politics might be better understood. But they are, in the end, simply parents, perhaps of a different origin than us, but impossible to be relayed through demographic adjectives. They may not even subscribe to the phrasings we dub them with.

Isn’t it a great betrayal when our parents are right all along?

Our parents, for better or for worse, are inescapable. They are suffused in our actions. And we are often somehow defined by the ultimate passing of our parents. Even after we no longer need them, we are children until they are gone; then we stand on our feet.

The past repeats itself in the future. Our weddings are mapped on to theirs. The births of our children come like our births did to them. But our failures are our own. When Gogol’s marriage fails, he feels he fails doubly because his parents were happy together up until his father died suddenly. They had a romance that was palpable.

I often find myself rejecting the worst parts of my parents that I see in myself––their short attention spans, tempers, impatience, and indecisiveness. But I also hate when I can’t replicate their best parts. It’s like those things were held back in the DNA transfer and all I can provide is a gross approximation of their steadfastness or their sense of adventure or their faith in others.

I think what strikes me in every rewatch of The Namesake is how each time feels deeper somehow. It goes beyond noticing things I missed before. When the film came out in 2007, I was sixteen. I didn’t watch it until I was about twenty. And since then I’ve seen it maybe half a dozen more times. It is possibly one of the most important films in the South Asian American syllabus, if someone were to ever make one. It is the rare case of the film living up to the book and both providing a lasting story to shepherd the generations through this strange, bracketed existence. To tell a story close to what we all share, it necessitates a polyphonic, multigenerational telling.

But that’s what it is. Every time I watch it, I feel more detached from Gogol’s story, though he and I are both second-generation. I find Ashoke and Ashima infinitely more relatable. My romance is backward-looking. I feel the significance of my parents’ stories and my grandparents’ stories more intimately than I feel my own, probably because I’ve been living apart from them for over ten years now. Romanticizing them provides an anchor where there is none—as if I could go anywhere but I’ll still belong somewhere. And after living alone in three major cities since I turned eighteen, I’m always looking for grounding.

My parents are my mythos and I view them through alternatingly rose-colored and harsher lenses. I’m sure there will be a day in the future when they stop being the glowering villains of my teen years or the heroes of my childhood and they will simply just be, as human as they are. Fallible and enthusiastic in their love.

*

The film ends on the process of the creation of the mythology. Ashima holds their newborn baby Sonia to her chest as Ashoke and a young Gogol climb the rocks of the windy beach out to where the water crashes. As they reach the end, Ashoke realizes he forgot his camera back on the shore. He bends down to Gogol and tells him that without a camera, he must simply remember what he sees.

“How long do I have to remember?” Gogol exclaims, looking out over the white-tipped water. He is perturbed by the task, the enormity of what’s required of him.

“Remember it always,” his father says. “Remember that you and I made this journey, that we went together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.”

Seeing them like that, Ashoke’s curls bobbing in the wind, a very bundled Gogol straining to look out over the sea and understand it all, reminds me of similar photos I have. In them, my parents swing me between them across a golden sand beach. I am wearing a blue top and striped leggings. My smile has holes in it where the teeth have begun to pop out. Kites fly overhead. Wind whips my hair across my eyes, but it’s clear that I am beaming.

When I think of my parents, it’s hard to square my more recent memories with them and these early recorded days that are full of pure joy. The frustrating thing is that I don’t remember the day in the pictures, but I remember the pictures. They are the relics of my childhood, sanctified and made sacred by my parents. There is never a way to remember something perfectly as it truly happened. Every remembrance is a misremembrance.

Memory is a cobbled-together thing, changing with each retelling, an oral tradition of its own.

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