October reading

October at last! And in 25 days, I will (finally) be 21! I am excited that I will be allowed into bars. I don’t want to drink anything there, because bars are expensive. But maybe I will just hang out in them for kicks. Another girl in my program has her birthday on October 30^th, so we are thinking of doing a joint birthday dessert night or something. (Also two other girls’ birthdays are on November 11^th and 12^th, so we’ll get to celebrate again!)

Wow I have so many things I want to talk about. I really need to update this blog more, because otherwise my rambling thoughts have even less structure than they normally do. For this post, I am going to make a list: 1. The Namesake. 2. Sarnath. 3. The Ramayana. 4. Slumdog Millionaire. Okay, here goes! (Edit: I have decided to split these up to make it less intimidating to read.)

First off, I want to talk about books! Books are possibly my favorite things, after air and water. They are certainly better than people most of the time. Anyhoo, I brought Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus and Sherlock Holmes with me to India and finished them both before we even got to Varanasi. Oops. So a couple of weeks ago I went to a teeny tiny book shop (I am not exaggerating; the shop is one closet-sized room) and purchased Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake.  The cover had pictures from the movie, which would normally deter me from purchasing it, but I was desperate.

For those of you who don’t know, The Namesake is about a first-generation Indian couple who moves to the United States and begin their family. The father has a special connection to the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, and so they name their first son after him. Gogol grows up to resent his name and identity, and the readers are given a look into the lives of first-generation immigrants and their second-generation children, and the struggle to find and comprehend one’s identity.

The book, as you can imagine, is not an especially cheerful read, but it is enjoyable nonetheless. I enjoyed it immensely, but I think I was able to understand it in a dual context considering my current location. It was interesting to read about the concrete floors inside the houses and the clothing and food and other quirks of India and actually to be able to relate to said experiences. Reading about Ashima’s experience of moving to Cambridge and feeling like an outsider was definitely relatable. Though she speaks English, she feels as if everyone is staring at her and wondering about her accent, and finds it difficult to make any American friends or even acquaintances. I unfortunately do not have the advantage of speaking Hindi, but I do feel that everyone stares and notices me. Well, they do. Not a day passes where someone stops to stare at me or watch me suspiciously, and while I am making friends within my program, I do not have any Indian friends outside of my host family. Of course, I do have the luxury of travel, and I can bear these difficulties fairly easily because there is a definite ending point to them.