<p>FOUND IT!</p>
<p>He spends the days of orientation rushing around campus, back and forth along the intersecting flagstone path, past the clock tower, and the turreted, crenelated buildings. He is too harried, at first, to sit on the grass in Old Campus as the other students do, perusing their course catalogues, playing Frisbee, getting to know one another among the verdigris -covered statues of robed, seated men. He makes a list of all the places he has to go, circling the buildings on his campus map. When he is alone in his room, he types out a written request notifying the registrar’s office of his name change, providing examples of his former and current signatures side by side. He gives these documents to a secretary, along with a copy of the change-of-name form. He tells his freshmen counselor about his name change; he tells the person in charge of processing his student ID and his library card. He corrects the error in stealth, not bothering to explain to Jonathan and Brandon what he’s so busy doing all day, and then suddenly it is over. After so much work, it is no work at all. By the time the upperclassmen arrive and classes begin, he’s paved the way for a whole university to call him Nikhil: students and professors and TAs and girls at parties. Nikhil registers for his first four classes: Intro to the History of Art, Medieval History, a semester of Spanish, Astronomy to fulfill his hard science requirement. At the last minute he registers for a drawing class in the evenings. He doesn’t tell his parents about the drawing class, something they would consider frivolous at this stage of his life, in spite of the fact that his own grandfather was an artist. They are already distressed that he hasn’t settled on a major profession. Like the rest of the Bengali friends, his parents expect him to be, if not engineer, then a doctor, a lawyer, an economist at the very least. These were the fields that brought them to America, his father repeatedly reminds him, the professions that have earned them security and respect.
The NamesakeBut now that he’s Nikhil, it’s easier to ignore his parents, to tune out their concerns and pleas. With relief, he types his name at the top of his freshman papers. He reads the telephone messages his suitemates leave for Nikhil on assorted scraps in their rooms. He opens up a checking account, writes his new name into course books. “Me Illamo Nikhil,” he says in his Spanish class. It is as Nikhil, that first semester, that he grows a goatee, starts smoking at parties, and while writing papers and before exams, discovers Brian Eno and Elvis Costello and Charlie Parker. It is as Nikhil that he takes Metro-North into Manhattan one weekend with Jonathan and gets himself a fake ID that allows him to visit the bars.
There is only one complication: he doesn’t feel like Nikhil. Not yet. Part of the problem is that the people who now know him as Nikhil have no idea that he used to be Gogol. They know him only in the present, not at all in the past. But after eighteen years of Gogol, two months of Nikhil feel scant, inconsequential. At times he feels is if he’s cast himself in a play, acting the part of twins, indistinguishable to the naked eye yet fundamentally different. At times, he still feels his old name, painfully and without warning, the way his front tooth had unbearably throbbed in recent weeks after a filling, threatening for an instant to sever from his gums when he drank coffee, or iced water and once when he was riding in an elevator. He fears being discovered, having the whole charade somehow unravel, and in nightmares his files are exposed, his original name printed on the front page of the Yale Daily News. Once, he signs his old name by mistake on a credit card slip at the college bookstore. Occasionally he has to hear Nikhil three times before he answers.
Even more startling is when those who normally call him Gogol refer to him as Nikhil. For example, when his parents call on Saturday mornings, if Brandon or Jonathon happens to pick up the phone, they ask if Nikhil is there. Though he has asked his parents to do precisely this, the fact of it troubles him, making him feel in that instant that he is not related to them, not their child. “Please come to our home with Nikhil one weekend,” Ashima says to his roommates when she and Ashoke visit campus during parents weekend in October, the suite hastily cleared of bottles, ashtrays. The substitution sounds wrong to Gogol, correct but off-key, the way it sounds when his parents speak English to him instead of Bengali. Stranger still is when one of his parents addresses him, in front of his new friends, as Nikhil directly: “Nikhil, show us the buildings where you have your classes,” his father suggests. Later that evening, out to dinner with Jonathan at a restaurant on Chapel Street, Ashima slips, asking, “Gogol, have you decided yet what your major will be?” Though Jonathan, listening to something his father is saying, doesn’t hear, Gogol feels helpless, annoyed yet unable to blame his mother, caught in the mess he’s made.</p>
<p>Source: [MAG</a> THE WEEKLY, MAG FICTION-Devdas](<a href=“Mag the weekly Fashion Magazine - Your Source for Fashion Trends, Beauty Tips, Pop Culture News, and Celebrity Style”>Mag the weekly Fashion Magazine - Your Source for Fashion Trends, Beauty Tips, Pop Culture News, and Celebrity Style)</p>