ch name next voice of your heart que who run away in taxi and why
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Summary Chapter 7
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Summary
The chapter begins with Ashima, alone in the house on Pemberton Road, addressing Christmas cards. She is 48. The family is scattered across the US. The narrator, speaking from Ashima’s thoughts, notes that she is learning to appreciate her solitude, especially her part-time work at the public library, which has introduced her to middle-aged women in the neighborhood. Ashima enjoys Ashoke’s visits, occurring every three weeks, and although Ashima has learned to do more things around the house, Ashoke still handles the bills and manages the yard-work. Ashoke calls that night, interrupting her daydreams, and says he has checked into the hospital near Cleveland. But he tells Ashima not to worry: it’s only an upset stomach, and he will be discharged soon. Ashima is concerned for her husband’s welfare but, believing his illness to be minor, she returns to her Christmas cards.
Several hours pass. Ashima calls Ashoke’s apartment in Cleveland and gets no response. She starts to worry about her husband’s health. She calls the hospital near Cleveland and is placed on hold; when she finally hears a voice on the other end, she explains she has been waiting for her husband, who checked in recently with a stomach ailment. The hospital official tells Ashima they have been trying to reach her directly, and that Ashoke has died in the hospital, of a heart attack. The administrator uses the word “expired,” which Ashima’s associates not with death but with the library books she handles at her job. She hangs up, in shock.
Gogol learns of his father’s passing after a night out with Maxine. He flies alone to Cleveland to take care of his father’s belongings. Although Maxine offers to accompany him, Gogol declines. Gogol takes a taxi to the hospital and briefly identifies his father’s body. He drives his father’s leased car to the apartment complex where he has been living, a temporary “bachelor,” while teaching at the college in Ohio. Gogol cleans the apartment and, on his mother’s orders, throws away everything his father owned in the small lodgings. Ashima tells Gogol that keeping the belongings of the dead is “not the way” Bengalis handle mourning. After cleaning, Gogol talks to Maxine on the phone, and though she urges him to stay away from the apartment, in a hotel, for the night, Nikhil instead lies on the couch and sleeps fitfully till morning. On the flight back to New York, the next day, Gogol remembers Ashoke shaving his head when his own father passed away. Although Gogol did not understand this behavior at the time, he has a better sense now of what it means to mourn one’s father.
Gogol returns to the Boston suburbs and observes a period of family mourning with Sonia and Ashima (and without Maxine). After the ten days, during which they eat plain meals and avoid all other company, Ashima holds a gathering to celebrate Ashoke’s life, in keeping with Bengali tradition. Family friends arrive at Pemberton Road. Maxine, too, joins the party, although she is concerned for Gogol’s welfare and surprised he does not wish to “escape” the demands of the family’s mourning rituals. Maxine asks if Gogol still plans to come to New Hampshire with the Ratliffs for the New Year, and Gogol declines, saying that he wishes to stay with his mother and sister.
Ashima, in the weeks that follow, takes care of logistical details related to her husband’s life, and realizes that his time away, in Cleveland, has enabled her to get a head-start on managing her own affairs. Sonia decides to remain in the Boston area permanently, instead of returning to California. Gogol takes the Amtrak down to Penn Station, where Maxine will be waiting for him, although he has mixed feelings about seeing her again, and entering back into their comfortable life in the Ratliff household. Gogol, on the train, has a daydream about a trip he and his father took, out onto a spit of land on Cape Cod. On that day, Ashoke asked Gogol to remember their walk forever—to remember that they went together to the edge of the continent.
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