Question

First, read the following text carefully:


The Namesake

They are surprised, in the summer, to learn that their father has planned a trip for them, first to Delhi to visit an uncle, and then to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. It will be Gogol and Sonia's first journey outside of Calcutta, their first time on an Indian train. They depart from Howrah, that immense, soaring, echoing station, where barefoot coolies in red cotton shirts pile the Gangulis' Samsonite luggage on their heads, where entire families sleep, covered, in rows on the floor. Gogol is aware of the dangers involved: his cousins have told him about the bandits that lurk in Bihar, so that his father wears a special garment under his shirt, with hidden pockets to carry cash, and his mother and Sonia remove their gold jewels. On the platform they walk from compartment to compartment, looking for their four names on the passenger list pasted to the outside wall of the train. They settle onto their blue berths, the top two swinging down from the walls when it is time to sleep and held in place by sliding latches during the day. A conductor gives them their bedding, heavy white cotton sheets and thin woolen blankets. In the morning they look at the scenery through the tinted window of their air-conditioned car. As a result, the view, no matter how bright the day, is gloomy and gray.
They are unaccustomed, after all these months, to being just the four of them. For a few days, in Agra, which is as foreign to Ashima and Ashoke as it is to Gogol and Sonia, they are tourists, staying at a hotel with a swimming pool, sipping bottled water, eating in restaurants with forks and spoons, paying by credit card. Ashima and Ashoke speak in broken Hindi, and when young boys approach to sell postcards or marble trinkets Gogol and Sonia are forced to say, "English, please." Gogol notices in certain restaurants that they are the only Indians apart from the serving staff. For two days they wander around the marble mausoleum that glows gray and yellow and pink and orange depending on the light. They admire its perfect symmetry and pose for photographs beneath the minarets from which tourists used to leap to their deaths. "I want a picture here, just the two of us," Ashima says to Ashoke as they wander around the massive plinth, and so under the blinding Agra sun, overlooking the dried-up Yamuna, Ashoke teaches Gogol how to use the Nikon, how to focus and advance the film. A tour guide tells them that after the Taj was completed, each of the builders, twenty-two thousand men, had his thumbs cut off so that the structure could never be built again. That night in the hotel Sonia wakes up screaming that her own thumbs are missing. "It's just legend," her parents tell her. But the idea of it haunts Gogol as well. No other building he's seen has affected him so powerfully. Their second day at the Taj he attempts to sketch the dome and a portion of the facade, but the building's grace eludes him and he throws the attempt away. Instead, he immerses himself in the guidebook, studying the history of Mughal architecture, learning the succession of emperors' names: Babur, Humayun, Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, Aurangzeb. At Agra Fort he and his family look through the window of the room where Shah Jahan was imprisoned by his own son. At Sikandra, Akbar's tomb, they gaze at gilded frescoes in the entryway, chipped, ransacked, burned, the gems gouged out with penknives, graffiti etched into the stone. At Fatehpur Sikri, Akbar's abandoned sandstone city, they wander among courtyards and cloisters as parrots and hawks fly overhead, and in Salim Chishti's tomb Ashima ties red threads for good luck to a marble lattice screen.

Then do the following task: Written expression

Back at the hotel in Agra, Sonia and Gogol discuss their incredible train trip through India. Imagine the dialogue (150-200 words). Thank you. Take your time. Enjoy!

Answer 1

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