Even though close to two decades have passed, Gogols memory

of going to the very tip of Cape Cod on a blustery winter

afternoon remains sharp and haunting, as if carved on a
headstone. And with his fathers absurd, sudden death still
painfully fresh, the episode takes on a far weightier significance.
We see his father helping him clamber over the breakwaters
giant gray slanted stones with Ashima protesting that hes
much too little, a situation in many ways mirroring his sixth-grade
field trip to a decrepit Puritan graveyard. There, he was moving
among similarly weather-beaten stones for an art project, and
similarly encountered opposition from his mother when he
showed her the rubbings. (Whats next, she demands to know, a
trip to the morgue?) Ashoke doesnt have this paralyzing fear of
looking death in the eye, in part because he has had so much
practice, having spent hours in extremis amid the carnage and
debris of that countryside train wreck. We glimpse some of this
solidity and strength, the ability to emotionally hold it together,
early on, when he has to tell Ashima that her beloved and muchtoo-young father died, first press[ing] her to the bed and lying
on top of her.
So when he takes issue with what he sees as his wifes
overprotectiveness and accompanies Gogol on a journey to a
place where there [is] nowhere left to go, it feels like an
initiation rite into manhood, acquainting his son with both the
thrill of adventure and the specter of mortality. The surrounding
sea resembles a graveyard with its fish spines, yellow skulls,
and dead gull. And one slip on the jetty stones might have
Gogol meet the same skull-crunching fate as Piggy in Lord of the
Flies. But we also see his father at his most joyously alive in the
novel: he collects cool stones, admires the seascape, and even
takes an alfresco whiz. It seems as if Ashoke is telling his son that
while death is all around us, an ever-encroaching seascape, we
can find meaning in our shared experiences, in our being along
for the ride. (This is a novel where sitting next to someone on a
physical journey---a bus, a train---can easily morph into a life
journey.) The memory ends with the father exhorting the son to

remember it always. The rich complexity of this experience,

what its saying about life and death, wouldnt be grasped by the
child back then. Its only after Gogol matures, gains selfknowledge, and becomes intimately acquainted with loss that he
is able to go back and fully register its significance.