As the authorities came to his rescue, Ashoke waved a tattered page from the book which helped the authorities spot and assist him.
A few years prior to his marriage, Ashoke had encountered a train accident in India while he was reading The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol. Ashoke had handpicked the moniker out of his adoration for the Russian writer, Nikolai Gogol. Consequently, the family began to address the baby as Gogol. Ashima’s grandmother had the ceremonial honour of naming their newborn son, however, the elderly lady suffered a stroke, and her letter got lost in the mail. Ashoke was a doctoral candidate pursuing electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the mid-1960s, Ashima married Ashoke, dutifully following the custom of arranged marriage in Calcutta, India, and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts with him where she eventually gave birth to a baby boy. With a svelte delicacy, she recounts the newfound tussles of first-generation Americans, their quest for their identities and, the constant, gnawing feeling of not belonging anywhere, which she aptly describes as a lifelong pregnancy to highlight the sensation of discomfort. With an extraordinary ability to weave a bestseller out of the ordinary lives of the characters, Lahiri's meticulous observational skills are evident. The book is a piece of bildungsroman fiction as it deals with the formative years of its protagonist, Gogol Ganguli, who is the son of Indian Bengali immigrant parents, Ashoke and Ashima, in the United States. The narrative sculpts a palpable storyline as it traces the voyage of a family from one continent to another and the consequential unfamiliarity, disarray, their filial love, and the emotional toll that their journey entails. The overwhelming and intricate style of writing that Jhumpa Lahiri possesses is showcased brilliantly in her debut novel The Namesake. Her pellucid prose portrays the milieu of Indian Bengali immigrants attempting to carve their own space in America while simultaneously retaining their cultural roots, and steadily holding onto their traditional idiosyncrasies and rituals.
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