The two children, with their natural, unaccented English and socialization in the American school system, are the reason for Ashoke and Ashima’s adoption of Christmas and of certain American food items. His sister Sonali (Sonia) is born, and the two siblings begin to bond as the carriers of American influence in the house.

When he begins kindergarten, his parents decide that his “good name” will be Nikhil-Ashima’s grandmother had suffered a stroke, so her naming letter was lost in the mail-but at school Gogol continues to be called by his “pet name,” frightened by the idea of changing it. Gogol becomes central to his mother’s life, filling some of the loneliness she feels for India. The novel then tracks Gogol’s growth, as the family moves into a small suburban town when Ashoke is hired as an assistant professor at the local university.

The couple waits for their son’s “good name” to come in a letter from Ashima’s grandmother in India, but in the meantime they must give the hospital a temporary “pet name,” and so they settle on “Gogol,” the writer whose book saved Ashoke’s life and made possible this new one. Ashima, too, is struck by how different her son’s life will be, but she pities him because he will grow up alone, without the extended family that was so central to her own development. Ashoke reflects on how lucky this boy is-the baby receives the present of a book from a Bengali friend-and how different his life will be from Ashoke’s own. Soon their son is born, in the foreign environment of the American hospital. She feels lonely and homesick in America, clinging to letters from her family and devising makeshift Indian recipes with the ingredients she can scrounge together. For Ashima, however, the journey abroad has proven difficult.

He was discovered by the rescue party because of the blowing pages of the book he had been reading when the train derailed-a copy of The Collected Stories of Nikolai Gogol. Ashoke has been set on traveling abroad ever since a terrible train accident a few years previous, which he barely survived. The young couple met through an arranged marriage in Calcutta, India, where Ashima had lived her whole life before leaving to accompany Ashoke as he studies engineering at M.I.T. When we first meet Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli they are living in a small apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, about to welcome their first child into the world. The Namesake is the story of two generations of the Gangulis, a family of Indian immigrants to the United States.

Jhumpa lahiri's novel the namesake