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A Bengali couple have their first child in Massachusetts, far away from home. The husband, Ashoke Ganguli, is studying at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The young wife feels lost in an alien land with no one around to help her and no friend she could call on for comfort.
The young boy has to be named. It is the tradition in Bengali families to have an elder person in the family select the name. This privilege has been assigned to Ashima’s grandmother. But the couple discover that they cannot leave the hospital without naming the child first.
So, Ashoke chooses the name of his favorite Russian author, Gogol, as the name of his child, and they go home. Ashima’s grandmother dies before she can choose a name for her great grandson. So, the boy remains Gogol.
Initially, the child likes his name, when he enters his teens, he begins to resent it. His dislike for the name increases as he progresses towards high school. Before leaving for higher studies, he formally changes his name to Nikhil. He is now Nikhil Gogol Ganguli.
Ashoke has another reason for choosing the name Gogol for his son, but he does not explain that reason to him, thinking the boy would not understand. Meanwhile, the boy is identifying himself more with the American life rather than the Indian way of life, much to his mother’s chagrin.
He returns home for the holidays. On the way, his train is stopped for a while due to an accident. Ashoke, who is anxiously waiting at the station to receive him, finally tells him the main reason he named him Gogol.
Before his marriage, Ashoke was involved in a train accident. Lying in the middle of the wreck with a broken back, he had only been saved because a page from the Gogol novel he had been reading was sticking up from his hand like a flag attracting the attention of the rescue crew.
Gogol asks his father why he was not told this before, and the incident initiates a change in his attitude. He begins regretting having changed his name, and slowly starts to rethink the way he is living his life. His father’s death sometime later accelerates the change, and he begins to spend more time with his family.
His life changes in many ways after that, but he feels comforted by the thought that his father told him why he chose the name Gogol, before he died. The book ends with Gogol picking up a set of books by the Russian author that his father liked so much, symbolizing that Gogol is now comfortable with his own identity.
The novel was made into a movie of the same name by Mira Nair.ISBN - 9780007258918
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Pages : 304
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