summary of gogols first day
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After several years in Cambridge, Ashima, Ashoke, and Gogol move to the suburbs, to a college town where Ashoke has accepted a job as an assistant professor—despite Ashima’s plea that they stay nearer to Boston, since Ashoke also had a job offer at Northeastern. Ashoke enjoys teaching and research a great deal, and seems to relish the atmosphere of the town; Ashima, on the other hand, finds the transition from Cambridge jarring, and wishes she could walk around and come in contact with her neighbors, as she used to. Gogol begins nursery school, giving Ashima more time to herself than she has had in years, time which she does not, at first, know how to spend. Two years pass. The Gangulis buy a house in the college town (which remains unnamed), at 67 Pemberton Road, next to neighbors with names like “Johnson” and “Merton.” Because the Gangulis wait several months to plant grass and shrubs on their lawn, for a while the house sits on a dirt lot. In the summer, the Gangulis go to the nearby beach.
Ashima becomes pregnant again. Gogol is five and begins kindergarten; Ashoke takes over many of Ashima’s household chores, including cooking for the family. Ashoke drives Gogol to his first day of organized school. Beforehand, his parents tell Gogol, who is reluctant to attend kindergarten, that he will have a new name there, a “good name”: Nikhil, which is relatively common in Bengali and which also has a connection to Gogol, since the author’s first name is Nikolai. Although Ashoke presents Gogol to the principal, Mrs. Lapidus, as Nikhil, Gogol asserts, later, that his name is Gogol, and the teachers and principal, respecting the boy’s wishes over his parents’, register him as Gogol, not as Nikhil. Gogol’s sister is born, and Gogol goes to the hospital to greet her. His parents decide to combine her “pet” and “good” names, calling her, officially, Sonali: “she who is golden.” But the family refers to her in nickname form, as Sonia—also a Russian name, like Gogol. At her rice ceremony, when she is seven, Sonia eats nothing and misbehaves, causing the Bengalis to recognize that she is “the true American” in the family, more comfortable in the less formal culture of their adopted home.
Time continues to pass, and Ashima and Ashoke realize they have been living in America for ten years. They begin following more and more American customs, like buying a barbeque and celebrating secular versions of Christian holidays. The Gangulis begin to eat American food, wear ready-made American clothes, and buy other American products, like disposable razors and pens. Gogol notices that children in school occasionally make fun of his name, and he starts to feel self-conscious of its “strangeness.” His father, one night in the house, tells Gogol that their last name, Ganguli, is itself a shortened version, supplied by the occupying British, of their full Bengali name, Gangopadhyay. In sixth grade, Gogol goes on a school field trip to rural New England; they make a detour in an old cemetery, and do “rubbings” with charcoal of the names on gravestones, as a lesson in local history. Some students find names resembling their own; Gogol is aware that his name will not be present. When he brings home his rubbing from the gravestones, Gogol is surprised that his mother is upset, since she believes that, according to Bengali custom, it is morbid and sacrilegious to make art among the dead. Indeed, in Calcutta it is custom to burn, not bury, bodies. Ashima gives Gogol back the rubbing, refusing to hang it in the kitchen. Gogol keeps it upstairs, hidden.
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