why did ashima think that the boy would have a childhood she has not known?
STORY FROM NAMESAKE
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Gogol celebrates his fourteenth birthday twice. His first is an “American” celebration: watching a basketball game with school friends (of different backgrounds) at home, eating pizza and ice cream. The second is a large, formal, Bengali affair, for which his mother prepares lamb curry and other traditional foods for days. Dozens of Bengali friends from the greater Boston area arrive at the home, including one girl Moushumi, whose family has come to the region from England, where they lived previously. Moushumi, who has an English accent of which she’s mildly embarrassed, says she does not like TV, and she reads instead of playing with the others. She has little to say to Gogol. After this second party, Gogol hears a knock on his bedroom door, and lets in his father, who has a present for him: Nikolai Gogol’s short stories. Gogol accepts the gift nonchalantly. Although it seems his father has more to tell him about its significance, Ashoke merely repeats a saying of Dostoevsky’s to his son—that “We all came out of Gogol’s overcoat,” a reference to Gogol’s most famous story. Gogol Ganguli doesn’t understand his father’s statement, and, after Ashoke leaves, Gogol stores the book in a corner of his room and forgets about it.
Gogol’s classmates find his name increasingly odd. Some wonder whether it’s “Indian,” and Gogol explains that he is named after a Russian author. To add to Gogol’s high school difficulties, his father receives a sabbatical for the academic year, when Gogol is in tenth grade, and Ashima and Ashoke announce to their children that the whole family will be moving to Calcutta for eight months. Gogol and Sonia are upset, as they will miss school, their American friends, and the comforts of their life in Massachusetts. His parents, however, are thrilled to be back among their extended families, and for months they travel to different aunts’ and uncles’ houses in Calcutta, eating long meals and catching up. Gogol and Sonia feel out of place, “foreign” in the city, but Ashoke and Ashima, Gogol notices, are far more confident in their native tongue, and among their friends and relatives. By the time summer arrives, after several months in Calcutta without sightseeing, Ashoke decides that the family will travel to Delhi and to Agra and the Taj Mahal. Gogol is surprised that his own parents are “foreigners” in non-Bengali regions of India, and though he and Sonia get sick to their stomachs on the trip, Gogol is taken by the majestic architecture of the palace in Agra.
Gogol begins eleventh grade in the fall, and his English teacher, Mr. Lawson, assigns some classics of European short fiction, including Nikolai Gogol. Gogol Ganguli cringes when he hears Lawson explain the terrible sadness of Gogol (the writer’s) life, including periods of depression and mania, lack of success in publishing, and horrid writer’s block. Gogol eventually dies of self-inflicted malnutrition. Gogol is anguished with shame, since his namesake is such an apparently luckless character, although the other students don’t seem to notice as acutely as he does. The narrator moves on to Gogol’s social life in high school, which, though not particularly robust, does include some furtive drinking and smoking, which his parents never suspect. Gogol goes with friends one night to a party at the local college (where Ashoke is a professor), and meets a college girl named Kim, whom he kisses. He introduces himself to Kim as “Nikhil,” the first time he has done so.