This motivated him to move far away from home and start anew. With many broken bones and no strength to move or call out, dropping the crumpled page is the only thing Ashok can do to get the attention of medics looking for survivors. He had been reading a short story collection by Gogol just before the accident, and lying in the rubble of the accident he clutched a single page of the story ' The Overcoat' in his hand. As a young man, Ashok survived a train derailment with many fatalities. Ashok suggests the name of Gogol, in honor of the famous Russian author Nikolai Gogol, to be the baby's pet name, and they use this name on the birth certificate. Bengali culture calls for a child to have two names, a pet name to be called by family, and a good name to be used in public. The letter never arrives, and soon after, the grandmother dies. The traditional naming process in their families is to have an elder who will give the new baby a name, and the parents wait for the letter from Ashima's grandmother. The delivery is successful, but the new parents learn they cannot leave the hospital before giving their son a legal name. Had the delivery taken place in Calcutta, she would have had the baby at home, surrounded by family.

Ashima struggles through language and cultural barriers as well as her own fears as she delivers her first child alone. Ashok is an engineering student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The story begins as Ashok and Ashima Ganguli, a young Bengali couple, leave Calcutta, India, and settle in Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The novel moves between events in Calcutta, Boston, and New York City, and examines the nuances involved with being caught between two conflicting cultures with distinct religious, social, and ideological differences. It explores many of the same emotional and cultural themes as Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection Interpreter of Maladies. It was originally published in The New Yorker and was later expanded to a full-length novel.

The Namesake (2003) is the debut novel by American author Jhumpa Lahiri.

The namesake lahiri