After two years in university-subsidized housing, Ashima and Ashoke decide to buy a home. Ashima is extremely upset and they decide to go to Calcutta six weeks earlier than they had planned for the funeral.īy 1971, the Gangulis have moved from Harvard Square to a university town outside Boston.
Ashima's brother Rana calls with the bad news that her father has suffered a heart attack and died. Six months later, the Gangulis are planning a visit to India. Ashima and Ashoke hold a rice ceremony for Gogol when he is six months old. Ashoke chooses Gogol, the name of the author whose stories he was reading when the train crashed years before.
However, it is time to leave the hospital and the letter has not arrived, so they decide to make up a pet name that will be used until they can officially name their baby based on his grandmother's wishes. It is the Bengali tradition to have a respected elder choose the name of a child. Ashima and Ashoke want to wait to name him until a letter arrives from Ashima's grandmother with two name options: one for a boy and one for a girl. Rescue workers found Ashoke because of the book page he clutched in his hand. On the train, he had been reading a collection of short stories by Nikolai Gogol, a Russian author, when the locomotive engine and seven bogies derailed, causing Ashoke's car to be flung into a nearby field. In the waiting room of the hospital, Ashoke remembers how in 1961, as he was taking the train from Calcutta to Jamshedpur to visit his grandfather and collect the books he was to inherit from him, there was an accident and he had nearly died. Her husband, Ashoke, accompanies her to the hospital in a taxi. The year is 1968, and Ashima Ganguli, a Bengali woman who has recently moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts with her new husband, is about to give birth.
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