(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
When they were alone, Mrs.Lapidus asked, "Are you happy to be entering to elementary school, Gogol ?"
"My parents want me to have another name in school."
"And what about you, Gogol ? Do you want to be called by another name ?"
After a pause he shook his head.
"Is that a no ?"
"Yes."
"Then it's settled. Can you write your name on this piece of paper ?"
Gogol picked up a pencil, gripped it tightly, and formed the letters of the only word he had learned thus far to write from memory, getting the "L" backward due to nerves. "What beautiful penmanship you have," Mrs.Lapidus said. She tore up the old registration form and asked Mrs.McNab to type up a new one. Then she took Gogol by the hand, down a carpeted hallway with painted cement walls. She opened a door, and Gogol was introduced to his teacher, Miss Watkins, a woman with hair in two braids, wearing overalls and clogs. Inside the classroom it was a small universe of nicknames ; Andrew was Andy, Alexandra Sandy, William Billy, Elizabeth Lizzy. It was nothing like the schooling Gogol's parents had known, fountain pens and polished black shoes and notebooks and good names and sir or madam at a tender age. Here the only official ritual was pledging allegiance first thing in the morning to the American flag. For the rest of the day, they sit at a communal round table, drinking punch and eating cookies, taking naps on little orange cushions on the floor. At the end of his first day he was sent home with a letter to his parents from Mrs.Lapidus, folded and stapled to a string around his neck, explaining that due to their son's preference he would be known as Gogol at school. What about the parents' preference ? Ashima and Ashoke wondered. But since neither of them felt comfortable pressing the issue, they had no choice but to give in.
And so Gogol's formal education began. At the top of sheets of scratchy pale yellow paper he wrote out his pet name again and again, and the alphabet in capitals and lower case. He learned to add and subtract, and to spell his first words. In the front covers of the text books from which he was taught to read he left his legacy, writing his name in number-two pencil below a series of others. In art class, his favorite hour of the week, he carved his name with paper clips into the bottom of clay cups and bowls. He pasted uncooked pasta to cardboard, and left his signature in fat brush strokes below paintings. Day after day he brought his creations home to Ashima, who hung them proudly on the refrigerator door. "Gogol G," he signed his work in the lower right-hand corner, as if there were a need to distinguish him from any other Gogol in the school.
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