(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
Gogol's sister was born in May 1974. This time the labor happened quickly. They were thinking about going to a yard sale in the neighborhood one Saturday morning, playing Bengali songs on the stereo. Gogol was eating frozen waffles for breakfast, wishing his parents would turn off the music so that he could hear the cartoons he was watching, when his mother's water broke. His father switched off the music and called Dilip and Maya Nandi, who now lived in a suburb twenty minutes away and had little boy of their own. Then he called the next-door neighbor, Mrs.Merton, who had offered to look after Gogol until the Nandis arrive. Though his parents had prepared him for the event, when Mrs.Merton showed up with her needlepoint he felt stranded, no longer in the mood for cartoons. He stood on the front step, watching his father help his mother into the car, waving as they pulled away. To pass the time he drew a picture of himself and his parents and his new sibling, standing in a row in front their house. He remembered to put a dot on his mother's forehead, glasses on his father's face, a lamppost by the flagstone path in front of the house. "Well, if that's not the spitting image," Mrs. Merton said, looking over his shoulder.
That evening Maya Nandi, whom he called Maya Mashi, as if she was his own mother's sister, his own aunt, was heating up the dinner she had brought over, when his father called to say the baby has arrived. The next day Gogol saw his mother sitting in angled bed, a plastic bracelet around her wrist, her stomach no longer as hard and round. Through a big glass window, he saw his sister asleep, in a small glass bed, the only one of the babies in the nursery to have a thick head of black hair. He was introduced to his mother's nurses. He drank the juice and ate the pudding off his mother's tray. Shyly he gave his mother the picture he'd drawn. Underneath the figures he'd written his own name, and Ma, and Baba. Only the space under the baby was blank. "I didn't know the baby's name," Gogol said, which was when his parents tell him. This time, Ashoke and Ashima were ready. They had the names lined up, for a boy or a girl. They'd learned their lesson after Gogol. They'd learned that schools in America would ignore parents' instructions and register a child under his pet name. The only way to avoid such confusion, they had concluded, was to do away with the pet name altogether, as many of their Bengali friends had already done. For their daughter, good name and pet name were one and the same : Sonali, meaning "she who is golden."
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