(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
It's in 1968, after about eighteen months of her settled life in America with Ashoke, she started experiencing morning sickness associated with nausea and vomiting. Initially she thought it to be a stomach disorder due to the unusual food that she had consumed in the week-end parties with their Bengali friends in their surroundings. But as it persisted she complained to Ashoke about her sickness. Ashoke took her to Mount Auburn Hospital in a Cambridge street, up Massachusetts Avenue and past Harvard Yard. A gynecologist, Dr.Ashley, confirmed her first pregnancy and prescribed suitable drugs to be regularly consuming and to get medical check-up periodically.
As the days passed on she started feeling the consequence of her pregnancy in a foreign land, away from her parents, suffering the queasy mornings, the sleepless nights, the dull throbbing in her back, the countless visits to the bathroom. That it was happening so far from home, unmonitored and unobserved by those she loved, had made made it more miraculous still. She was terrified to raise a child in a country where she is related to no one, where she knows so little, where life seems so tentative and spare.
During day time whenever she faced any problem associated with the pregnancy, she used to call out to her husband, Ashoke, a doctoral candidate in Electrical Engineering at MIT.
On a sticky August evening, two weeks before her due date, Ashima Ganguli was in her kitchen, standing, of a their Central Square apartment, combining Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion, thin slices of green chili pepper and salt in a bowl. Ashima had been consuming this concoction throughout her pregnancy, a humble approximation of the snack sold for pennies on Calcutta side walks and on railway platforms throughout India, spilling from news paper cones.
All of a sudden she started experiencing her pelvis aches from the baby's weight and a curious warmth flooding her abdomen, followed by a tightening so severe spasm of discomfort. In the bathroom she discovered, on her underpants, a slid streak of brownish blood. She called out her husband studying in the bedroom.
At dawn a taxi was called to ferry them to the hospital that she was going for her regular medical check-up,Mount Auburn Hospital. Ashima registered, answering about the frequency and duration of the contractions, as Ashoke filled out the forms. She was seated in a wheel chair and pushed through brightly lit corridors, whisked in to an elevator and taken to the maternity floor. She was assigned to a bed by a window, in a room at the end of the hall. She was asked to remove her Marshidabad silk sari in favor of flowered cotton gown that, to her mild embarrassment, only reaches her knees. A nurse offered to fold up the sari but, exasperated by the six slippery yards, ends up stuffing the material in to Ashima's slate blue suitcase. Her obstetrician, Dr. Ashley arrived to examine her progress. The baby's head was in the proper position, has already begun to descent. She was told that she was still in early labor, three centimeters dialated, beginning to efface. The process would take some time, Dr. Ashley told her, given that this was her first pregnancy, labor could take twenty-four hours, some times more.
"Don't you worry, Mr.Gaguli. She's got a long way to go. We can take over from here," a nurse added, and Ashoke stepped behind the curtain saying, "I'll be back soon," to his wife in Bengali.
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