(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
Gogol's family made it a point of driving into Cambridge with the children when the Apu Trilogy played at the Orson Welles, or when there was a Kathakali dance performance or a sitar recital at Memorial Hall.
when Gogol was in the third grade, they sent him to Bengali language and culture lessons every other Saturday, held in the home of one of their friends. For Ashima and Ashoke it sounded strange that their children were conversing in a language that still at times confounded them, in accents they were accustomed not to trust. In Bengali classes, the children were not showing much interest to learn instead they preferred to attend a ballet or softball practice. Gogol hated it because it kept him from attending every other session of Saturday-morning drawing classes he'd enrolled in, at the suggestion of his art teacher.
As a young boy he did not mind his name. He recognized pieces of himself in road signs : GO LEFT, GO RIGHT, GO SLOW. He was told that he was named after a famous Russian author born in the previous century. The substitute teachers always paused, looking apologetic when they arrived at his name on the roaster, forcing Gogol to call out, before even being summoned, "That's me," teachers in the school system knew not to give it a second thought. After a year or two, the students no longer teased him saying "Giggle" or "Gargle" "Gogol is an outstanding student, curious and cooperative," his teachers wrote year after year on report cards.
As for his last name, Ganguli, by the time he was ten he had been to Calcutta three more times, twice in summer and once during Durga pujo, and from the most recent trip he still remembered the sight of it etched respectably into the white-washed exterior of his paternal grandparents' house. He was astonished to see six pages full of Gangulis, three columns to a page, in the Calcutta telephone directory. On taxi rides through the city, went to visit the various homes of his relatives, his father had pointed out the name, Ganguli, on the awnings of confectioners, and stationers, and opticians. He had told Gogol that Ganguli was a legacy of the British, an anglicized way of pronouncing his real surname, Gangopadhyay.
Back home on Pemberton Road, he helped his father paste individual golden letters from a rack in the hardware store, spelling out GANGULI on one side of their mail box. One morning, the day after Halloween, Gogol discovered, on his way to the bus stop, that it had been shortened to GANG, with the word GREEN scrawled in pencil following it. His ears burnt at the sight, and he ran back into the house, sickened, certain of the insult his father would feel. Though it was his last name, too, something told Gogol that the desecration was intended for his parents more than Sonia and him. For by now he was aware, in stores, of cashiers smirking at his parents' accents, and of salesmen who preferred to direct their conversation to Gogol, as though his parents were either incompetent or deaf. But his father was unaffected at such moments, just as he was unaffected by the mailbox. "It's only boys having fun," he told Gogol, flicking the matter away with the back of a hand, and that evening they drove back to the hardware store, to buy the missing letters again.
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