(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
The presents of the birthday party were opened when the guests were gone. Gogol received several dictionaries, several calculators, several Cross pen-and-pencil sets, several ugly sweaters. His parents gave him an Instamatic camera, a new sketchbook, colored pencils and the mathematical pen he'd asked for, and twenty dollars to spend as he wished. Sonia had made him a card with Magic Markers, on paper she'd ripped out of one of his own sketchbooks, which said "Happy birthday Goggles," the name she insists on calling him instead of Dada. His mother set aside the things he didn't like, which was most everything, to give to his cousins the next time they went to India. Later that night he was alone in his room, listening to side 3 of the White Album on his parents' cast-off RCA turntable. The album was a present from his American birthday party, given to him by one of his friends at school. Born when the band was near death, Gogol was a passionate devotee of John, Paul, George, and Ringo. In recent years he had collected nearly all their albums, and the only thing tacked to the bulletin board on the back of his door was Lennon's obituary, already yellow and brittle, clipped from the Boston Globe. He sat cross-legged on the bed, hunched over the lyrics, when he heard a knock on the door.
"Come in," he hollered, expecting to be Sonia in her pajamas, asking if she could borrow his Magic 8 Ball or his Rubik's Cube. He was surprised to see his father, standing in stocking feet, a small potbelly visible beneath his oat-colored sweater vest, his mustache turning gray. Gogol was especially surprised to see a gift in his father's hands. His father had never given him birthday presents apart from whatever his mother bought, but this year, his father said, walking across the room to where Gogol was sitting, he had something special.The gift was covered in red-and-green-and-gold-striped paper left over from Christmas the year before, taped awkwardly at the seams. It was obviously a book, thick, hardcover, wrapped by his father's own hands. Gogol lifted the paper slowly, but in spite of that the tape left a scab. The Short Stories of Nikolai Gogol, the jacket said. Inside, the price had been snipped away on the diagonal.
"I ordered it from the bookstore, just for you," his father said, his voice raised in order to be heard over the music. "It's difficult to find in hardcover these days. It's a British publication, a very small press. It took four months to arrive. I hope you like it."
Gogol leaned over toward the stereo to turn the volume down a bit. He would have preferred The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or even another copy of The Hobbit to replace the one he lost last summer in Calcutta, left on the rooftop of his feather's house in Alipore and snatched away by crows. In spite of his father's occasional suggestions, he had never been inspired to read a word of Gogol, or any Russian writer, for that matter. He had never been told why he was really named Gogol.
"Thanks , Baba," Gogol said, eager to return to his lyrics. Lately he'd been lazy, addressing his parents in English though they continued to speak to him in Bengali. His father was still standing there in his room, watching expectantly, so Gogol flipped through the book. He looked at the picture at the front, on a smoother paper, a pencil drawing of the author. He couldn't find any resemblance of himself with the picture on the book, Nikolai Gogol.
For by then, he had come to hate questions pertaining to his name, hated having constantly to explain that his name did not mean anything "in Indian." He also hated having to wear a name-tag on his sweater at Model United Nations Day at school. He hated even signing his name at the bottom of his drawings in art class. He hated that his name was both absurd and obscure, that it was neither Indian nor American but of all things Russian. At times his name, an entirely shapeless and weightless, managed to distress him physically, like the scratchy tag of a shirt he had been forced permanently to wear. At times he wished he could disguise it, shorten it somehow, the way the other Indian boy in his school, Jayadev, had gotten people to call him Jay. But Gogol, already short and catchy, resisted mutation. Other boys his age had begun to court girls already, asking them to go to the movies or the pizza parlor, but he could not imagine saying, "Hi, it's Gogol" under potentially romantic circumstances. He couldn't imagine this at all.
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