The Namesake (2003), Jhumpa Lahiri’s first novel, was widely acclaimed on literary platforms like The New York Times and USA Today, has been translated into Bengali and Marathi, and was made into a film (directed by Mira Nair) in 2006. Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli are first-generation immigrants to America. When Ashoke moves to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to pursue his doctorate in electrical engineering at MIT, he is joined by Ashima. Gogol, their son, born in 1968, grows up as an American teenager and rebels against his “pet” name, “Gogol,” by which he is generally known, and in which he is officially registered in documents. Ashoke names his son Gogol after Nikolai Gogol, the famous Russian author whose work Ashoke was reading when he nearly died in a train accident 209 km from Calcutta in 1961. He was saved when rescuers spotted him in the darkness after a search lantern shone on the pages of the Russian story “The Overcoat” that he had been clutching in his hand. Even though his son Gogol hears the story of the near-fatal accident and begins to respect the feeling behind his father’s naming of him, Gogol continues to stay at an emotional distance from his parents, embarrassed or, at times, even ashamed of their deference to Bengali cultural norms and their cultural difference from Anglo-American middle-class normative cultural practices, with which, despite their familiarity, they have never been entirely at ease. In his various attempts at acculturation, Gogol begins to abhor his parents’ sense of obligation to the “homeland” of Calcutta, their continued affiliation to the Bengali Indian diasporic community, and, above all, their sense of insecurity in America.