Moushumi, feeling confined in the marriage, begins an affair with an old friend, an aimless academic named Dimitri Desjardins. Ashoke is a quiet, sensitive man, and although the narrator does not have access to many of his thoughts, he is nevertheless devoted to his wife and children. In Chapters 3 and 4, Gogol grows up as a Bengali American child with a name that is neither Bengali nor American. In the first chapter we see Ashima pregnant with her first child, craving a spicy Indian snack sold by street vendors on roadsides in Kolkata. Her resolution to spend six months of each year in Calcutta and six months in America symbolizes the joint identity at which she finally arrives.

When she talks about her mother’s “salesmanship” in successfully ‘singing her praises’ to the groom’s family when their marriage was being arranged, when she remembers how the whole family came to the airport in India to wave them goodbye, I had familiar flashbacks from exactly similar experiences in my life. If an action is participated in, lists of all the objects involved, with as prolific a number of brand names as possible.For being a foreigner Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy -- a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. A curious warmth floods her abdomen, followed by a tightening so severe she doubles over, gasping without sound, dropping the onion with a thud on the floor. Despite their Bengali-American heritage, Moushumi grow apart, become foreign to one another, because Moushumi longs for a different set of experiences, and for a different kind of relationship. At the same time, Ashoke and Ashima take their children to regular gatherings of their Bengali friends in America, and the family takes extended trips to Calcutta, at one point living with relatives for an eight-month period.

In 2001 she married Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, Senior Editor of Time Latin America, and with whom she now resides in Rome, Italy, along with their two children. They may be fictional characters but they sound like real people, and their stories sound like an accumulation of real data.After a summer trip to India before starting college at Yale, Gogol starts opening up to his culture and becomes more accepting of it. The soundtrack has varied music: Indian, Anglo-Indian (by Nitin Sawhney, influenced by Ravi Shankar's music for Pather Panchali), [9] and a French piece.