The letter never arrives, and soon after, the grandmother dies. The traditional naming process in their families is to have an elder who will give the new baby a name, and the parents wait for the letter from Ashima's grandmother. The delivery is successful, but the new parents learn they cannot leave the hospital before giving their son a legal name. Had the delivery taken place in Calcutta, she would have had the baby at home, surrounded by family. Ashima struggles through language and cultural barriers as well as her own fears as she delivers her first child alone. Ashok is an engineering student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The story begins as Ashok and Ashima Ganguli, a young Bengali couple, leave Calcutta, India, and settle in Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The novel moves between events in Calcutta, Boston, and New York City, and examines the nuances involved with being caught between two conflicting cultures with distinct religious, social, and ideological differences. It explores many of the same emotional and cultural themes as Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection Interpreter of Maladies.
It was originally published in The New Yorker and was later expanded to a full-length novel. The Namesake (2003) is the debut novel by American author Jhumpa Lahiri.
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