The Namesake: Chapter 12 Summary & Analysis

It is Christmas eve in the year 2000, and Ashima is sitting at the kitchen table, preparing her signature croquettes for an upcoming party—the first since her husband’s death, and the last before she moves from the house at Pemberton Road, which has been sold to a young American family. Hearing their plans for renovation, she had hesitated, but in the end went through with the sale. She has decided to spend six months in India and six in America for the rest of her life. In Calcutta she will live with her brother Rana and his family, in America she will split her time between her children and Bengali friends.

One reason for moving is the marriage of Sonia to Ben, which is scheduled to take place in Calcutta next year. Ashima looks kindly on this marriage—Ben makes Sonia happy in a way that Moushumi never did with Gogol, a match she still feels guilty for encouraging. They are divorced now, not having felt constrained, as the previous generation would have, to stay together, to settle.

Now, for these last few hours, Ashima is alone in her home, a state of existence she has grown used to. She is no longer the same Ashima she once was, and will be returning to Calcutta with an American passport. Still, she looks forward to a world where she does not have to make her own croquettes, or cobble together homemade yogurt from half-and-half. She finishes the last croquette and looks at the food she has prepared with anticipation. She has enjoyed cleaning and preparing for this last gathering, a welcome relief from the slow task of packing up her life room by room.

Upstairs in the bathroom before showering, imagining life as a grandmother, Ashima suddenly starts sobbing in memory of her husband and fear for what is to come, this journey to a place she has missed for so long, and which is now in its own way foreign. She will miss parts of her life in America, like her children, the library, throwing parties, and the memories of her husband. Steeling herself, Ashima puts on a thick pink robe, a gift from her husband, no doubt picked out by one of her children. She does not fault Ashoke for this fact, which could seem like a lack of care. She no longer wonders what it would have been like to fall in love before being married, instead of afterward. Now the robe is a reminder of the life they built together here.

No one greets Gogol at the train, so he waits at the station, reflecting on his mother’s upcoming move, and the loss of his childhood home. Soon there will be no more reminder of his past here, and his mother will be far away. For the first time, Gogol feels he understands what it must have been like for Ashima and Ashoke to leave their past life in India, and he wonders if he has the same strength. He has never lived more than a four-hour journey from home, he realizes, a journey he has made again and again. It was on the train that he first discovered Moushumi’s affair, when she slipped up and mentioned Dimitri. He had felt the same betrayal as when Ashoke told him about the train accident, but none of the accompanying tenderness, only anger.

Gogol and Moushumi were then trapped together on the train, and then at the Christmas celebration at his home. Moushumi revealed the whole story, and for the first time Gogol found himself more upset at another man’s name than his own. Moushumi left the apartment after that weekend, and Gogol removed the rest of her things from their home, just as he had done after his father’s death. Gogol went alone on the trip to Venice that he had planned for them to take together, and he sketched its buildings. A year later, the shock is gone, but sometimes the shame persists—although he cannot blame Moushumi. He knows they both acted out of the same mistaken impulse, looking for comfort in a world they feared was dying out. His time with her now feels empty of meaning, “like a name he’d ceased to use.”

Sonia and Ben arrive, and Sonia greets Gogol, saying, “Welcome home, Goggles.” They go to the house and assemble the artificial Christmas tree, decorated with ornaments they made as children. They put up the stockings and drink champagne from Styrofoam cups. That night Ashima will fill their stockings, according to the rules of Christmas her children have taught her—rules that Sonia rejected one year after taking a Hinduism class in college, a fact they tease her for now.

The guests begin to arrive, chattering in Bengali and expressing their regret at Ashima’s departure. Gogol realizes that Ashima has been the force that gathers them all together for these occasions, and it is Ashima they have relied on to translate American customs, customs that she only knows because of Gogol and Sonia. Ben is overwhelmed by all of the new names, but Gogol reassures him that he will never need to know them all—he refers to them all as meshos and mashis, uncles and aunts.

Gogol reflects that their life has been formed by a series of accidents—first Ashoke’s train accident, inspiring him to move to America, then the disappearance of the letter containing his good name and the accident of his being named Gogol. His marriage feels like an accident as well, and worst of all is the death of his father—but it is these things that endure, that have brought them here today. Ashima interrupts Gogol’s thoughts to ask him to fetch the camera, and he goes upstairs to find his father’s Nikon. He is distressed by how empty all the rooms are.

Gogol takes the camera into his old room to load a new battery, and is struck by how much is the same here, as he has yet to clean out the room. Ashima has warned him that all of his books will be donated to the library where she works. Gogol pokes through a box of them, and one book catches his eye. It is the copy of The Short Stories of Nikolai Gogol that his father had given him years before, still unread. He finds the inscription, and reflects that soon there will be no one left to call him Gogol. His father is dead, and his mother is leaving. The thought is an unhappy one.

Gogol closes the door and sits down with the book, which has been saved as if by chance from being lost, just as Ashoke had been saved from the train accident years ago. Gogol reads the author’s bio—in ten years he will be 43, the age Nikolai Gogol died. Gogol wonders if he will remarry, and have children. There is a chance that the new architecture firm he is about to start working for will someday take on his name—Nikhil Ganguli—but the name Gogol will not live on.

Gogol opens to the first story in the book, “The Overcoat.” Soon Ashima will come to find him, wondering where he has been, scolding him, urging him to come and take his photos. He will descend the staircase and help to serve the food, and then to clean the plates, watching his mother give away leftovers in the cooking pots themselves. But for now, Gogol settles against the headboard and begins to read.