New York, Oct 27: After crisscrossing the country on a book tour, Jhumpa Lahiri came home to New York City - and a roomful of eager fans.
All seats were taken at Lahiri's recent reading at the Polytechnic Preparatory School, just two blocks from her home in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. The school opened its heavy oak doors to the Pulitzer Prize winning author and let the crowd spill into the front hallway and up the front staircase.
The demure Lahiri took her seat at the front of the room and began to read from her book, The Namesake. Her black hair shone under the lights and her large, dark eyes peeked out from behind the top of the book. "The book is really about accepting who you are," said Lahiri, who was born in London but raised in the United States. "There was a time when I felt confusion and conflicting loyalties between being American and Bengali. But now I think I understand it more" The Namesake, Lahiri's first novel, has received rave reviews from such publications as The New York Times and Entertainment Weekly. Booklist magazine called it an "avidly descriptive, and luxuriously paced first novel."

Lahiri eased on to the literary scene in 1999 with her debut collection of short stories, The Interpreter of Maladies. Back then her publisher, Mariner, simply released the book without sending her out on a book tour. The collection ended up winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2000 when Lahiri was 32. Now, crowds at her readings are huge, with some people coming with not only books to sign but old copies of the New Yorker, where her stories had appeared years ago.
The Namesake is the story of Gogol, a Bengali boy who is named on a whim after the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. In Bengali culture, it is traditional to have two names, a "good" name, or a name for which you're known outside the home and appears on official documents, as well as a "pet" name used only by family and close friends.

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Gogol was supposed to have a different name that was to come in a letter from his grandmother in Calcutta. However, the letter got lost in the mail, the grandmother fell ill and died and Gogol's parents have to give the hospital a name for their baby before they are discharged.
"The letter is key to the story," Lahiri said with a laugh at the reading. "Without it I wouldn't have a plot." Gogol grows to loathe his name, mostly because of its lack of a link to anything either American or Bengali.

Lahiri insists that The Namesake is not an autobiographical novel.
"I decided to write about my own Gogol," she told her fans. "The bedrock of the story is autobiographical, such as living in the suburbs and going to Bengali parties. But I imagined all the specifics to Gogol's life."

Like Gogol, Lahiri has accepted who she is and where she is going in life, including having a son who is part Bengali and part Hispanic, like her husband. She said there was a time when her parents would have preferred that she marry a Bengali man. In the end, though, she felt that wasn't the best choice for her. "Parents want for their children what seems safe, because that is what they know," she said. "But that can seem restrictive. I accept what I am. I don't compartmentalize. I am aware of the contradictions."
Bureau Report