The Namesake: Ashima and Moushumi

Name: Tintrin Prameswati

NIM: 2211412061

Subject: Prose Analysis

The Namesake: Ashima and Moushumi

        Ashima Ganguli was the wife of Ashoke and the mother of Gogol and Sonia. Ashima was raised in Calcutta. After married with Ashoke, she moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and stayed in a suburb of Boston to raise her family. Her original name was Ashima Bhaduri.  Ashima was five feet four inches, tall for a Bengali woman, ninety-nine pounds. Her complexion was on the dark side of fire, but she had been compared on more one occasion to the actress Madhabi Mukherjee. Her nails were admirably long, her fingers, like her father’s, artistically slim. I guess her hair was long and black, because her appearance when her wedding like Indian. Her hair wound up, bound with flowers, held in place by a hundred wire pins. In Calcutta, before she was married, she was working toward a college degree. She used to tutor neighborhood schoolchildren in their homes, on their verandas and beds, helping them to memorize Tennyson and Wordsworth, to pronounce words like sign and cough, to understand the difference between Aristotelian and Shakespearean tragedy. Now, in America she became housewife. In the morning she opened the window, clearing up the bed, preparing her husband’s needed for work, and making breakfast. In the evening, she cooked for dinner with her husband. She did something like that everyday. Her personality was independent, smart, appreciative, protective, and diligent. She lived in disciplinary, from she woke up in the morning, cleaning, shopping, cooking, until sleeping again everyday. She was smart in manage of time. She was appreciative to her culture, although she lived in America she was still use sari as her dress. She was protective woman, she was dislike when Gogol in relationship with Maxine, she divorced Gogol with Ashima, because she was generation of Indian too. Ashima was independent and diligent for example, she prefers to cook by herself than buy in the outside. She also did everything in the house by herself without housemaid.

        Moushumi Mazoomdar, she was the wife of Gogol and the daughter in law of Ashima and Ashoke. She was the daughter of friends of Gogol’s parents who had lived for a while in Massachusetts, then moved to New Jersey when Gogol was in high school. Moushumi had a slender face, pleasingly feline features, spare, straight brows. Her eyes were heavy-lidded and boldly lined on the top lids, in the manner of 1960s movie stars. Her hair was middle-parted, gathered into a chignon, and she wore stylishly narrow tortoiseshell glasses. Her dressed like modern people, for example when Moushumi and Gogol having dinner in Italian restaurant, she wore a navy wool coat, a black wool scarf at her throat, long black leather boots that zip up the sides. She had a British accent. She was a graduate student of NYU. She was candidate for a Ph.D. in French literature at NYU. She spent the last summer temping, working for two months in the business office on an expensive midtown hotel. Her job was to review and file all the exit surveys left by the guests, made copies, distribute them to the appropriate people. Her personality chummy, luxurious, the bookish, intelligent, sympathetic, restless, disloyal or cheat girl. She was chummy with new people, in the first time she met Gogol, they chatted each other enjoyably without awkward. Her appearance was luxurious, we could see from her dress. She was bookish, always with a book in her hand at parties. It made her intelligent, her French was good. When Moushumi and Gogol having dinner, she presented her sympathetic about Gogol’s father had passed away. When she started playing heart with other man, she felt restless every day. The bad personality of Moushumi was disloyal to her husband. She had cheated her husband who was very love to her. She cheated on Gogol after only a year or so of marriage.