Diasporic life colors certain human relationship in such hues that they appear anew as if the eye by changing its perspective sees things in a new light. Among all human relationships, the parent-child relationship is the basic relationship that has acquired an aura since Freud made it the basis of his psychological theory. At the same time the psychological theories like Oedipal complex and Electra complex have given a new focus to the study of parent-child relationship. George Bernard Shaw in his play, Misalliance, says about the relationship between parent and child as being ‘affectionate’, ‘useful’, ‘necessary’ but never an ‘innocent’ one. He goes so far as to humor that ‘in a thousand years it’ll be considered bad form to know who your mother and father are’. To come back from such futuristic assumptions, even if the parent-child relationship is considered without the moorings of its psychological interpretations, it will be found that the parent-child relationship forms the cornerstone of all civilized society. From a historical point of view the parent-child relationship marks ascendancy, a progress from one generation to another, hence its vertical nature. But from a sociological perspective the said relationship appears to be horizontal since both the parent and the child are members of the same society, at least for some length of time. The parent-child relationship is thus not only multi-layered but also multi-dimensional and when it is viewed in the coloring of the diasporic condition it appears as multi-faceted.

Jhumpa Lahiri in both her novel and her short stories has depicted the parent-child relationship in diasporic life. Lahiri has explored how the parent-child relationship goes through gradual stages of evolution over time and how such a relationship is qualified by the diasporic condition. Lahiri has brought out the sense of displacement, rootlessness, alienation and non-belonging that besiege all diasporic communities in her exploration of the relationships between non-resident Indian characters, especially the parent-child relationship. The parent-child relationship is very important in this context because it is a relationship between two immediate generations – one harboring a sense of dislocation and the other finding themselves rootless. The first generation NRIs have spent a part of their lives in India and then migrated to the West whereas the second generation NRIs are born and bred in the West. So, it is quite evident that because of their different upbringing the relationship between the first and second generation NRIs is bound to be a testing one.

Even when the child in the parent-child relationship is literally a child, it does not diminish the importance of the relationship; especially when the child is the narrator. Lilia is the child-narrator of Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story, When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine, and it is through her eyes that her parents come into focus. Lilia’s parents have accepted the fact that Lilia being born in America will celebrate Halloween with her American friends. Lilia’s parents are sensitive to her needs so that Lilia does not find herself as an outsider in American society. Her mother buys a ‘ten pound pumpkin’ and it is carved into a jack-o’-lantern and she is dressed as a witch and allowed to go trick-or-treating with her American friend Dora, without any escort, during Halloween. Lilia’s relationship with her parents is a happy and affectionate one but even little Lilia realizes that her parents are different from other parents. She cannot comprehend why her mother does not ‘seem particularly relieved’ on hearing that she has reached Dora’s house safely as much as she cannot comprehend her father’s and Mr. Pirzada’s discussion of civil war torn Bangladesh. Lilia’s father on the other hand, despite knowing that Lilia learned American history and American geography, cannot comprehend that his daughter is ignorant of the fact that India was partitioned at the time of its independence. Hence the little incomprehensions are arising in the parent-child relationship due to their diasporic condition.

Affection is the basic raw material in any parent-child relationship and even if the parents show some indifference towards their children it is not because they love them less but because of the strain in the relationship between the parents themselves. In the short story, Interpreter of Maladies, the relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Das, an NRI couple born and bred in America, is strained. Both the parents care for their children dearly but the rift in their relationship adversely affects their attitude towards their children:

The children are also sensitive enough to understand when the relationship between their parents has soured. Even if a parent tries to prevent the bitterness from getting into the child’s mind by physically distancing the child from the crisis, the child can make out the change from normalcy. In the short story, Sexy, the seven years old Rohin’s parents are on the brink of divorce because his father has fallen in love with another woman. Rohin is being taken by her mother to her parents’ house in California ‘to try to recuperate’. What Rohin’s parents might not know is how much Rohin knows about the crisis in their relationship. Rohin innocently divulges to Miranda who baby-sits him for a day:

"My father met a pretty woman on a plane…"

and,

Miranda imagines how Rohin must have overheard the quarrels between his mother and father and how it is going to alter his relationship with his parents.

Compared with Lilia and Rohin, the ten years old American boy, Eliot, from the short story, Mrs. Sen’s, is also lonely but he does not show any incomprehension about the cause of his loneliness. He is neither wracked by the fact that his father lives away from his mother. He is ‘wiser’ and has come to know ‘the way things must be’. But for the children of the Indian diaspora, it is a sterner test. Indian sensibilities in Western society not only put stress on the parent-child relationship but also on all allied relationships. In the short story, A Temporary Matter, Shoba and Shukumar are an NRI couple perfectly assimilated in Western society. But when their baby is born dead the tragedy becomes unbearable for them, it puts cracks in their relationship because in their diasporic life they had formed a strong bonding even with their unborn child. Such is the intensity of parent-child relationship in diasporic life.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, The Namesake, shows the growth of Gogol since childhood and the development of his relationship with his father and mother over time. Gogol’s relationship with his parents is not a streamlined one; it goes through a number of upheavals, ups and downs and is redefined a number of times. This shows that the parent-child relationship is not static – it is dynamic, ever-changing. The changes in the relationship reflects the changes in the character and attitude of the individuals concerned, especially in the diasporic context that taxes both the first and the second generation Indians in their exilic existence. Even before Gogol’s birth, when his mother, Ashima, is in the last stage of her pregnancy, Gogol’s presence is made to feel from the womb itself. In the hospital Ashima wonders if she is the only Indian person present, ‘but a gentle twitch from the baby reminds her that she is, technically speaking, not alone’. Before Gogol’s birth, though it is Ashima who carries the child, the father, Ashoke, ‘too feels heavy, with the thought of life, of his life and the life about to come from it’. So, even before Gogol’s birth his procreators acknowledge his presence that marks the onset of an enduring relationship.

After Gogol’s birth, Ashima’s initial glimpse, before the cord is cut, ‘is of a creature coated with a thick white paste, and streaks of blood, her blood, on the shoulders, feet, and head’. When Ashoke first looks at Gogol, he is reminded of the first miracle of his life where he was rescued from a massive train wreckage and ‘now, reposing in his arms, weighing next to nothing but changing everything, is the second’ miracle. One indicates a physical bonding between the parent and the child, the other a mental bonding.

Ashima’s loneliness in a foreign land is quelled for the time being in taking care of child-Gogol. It is Gogol who brings her close to her American environs when she takes him out in a pram. It is Gogol who helps in increasing the number of her Bengali acquaintances. It is Gogol who gives her occasion to celebrate – be it his birthdays or his rice ceremony. But Gogol is not just a medium for her to adjust in Western society. A symbolic incident indicates that the mother-son relationship is something more than that of convenience:

The umbilical cord connecting Ashima and Gogol has been clipped but there remains an intrinsic contact between them that can never be severed. If Gogol’s relationship with his mother is close from the start, his relationship with his father is quite aloof to begin with: especially when Ashima is pregnant with Sonia and Gogol is in his father’s care. When Gogol and his father eat together, ‘alone’, he does not feel like eating; he wishes his mother ‘would emerge from the bedroom and sit between him and his father, filling the air with her sari and cardigan smell’.

Gogol’s first show of dissent occurs with his parents very early in his life when he is admitted to school where he prefers being called ‘Gogol’ instead of ‘Nikhil’, the good name his parents gave him. It is a faint dissent but it indicates Gogol’s assertion of his individuality as a mark of his Western upbringing. Although Gogol goes to Bengali class every other Saturday to learn Bengali language and culture, his parents are more accommodating and know about his needs in a Western society:

Thus, since his childhood, Gogol finds himself adjusting with two cultures; he is forever at the crossroads where he has to choose either one or the other. When one day Gogol comes home from his school field trip with rubbings on paper of the names from gravestones, his mother is horrified. But Gogol is attached to them – these names of ‘very first immigrants to America’. So, ‘in spite of his mother’s disgust he refuses to throw the rubbings away’, he hides them behind his chest of drawers, ‘where he knows his mother will never bother to look’. The chasm between the first generation NRIs, represented by the parent, and the second generation NRIs, represented by the child, is slowly but surely widening.

On Gogol’s fourteenth birthday his parents throw a party for all their Bengali friends, but Gogol as an American cannot identify with such a crowd. Gogol’s relationship with his parents has changed from that of love to that of mere acceptance. After the party is over, when his father comes to his room he is listening to an album, ‘ a present from his American birthday party, given to him by one of his friends at school’. His father presents him The Short Stories of Nikolai Gogol, but he would have preferred The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or The Hobbit. Gogol has no interest in reading any Russian writer and ‘it dismays him that his parents chose the weirdest namesake’ for him among all the Russian writers. The child who insisted to be called Gogol and nothing else now hates his name. Since the parent-child relationship has become of mere acceptance, it flavors everything else in Gogol’s life – he simply has to accept them, he cannot love them. Even Gogol’s sister, Sonia, shows sparks of insolence with her parents when she threatens to color a streak of her hair blond or having additional holes pierced in her earlobes. No doubt, adolescents’ relationship with their parents are shaky but the diasporic condition adds tumult to it – the arguments are violent; parents cry, children slam doors.

As Gogol grows up he gets more disillusioned with his parents. He cannot understand why his parents disapprove of his romantic relationships with American girls; he cannot understand why his parents do not accept his American girlfriends as their parents accept him; he dislikes his parents when he compares them with the parents of his American girlfriends. When Gogol is involved with Ruth, his parents refuse to give him money to fly to England where Ruth has gone for a semester. Afterwards when he gets involved with Maxine, he sees Maxine’s parents, Gerald and Lydia, in stark contrast to his parents. Gogol distances himself from his parents and starts living in New York, away from his parents. He avoids going home on weekends excusing himself on the false pretext of work and spends his time with Maxine and her parents with whom he feels:

…none of the exasperation he feels with his own parents. No sense of obligation.

(The Namesake, Flamingo, UK, 2003, p. 138)

He thinks of the terms of his parents’ arranged marriage as ‘something at once unthinkable and unremarkable’. When he goes on a vacation with Maxine and her parents ‘he feels no nostalgia for the vacations he’s spent with his parents’.

Three incidents help to bring about reconciliation in the relationship between Gogol and his parents. The first occurs after his break-up with Ruth when once on his weekend visit to home he is late because of a minor train accident. His father picks him up at the station and on their way home tells him the secret behind his name. He tells him about the major train accident in India that almost killed Ashoke Ganguli twenty-eight years ago and the page of Nikolai Gogol’s short stories that he held in his hand, which ultimately reveals him to his rescuers. Gogol is stunned and:

The profoundness of the revelation, that his name is linked with his father’s brush with death, takes full effect when the second incident occurs. Gogol is vacationing with Maxine when he gets the news of the sudden death of his father in Ohio. Gogol flies alone to Ohio, traveling for the first time in ‘a world in which his father does not exist’. In the hospital he is asked to identify his father’s body:

It is a poignant moment because the parent-child relationship is undergoing a change now from dislike to longing. After his father’s death when the sacred rites are over, Gogol goes back to New York, but he longs to talk to his mother and sister, to be with them and at every opportunity rushes home. It is this intense, private longing that leads Gogol to break-up with Maxine. Just like before Gogol was born the parent-child relationship was established, even after Ashoke Ganguli’s death the relationship endures.

The third incident is the childhood memory of Gogol of one of the many times ‘he had driven with his family, on cold Sunday afternoons, to the sea’. He and his father had walked along the breakwater to the lighthouse where his father told him:

Like the narrator of Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story, The Third and Final Continent, Ashoke Ganguli has traveled in three continents – Asia, Europe and North America. He has journeyed from the east to the west and as the title of the story suggests, America marks the finality of that journey. Ashoke Ganguli has brought his son to be born and bred at a place from where he can journey back and forth but go no further because ‘there was nowhere left to go’. It is because of their diasporic condition that has somehow glued them together in a way that is beyond comprehension. Parents choose to migrate not only for better prospects for themselves but also for their progeny. In doing so they make a lot of sacrifices but they also, quite unawares, narrow the choices for their children. The children know that they cannot emulate their parents because there is no El Dorado beyond, and they cannot possibly go back because that would not only entail much sacrifice from them but also belittle their parents’ sacrifices. Hence in their diasporic life the parents and children share an invisible bonding that is peculiar to their condition.

Gogol’s relationship with his parents goes through the phases of love, acceptance, dislike and longing. The parent-child relationship is put to test because of adolescent angst, generation gap and also because of the challenge of living in a diaspora. At the end of the novel when Ashima throws the last party at the Pemberton Road house before leaving for India alone, Gogol discovers the book that was presented to him by his father on his fourteenth birthday – The Short Stories of Nikolai Gogol.

He starts reading the book for the first time - at a time when the ‘givers’ and ‘keepers’ of his name ‘are far from him now. One dead. Another, a widow, on the verge of a different sort of departure’. This does not mark the culmination of the parent-child relationship but a rejuvenation of it: the relationship will now be purely of love and is going to last beyond mere physical presence. This precisely forms the gist of parent-child relationship in diasporic life.