Ashima loves India. She misses it and her family there. She misses their customs and traditions. What she had in America is less than what she had in India. Here are some text that proves how she felt.
Chapter 1 - "Ashima thinks it's strange that her child will be born in a place most people enter either to suffer or to die […] In India, she thinks to herself, women go home to their parents to give birth, away from husbands and in-laws and household cares, retreating briefly to childhood when the baby arrives."
Chapter 3 - "For being a foreigner, Ashima is beginning to realize, is a sort of lifelong pregnancy – a perpetual wait, a constant burden, a continuous feeling out of sorts. It is an ongoing responsibility, a parenthesis in what had once been ordinary life, only to discover that that previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding."
Gogol on the other hand does not love India. In fact, he veered away from all things Indian to the extent that he changed his name from Gogol to Nikhil. He immersed himself to the American life and turned his back from his family. Here are some text that proves how he felt.
Chapter 5 - It is as Nikhil that he loses his virginity at a party at Ezra Stile, with a girl wearing a plaid woolen skirt and combat boots and mustard tights.
He cannot imagine coming from such parents, such a background, and when he describes his own upbringing it feels bland by comparison.
