Quote 1
Moushumi has kept her last name. She doesn't adopt Ganguli, not even with a hyphen. Her own last name, Mazoomdar, is already a mouthful. With a hyphenated surname, she would no longer fit into a window of a business envelope. Besides, by now she has begun to publish under Moushumi Mazoomdar, the name printed at the top of footnoted articles on French feminist theory in a number of prestigious academic journals […] (8.21)
For Moushumi, identity issues as a Bengali-American are even more complicated because she is a woman. For her, naming has a gender angle. Tradition says she should change her name to her husband's, but she doesn't want to do so, and in this case, she is bucking both Bengali <em>and </em>American tradition. She is quite the rebel, that Moushumi.
Quote 2
This assurance is important to her; along with the Sanskrit vows she'd repeated at her wedding, she'd privately vowed that she'd never grow fully dependent on her husband, as her mother has. (10.2)
Moushumi does not want to repeat what she views as her mother's mistake. But this vow sets her up for failure later, when she begins to push Gogol away.
Quote 3
It reminds her of living in Paris – for a few hours at Dimitri's she is inaccessible, anonymous. (10.65)
You could say Moushumi is in the same place Gogol was in when he was dating Maxine. She sees her affair with Dimitri as an escape from who she is. Frankly, we wish she had just opted for marriage counseling.
Quote 4
The name alone, when she'd first learned it, had been enough to seduce her. Dimitri Desjardins. (10.48)
Uh oh. Unlike Gogol, the name "Dimitri Desjardins" is totally sexy. It's got a French, Russian, sophisticated thing going on, like a name from a romance novel. Gogol is a Russian name too, but it's not as romantic sounding as Dimitri.
Quote 5
The shameful truth was that she was not involved, was in fact desperately lonely […] Sometimes she wondered if it was her horror of being married to someone she didn't love that had caused her, subconsciously, to shut herself off. (8.169)
As a young woman, Moushumi is unable to have relationships because of her fear of turning into her mother, a woman who entered an arranged marriage and didn't marry for love. She is afraid of the example that has been set for her by her culture.
Quote 6
And yet the familiarity that had once drawn her to him has begun to keep her at bay. Though she knows it's not his fault, she can't help but associate him, at times, with a sense of resignation, with the very life she has resisted, has struggled so mightily to leave behind. (9.17)
Gogol's intuition isn't off base. We know that Moushumi really wanted to distance herself from her parents, and now, with Gogol, she resents the fact that her marriage is the perfect example of what her parents wanted for her.
Quote 7
"I detest American television," Moushumi eventually declares to everyone's delight, then wanders into the hallway to continue her reading. (4.2)
A little pretentious, isn't she? And she's only a kid at this point. Maybe Moushumi acts this way as a way to distance herself from her fellow Indians and Indian-Americans. She certainly stands out in this scene.
Quote 8
Moushumi wonders how long she will live her life with the trappings of studenthood in spite of the fact that she is a married woman […] It would have been different with Graham – he'd made more than enough money for both of them. (10.44)
Moushumi is definitely more interested in status than Gogol is. She still dreams of her ex's lifestyle. But why? What is it about her life that isn't good enough for her?