Through the use of juxtaposition, this indicates how different Nikhil's life is from that of his girlfriends. On page 128, in The Namesake, it states, “They’d begun fighting, both admitting in the end that something had changed.” This implies that Nikhil's first-ever relationship with a girl of a different ethnicity didn’t go well at all. Considering that Nikhil himself is Bengali and Ruth, his girlfriend, is white, demonstrates how they both come from different cultural backgrounds. Therefore, it would have been harder for their affinity to flourish. Furthermore, they had very dissimilar lives since Ruth's parents were divorced, and Ruth possessed much more independence and leeway since her parents didn't control what she did. Nikhil had both
