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.