Space is an important concept both physically and emotionally. The different apartments and houses the characters live in and the huge spaces of the countries all play their part in shaping the characters and setting moods. Gogol finds a career that is all about making and understanding space.

The Ganguls small urban apartment and their move to the suburban house show their success and their Americanization. The lighter, spacious rooms in the house fill with the props of suburban life, but the parents, Ashima and Ashoke, never really feel at home.

The family trips to India invoke the great differences in space as culture. For the parents, the trips mean going home, but for Gogol and his sister Sonia, they are visits to a strange land, with oddly laid out houses. They are now the alienated ones. Still, something irreplaceable moves in Gogol when he visits the Taj Mahal. It is a surprising identity homecoming for him, the first dawning that he understands something vital about the power of space, as he ends up becoming an architect.