names and identities

People pronounce your name in myriad ways in a multicultural city, that too, in a ‘foreign’ one. I have never regarded London as ‘foreign’ in any sense, from the moment I decided to move here, until now. But then, that is what this city is all about; making Londoners out of just about every 'foreigner' who happens to stop by. A place with no instinctive fear of the 'other', we are all others, a whole, chaotic city full of others good humouredly coping with the 'foreigner' next door. And pigging on each others' food at the slightest opportunity. A city of contradictions, counterpoints, oddities and incongruities. I am an Indian and a Londoner. No, I'm not vegetarian. Actually, I eat a number of things that move. A spaceship just crashed in Waterloo place. And a small girl came out. The thing is, she was 16 ft tall. And then she went to sleep. When she woke up, an elephant gave her a shower. The Sultan's elephant. And oh, the elephant was a mechanical one. That's allright, then.

On a National Express coach accelerating away from the Ferrari showrooms of Park Lane into the all too enveloping darkness of a motorway ride to Birmingham, my decision to move here came in part, from a brief brush with ‘failure’. Failure, like being foreign, was not something unfamiliar. I'd had to cope with the former differently each time, which ended up working out in often weird and wonderful ways . The latter had been dealt with by a series of departures, of which the previous two, surprisingly, had been from places where I seemed to sort of belong. That was extraordinarily rare, and so, painfully precious. This had resulted in a vague anxiety that, after so many years of struggling to come to terms with a permanent sense of being out of place, I had copped out of the very situations that made closure appear so tantalizingly close.

Then along came London, where failure and otherness seemed to merit no more than a shrug of the shoulder.

Which brings us back to the name business. I have no sense of a ‘nominal identity’ (for want of a better phrase). That is, I don’t give a shit how anyone pronounces my name, as long as they don’t make it sound like something grotesque. In fact, I like some of the names mine get conjured into, when then, I am suddenly transformed into this magical, mysterious stranger with an exotic name I have never known. A twin separated at birth, an identical other, strange and yet the same. Suddenly, I am perhaps Georgian, or Samoan, or Indochinese, or Chilean. I could be from the Antioch of late antiquity or the streets of Bombay. The possibilities are infinite. I sort of like that :-)

However, as I staggered into the gym today out of a sense of duty more than anything else, bone tired and feeling that crossing thirty does perhaps change one’s body in some ways, something happened. I was greeted by the familiar face of the strikingly composed half-Indian girl with the fully Indian name who womans the desk. I said a perfunctory ‘hi’, my mind a million miles away, barely glancing at her. We’d seen each other a hundred times before, but rarely smiled at each other. The tiredness and surliness probably showed on my face. She said ‘hi’, swiped my card, released the turnstile and handed me my towel. Reflexively, I grunted ‘thanks’.

She looked up from the computer screen (where my name had probably showed up), smiled and said, calmly, ‘Thank you, Never-mind’, each syllable of my name perfectly balanced, the intonations in exquisite cadence, like slow jazz on a summer night.

It had rarely sounded better.