Recently I was introduced to Suryanna, all of
five months old and rich gurgle as her calling card. Suryanna’s parents are UK
residents of Indian origin but that was the first I had heard of the pretty
name. A brief Internet search revealed that a few people of Indonesian origin
bear the name and sometimes the identical family name too.
The hugely engaging movie The Martian has Vincent Kapoor head of Mars operations, reprised by
African American Chiwetel Ejiofor who reveals “my father is Hindu and my Mom’s
Baptist”.
A name or surname no longer gives us an inkling of its provenance.There
was a time when If a person gave you his or her name you could safely place
them in their specific region of origin; with cross-cultural migration and
mixed marriages this is no longer the case.
And so when my Memoir Writing class in Staten Island, NY,
gave us a prompt of ‘What’s in a name’ it set me thinking.
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| Roses at the New Jersey State Botanical Gardens |
Now my name is Sandhya and I’m from Bombay, the commercial capital of India. Although I live in Bangalore now, which is known as the Silicon Valley of India, I still think of myself as a Bombay girl.
So what’s a Bombay girl? When you grow up in Bombay your neighbours have names and family names that declare their origin from other parts of the country. You could say the city is a melting pot of the diverse peoples that exist in India. While you know what they are you also know who they are. And you learn to hold your own, no matter what or who.
When I moved to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, I saw that that city state was a macrocosm of Bombay, only here we had a melting pot of nationalities rather than communities.
For a while I was the editor of a sports magazine, a glossy dedicated to everything hedonistic about sport. The publisher of the English version of this originally French magazine was a naturalized Swedish citizen of Algerian origin.
Interestingly, he had no difficulty pronouncing my name which had been deliciously mangled as Cynthia by my Lebanese ex-boss and as Sandra by my British ex-editor.
The French educated Lebanese ex-boss, publisher of a clutch of corporate magazines for luxury brands, was always well turned out in her designer clothes. Although, with her hourglass figure she would have looked good in Salvation Army discards too.
I do not know what her family name meant but I suspect ‘mistrust’ would be her middle name. On my second day at work she called me twice on my cell phone during an interview of the scion of a designer jewellery brand. She wanted to know when I would get back to the office. I thought maybe she wanted to fire me. But all she asked when I rushed into her cabin on returning was, ‘How long was the meeting?’
The girl from whom I had taken over the position, who was also in the office to collect her dues, looked at me from under her false eyelashes and shrugged.
When I laid bare my damaged soul that night at dinner, my 15-year-old son admonished me with a, “Chill Mom! You always make friends with your bosses, eventually. Just give her time.” Maybe he knew something I didn’t, because before the year was up the Boss and I had had several conversations that opened a window into the history of her temperament.
After four years of overlooking the inconvenience of interrupted interview meetings, the Boss and I parted amicably; for personal reasons I chose to go freelance again. “Cynthia, if you change your mind know that I would love to have you back,” she said warmly. Hmm, I am a Gemini but how long would I remember this double identity?
Soon after I quit my job I got a surprise call from an UAE National. “Sandhya, I want to write a book and I need your help”, he said after the customary greetings. He was the self-appointed cultural ambassador of his people and he not only had a successful business conducting culture sensitizing workshops for top companies setting up shop in the Middle East but he was also a major media star. His book was to be a memoir that also decoded the culture and values of the Arab people. I was a bit surprised that he should choose to ask for my help when I neither had a name he could comfortably pronounce nor did I belong to his faith.
When I handed him the final cut of the manuscript I understood that people everywhere are the same – they all want the same things for themselves and their families – opportunities for growth, love and harmony.
So really, what’s in a name: culture, identity, faith, geography? And should we meld these to celebrate our oneness or wield them to separate humanity?
Perhaps names do say it all – creating an individual identity even while bringing us together as the sum of all things human.
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