



Democracy, do your homework

I was eight years old when my father was posted from Bombay to Bahrain. The next year Bahrain’s only teen magazine ran a Most Unusual Name competition. It seems ridiculous to me now, but to a girl surrounded by Alis and Fatimas, my name did seem most unusual. So I entered, and I lost, to another Indian girl who was named Democracy.

Her father named her Democracy because he said it was an important ideal and he wanted to make it central to his life. To say it every day. (I love you Democracy. Democracy, do your homework. Democracy, you’re grounded.)

I was so envious, first because she had won and second because I wasn’t named after a grand political concept. This was 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell. It was my first tryst with democracy. In 1991, when the Gulf War broke out, I was sent back to India.

*

The secular and democratic Republic of India was born in 1950. But the independent nation appeared in 1947. Ignoring Indian requests for 26 January as the handover date, Lord Mountbatten chose 15 August, the second anniversary of the Japanese surrender to the Allies. Stay classy. The departing Imperial power conflated the freedom of a colonized nation with a final moment of Imperial power. But then India had its first last laugh: Astrologers got together and declared 15 August inauspicious, so the official celebrations started a few hours earlier on the 14th.

For many years commentators predicted India’s demise. Its diversity was the root of its impossibility. It was ungovernable. It would fragment. But this diversity and heterogeneity turned out to be a most important thread, holding things together, despite the odds.

*

My brother and his wife moved from India to Hong Kong several years ago. They recently had a second son. Lots of potential names were passed around a family WhatsApp group, from Hong Kong to Mumbai to New York to San Francisco and back again. Some favored names were ultimately rejected. There were several reasons for this. One reason I’ll withhold for now. A major reason, though: How will non-Indians pronounce it? Names vetoed on these grounds include: Samar, Rohan, Yohan.

It can be annoying, it’s true. You’d think Deepti was straightforward, but how many times in England or the US have I said my name and seen the person in front of me smile, trying to latch onto something familiar . . . he can’t quite get it, he’s being polite, but no . . . Sorry, what was that? Seepi? No, Deepti. Teepee? Ummm. Deepti. Deep like the deep sea. Ti like not coffee. Ah. Deep Tea. Yes, yes, but not like that exactly, not like separate words. Put them together, say them a little faster, without so much stress, with the tip of the tongue touching the back of the teeth at the d and the t . So it’s a little like Dhipthi.

Try to picture the opposite:

“You know, I like the name Bradley, but I’m not sure how they’ll say it in Asia.”

“I guess you’re right, honey, we can’t take the risk. Let’s think of something else.”

It is a conversation no one’s ever had.

*

These are the anxieties of a certain kind of Indian. Highly educated, internationally minded, liberal, pragmatic, not overtly or publicly religious, still traditional in some respects. They know with absolute certainty that their children will interact with a global culture. I’m basically describing the younger generation of my family.

If I had to come up with something on the spot I’d call them New Global Indians. India loves acronyms, so I’ll call them NGIs. Indians love complicated acronyms, so maybe I’ll call them GCNIs. Globally Confident New Indians. With great confidence comes great anxiety.





How Dinesh became Matthew became Dinesh

When my British husband first moved to Delhi in 2006, on a whim, with blind confidence, butterflies, and the vague feeling that something in London was very wrong, there was no WhatsApp, no Facetime, no iPhone. (No Tinder!) He still wrote letters, went to the internet café, and made long distance calls with a phone card. Through the arrangement of a journalist friend, he lived in Brotherhood House, home of the Brotherhood of the Ascended Christ, an Anglican religious order, whose huge and somewhat crumbling colonial bungalow was found in the genteel heart of the city’s old British administrative district. The day he arrived was Day 2 of a three-day silent retreat. No one could speak to him. They had to point him to his room, little more than a bed and a desk and a toilet in a row of rooms in the gardens. This was where he met Dinesh.

Dinesh lived in the compound, but he was not a Brother; he was a kind of novice, helper, and researcher. Born a Hindu, in the Himalayan foothills, he had come to see Jesus as his personal God, the way another Indian might pick Vishnu or Shiva. He was short and stocky, extremely strong, with explosive cricketing power, and a fear of his own violence. He was also very thoughtful and very lonely. My husband and he became good friends; at dusk Dinesh would walk Matthew into the labyrinth that is Old Delhi, and slowly reveal its secrets.

Have you ever spoken to someone from India on the phone? I wonder what they were called. When not working with the Brotherhood, Dinesh was a teacher in the public schools of Delhi. And then, for a while, because so many young people were doing it, and it made you good money, he worked in a call center.

He kept a diary of the time, so his recollections are vivid. It was a third-party debt collection agency. Getting the money from people who bought those CD collections out the back of magazines without realizing what they were doing, who then refused to pay for them. People who were already on their third warnings, and to whom mailed notices meant nothing. These people needed human coercion. So the work was outsourced to India and Indians were trained to pretend to be Americans in order to cajole and threaten and incentivize the debtor to pay. “We have your details. It’s useless to resist.”

When you joined the company, part of your orientation involved picking a new name, a name the Americans you were going to be speaking to would feel comfortable with. Everyone thought hard before picking their names. Eventually, most chose the names of Hollywood stars. “This hottie or that hottie,” according to Dinesh. Tom. Ben. Julia. Dinesh chose Matthew, which is the name of my husband, his friend. These were the names they were registered with. As far as the company was concerned, their real names did not even exist.

Most of the workers were kids from the vast, troubled, vital state to the east, Uttar Pradesh. They were part of the newly modern, aspirational generation, leaving their families and tradition behind, coming out of dead-end towns, looking for a future. They lived life hard, worked long hours in the call center, got drunk afterwards, partied, had sex with one another. Some married each other in the end. But Dinesh felt like an alien among these kids. His was an austere, serious presence. The ghost at the feast. Completely out of place in this New India.

In the call room, pen and paper were not allowed. This was so personal details couldn’t be stolen. Still, some of the workers found ways of taking these details. Some just memorized them. Then they went and used these people’s credit cards to buy things, because these people were American, and why should Indians care about Americans?

Dinesh worked hard and he was good at it. So good that someone in the head office investigated why there was a sudden spike in payments during his time there. Here was his trick: He actually talked to these people, and listened to them. They were mostly poor, or lost, or unhappy, or troubled. He spoke to them like a good Christian, and they often opened up to him, and very often they agreed to pay without protest.

Two of these disembodied voices remained with him. First, a woman who had just been divorced, and had no money left, who wept down the phone unashamedly, telling him of her pain and fear. Second, a man who listened quietly to his opening spiel, then said, in a gentle, strong voice: “I hear you, Matthew. Now listen to me. I’m just back from a tour of Afghanistan. I’m walking in the woods, in nature, the wind is in the trees, and I’m enjoying it. I didn’t even buy these things you’re talking to me about, but it don’t matter. Let me be for now. Then you call me back in an hour, and you’ll get your money.”

He could only do it a few months, even though the money was better than any money he’d made before or since, even though they were lining him up for promotion, fast-track, for a glittering corporate career. The soldier in the woods moved him too much. He gave up being Matthew and became Dinesh again.





How Helen wrote Anna and then became her (and other stories)

I love to read about alter egos, name changes, hidden identities, pen names, and pseudonyms. Kal Penn is a made-up name. The actor’s real name is Kalpen Suresh Modi, which has a hell of a different connotation than the breezy, All-American Kal Penn. (The change helped his career immensely.)

Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff was the chrysalis of Doris Day. Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko became Natalie Wood. Krishna Pandit Bhanji, would you believe, is Ben Kingsley’s true identity, while Issur Danielovitch Demsky is actually Kirk Douglas. Ilyena Lydia Vasilievna Mironov? That would be Helen Mirren, who played The Queen. Speaking of Queen, Freddie Mercury was actually a Parsi boy brought up in Zanzibar and Bombay with the name Farrokh Bulsara.

*

Helen Emily Woods was born in Cannes in 1901, the daughter of a wealthy British family. Her mother was a cold and cruel woman and her childhood was remembered as lonely and miserable. Her father committed suicide in 1911. After his death she was sent to boarding school in England. Before Helen could go to university, she was introduced to Donald Ferguson, the encounter having been set up by Helen’s mother, who was one of Ferguson’s ex-lovers. Helen and Donald married in 1920, and soon after he was posted to Burma with the Railway Company. Helen Ferguson’s marriage was as miserable as her childhood, her husband as abusive as her mother.

She divorced Donald Ferguson in 1928 and married an artist named Stuart Edmonds. In 1930 she published a book, a conventional bildungsroman titled Let Me Alone, with a protagonist—a thinly veiled version of the author Helen Ferguson—called Anna Kavan. She published five more books over the next eight years. The second marriage ended in 1938, leading Helen to attempt suicide, and be admitted to a psychiatric clinic in Switzerland.

When she emerged from the clinic, her brunette hair was dyed an icy blonde, her outward manner markedly changed. She began to write as Anna Kavan.

Anna Kavan was not a stage name; it was not a pseudonym. Helen Ferguson became the protagonist that she herself had invented. It is one of the most radical, mysterious, and potent artist transformations I have encountered. Her first Kavan novel, Asylum Piece , depicts a descent into madness in language that is at once spare, precise, and utterly opaque. It is the condition of dreaming while awake, of half-remembering a fearful dream, of experiencing déjà-vu, of being haunted in sheer daylight, of not quite knowing if one is asleep or awake. It is truly uncanny.

Her final novel, Ice , taken to be science fiction and later recognized as unclassifiable, is her masterpiece. In Ice , a tough male protagonist, a soldier, writes in staccato, gumshoe prose about the chase of an elusive, unstable girl—a sylph—in an encroaching end-of-the-world scenario. The ice that slowly grips the world can also be taken as a metaphor for her years of heroin use.

*

My favorite name-change story belongs to F. M. Esfandiary, the dashing, brooding, square-jawed, shaggy-eyebrowed son of an Iranian diplomat. Born in 1930, he moved constantly around the world, learned many languages, competed for Iran in the 1948 Olympics, wrote several novels, and in the mid-seventies changed his name to FM-2030. What FM stood for was never clear (Future Man?) but 2030 indicated the year in which he would turn a hundred. He was a futurist. A transhuman. He once said: “I have a deep nostalgia for the future.”

His youthful migrations helped construct the self-image of a global citizen, without nationality. There were no illegal immigrants, he said. Only irrelevant borders. He died in Manhattan in July 2000; his body has been cryogenically frozen. He has not seen the Global War on Terror.

*

There are a lot of foreigners in India who like to give themselves (or are given) Hindu names. Often these are peasant names, the kinds of names that my family would never dream of giving a child. Krishna, Prem, Om, Chameli, and Sundari. Names that are markers of class to the discriminating ear. I can’t help but laugh when foreigners have these names. It’s like me going to England and calling myself Shirley.





A Cantonese interlude

I asked my friend Jayne about Chinese names. Jayne is both a name and an alias. Her real name is Zhen. I don’t know her as Zhen; I know her as Jayne, who lives in Chinatown, Manhattan, in a beautiful compact apartment above a blue-lit video game arcade where her parcels are left. They seem to love her there, but then everyone loves Jayne. Jayne knows New York like no one else, but Jayne knows a lot of things like no one else. When I saw her last, in Delhi, she gifted me some beautiful hipflasks for the good whisky she’d also brought, and we drank from them during the dry part of a wedding. She sent me this email:

Before my mom’s generation, only the upper classes had English names, because it meant that they had some kind of exposure to the British colonialists in Hong Kong, or were “intellectual” in some way. Then many of my mom’s generation received English names when they emigrated to the West, and many of those names only stayed as nicknames, and were never legally adopted. Because they knew nothing about names, they chose names really randomly. Here’s an example from my own family: My mom’s name is Shirley, but she was originally named Shelly [sic], after the poet. Her father was a professor and studied British literature, and named her Shelly. But her father died in war when she was only three months old, so her mom, my grandmother, renamed her Shirley because she thought Shelly was a boy’s name. She named her Shirley after Shirley Temple.

My dad chose his name based on GI Joe. I think. My uncle Eric chose his name because he liked the way the letter E looked in cursive, especially since the brand General Electric has this big neon sign in Hong Kong. So he looked at the names that began with E and chose Eric. He also got his first job from a man named Albert Gordon, so he named his kids (two boys), one Albert, and one Gordon. My aunt Zarina wanted to have a name that started with the letter Z. That’s it. People my age had a chance to choose an English name in school. Lots of schools handed out lists of common English names and had you pick one for English class. You were encouraged to pick a name that sounded close to your Chinese name; for me, Zhen is close to Jayne.

I love the name Jayne. Names become pleasant with pleasant associations. The composer Bernard Herrmann, for example, who began his career with Citizen Kane , created his masterpiece with the Vertigo soundtrack, which I’m listening to now, and finished his career, and his life, with the soundtrack to Taxi Driver . What a life. I’m attracted to his music, but I know nothing of the man, so I’m attracted to his music and his name. But I wouldn’t call my kid Bernard. Or Herrmann. Would you?





Wherein I muse on band names

And I wouldn’t call a band Nirvana. Or Oasis. In the pantheon of band names I think they’re quite hideous. But I look at the words I’ve just written, and I don’t read the word, I read the band I know. Mumford & Sons. If I liked them, I bet I’d like the name. Burial: I look at the word and I feel good. Death Prod. Sounds kind of heavy, but I listen to “Dead People’s Things,” from Morals and Dogma , and I get goosebumps and waves of happiness. Neutral Milk Hotel, now there’s a band name on which this paragraph should end.

One of my favorite bands is Godspeed You! Black Emperor. I didn’t know what to think when I first read that name. African Gospel Funk? No, Canadian Post-Rock Art Noiseniks. Then I heard “The Dead Flag Blues,” and learned they were named after a 1976 documentary about a Japanese biker gang, the Black Emperors. On the DVD cover the “Godspeed You!” bit was written in the angular katakana script. Once this became clear, I heard the band in a new light. Right now I’m listening to their EP Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada . Kannada is the Dravidian language of Karnataka, the Indian state to my south and east. The most tenuous and private connections can make meaning, and be utterly unfathomable to everyone else.





Some more (seemingly tenuous but in fact not at all random) associations

My ankles are being bitten by mosquitoes. It’s sunset in the Catholic dive bar that sits hidden on the first floor of the crumbling stone building with the balcony view of the market down below. All across western India, Ganesh Chaturthi is about to begin—the festival in which the fun-loving, sweet-toothed, elephant-headed god, Lord Ganesh, Remover of Obstacles, is venerated, fed, bathed in milk, and, finally, after one-and-a-half or three or five or seven or nine or eleven or twenty-one days of worship, taken to the nearest tank or river or beach with much fanfare, firecrackers, singing and dancing, in order to be immersed.

Pre-Ganesh shopping is taking place all around. I can only describe the scene as a tropical pre-Christmas on acid. Monsoon is not yet over. I order a gin and tonic and keep watch on the darkening, thickening sky. Even though the quinine content in tonic is considerably less than it was in colonial days, it still has the required anti-malarial effect, and though a G&T on an English summer lawn is pleasant, there’s nothing like gin and tonic at sunset in a Catholic dive bar in an Indian market town.

Gin first appeared in Holland, of course. The phrase “Dutch courage” refers to genever, its eighteenth-century Dutch precursor, drunk before battle on account of its calming effects. I always thought the phrase meant the Dutch were cowards and needed alcohol to be brave, but it means they were smart enough to have found a drug that steadied their nerves before killing. For years the Dutch have been unfairly maligned in my imagination.

Gin really came into its own with the British Empire. It was the only thing that made the taste of tonic—powdered quinine mixed with sugar and soda, itself the only thing that was proven effective against malaria, and so much more bitter than modern tonic water—palatable. I love that my go-to drink is borne out of medical necessity.

Meanwhile in the bar, the sun has gone. The market is throbbing and glowing in so many colors; of saris, bare bulbs in shops, flashing multi-colored lights of vendors, the neon strings of lights draped across the market buildings. On days like this, with all the fluorescence in the hot dark night, the horns and the music, seeing the madness of the auto-rickshaw driver firing off rounds from his cap gun into the sky as he does a jig, a policeman grinning at his side, the crowd in the market behind rippling like the grass of a paddy field, I can’t help but marvel at how goddamn trippy and ecstatic the Hindu religion is.





I asked the people in our village how they named their kids. Ciriaco, a Catholic rice farmer, says his grandma named him back in the Portuguese days. He doesn’t know why. His daughter is called Jocelyn. Why? “I don’t know, my wife named her.” Everyone laughs. I turn to Siddhartha, who owns the liquor store where Ciriaco buys his beer and I buy my milk and gin, to ask why he named his kids Om and Sai. He laughs and directs me to Pragati, his wife, playing with eight-month-old Sai behind the counter. “Because I like them!”

Ujwala and her husband Rajesh own our local fish curry rice restaurant. It overlooks the paddy fields. Their first son is named Rahul, which is constructed using the letters of their names. Their second son is Heramb, which is another name for Lord Ganesh. Vinayak, their restaurant, is yet another name for Lord Ganesh.

Ujwala loves Ganesh. Her eyes dew up with devotion when she speaks of Him; to her he is as real as I am, perhaps more so. Ujwala used to work as a medical lab technician, testing blood. Right now she looks like a teenage girl. “Let me tell you. There was a gap of eleven years between the first and second child. I prayed to Lord Ganesh for a daughter. He gave me a son. But the important thing is, he gave. So I wanted to thank him, and say his name every day.”





What I’m saying is that the practical is political

Ganesh Chaturthi is the biggest festival in Bombay. Much like Delhi and Diwali, or Calcutta and Durga Puja, Ganesh and Bombay go hand in hand. Or, I should say, Ganesh and Mumbai, since Bombay, so redolent, still echoing, is no more.

The name was changed in 1995, at the behest of the local Hindu nationalist/nativist party, Shiv Sena, who had taken power in the state. Bombay, they argued, was a relic of the colonial past, an anglicized bastardization of its true name. Many say the city of Bombay died even earlier, though, between 1992 and 93, with the murderous Hindu/Muslim riots and subsequent bomb blasts orchestrated by Dubai-based Muslim mafia dons, which ripped the city apart, shattering its cosmopolitan, co-existent, internationalist ideals. The change of name was merely the logical conclusion.

But it’s not unique. Indian names change all the time. Post-Independence, we’ve seen around sixty cities transformed. Benares to Varanasi. Madras to Chennai. Baroda to Vadodara. Recently Gurgaon changed to Gurugram.

And area names are often changed, depending on which party is in power and who they venerate. When the new city of Greater Noida was planned, an enterprising civil servant named the area after the Greek alphabet, so as to discourage such acts. This is why you might drive from Sector Gamma to Sector Chi.

Then there are street names. In Delhi last year, the famous Aurangzeb Road was changed to Dr A P J Abdul Kalam Road. Here a “bad Muslim,” the “cruel” seventeenth-century Mughal Emperor, was replaced by a “good Muslim,” the late, much-loved, ex-President of India. Preceding the change, a Hindu Nationalist MP declared the move would “correct the mistakes made in our history.”

*

Here are some of the names that my family, in their WhatsApp group, loved but ultimately rejected.

Aadil. Zafar. Armaan. Faryan. Farzad. Farhan. Faiyaz. Shahid. Ishaan.

Do you notice anything? A common thread?

“Nice names,” a cousin texted back. “But what about airport immigration?”

Suddenly I’m in a world of glass, metal, sterile lighting, tension, tiredness without end, paranoia. A no-man’s-land so far from a market town where all life spills out. A world of silence and queues and yellow lines. It’s 2036. I am my nephew, twenty years old and traveling alone. I have one of these names. I reach passport control. I’m asked by unsmiling men and women to step into a private room for a chat.