Becoming name wise
My mother once sent me to buy vegetables. We had just moved to Delhi from the South and Hindi was an alien language. As I entered the market, I noticed with consternation that the place reverberated with the sound of my name - gobi gobi gobi. How did all these strangers recognise me? I am famous, my 14 year old mind reasoned irrationally.
I then made an observation that simultaneously explained the mystery and deflated my ego. Each vendor held out a cauliflower or cabbage intent on demonstrating how much bigger, fresher, their vegetables were. Gobi, I later learned, is the generic Hindi name for cruciferous vegetables. Phool Gobi is cauliflower and Bandh Gobi, cabbage.
Brits often misspell my name. “Dear Gobi”, they would email me. I correct them, in jest of course. “It’s Gopi, not GoBi,” I would respond. “Gobi is cabbage in Hindi.” Most people see the funny side of it. They also stop misspelling my name.
Some don’t use my name at all. I regularly attend Pilates lessons at our local gym. The instructor addresses everyone by name - everyone, that is, with a traditional British name.
“Tuck in your chin Daniel” or “Margaret, look up” or “Excellent, Emily” she would say. She never used my name. The booking app shows who is attending which class. GOPI, it clearly says under my photograph. Janet is a sweet and affable woman. She is not a bigot, by any stretch of the imagination. Then why doesn’t she use my name? Like sand in the shoes, it grated. A year passed. Then one day, I approached her after class.
“Janet, do you know my name?” I asked with a disarming smile.
“Yes,” she replied with a slight touch of hesitation, “Go.. Go.. Gopi?”
Then, as if reading my mind, the poor woman clarified.
“I was afraid of mispronouncing and causing offence.”
From that day, she used my name liberally as if she had named me as a newborn. I was glad I took the risk and asked her. You can’t make an omelette without breaking an egg.
My Welsh neighbour Paul could not, for the life of him, remember my wife Sujata’s name. He knew it started with an S, ended with an A and comprised three syllables. He addressed her by a different name each time: Sangita, Sunita, Sarita … anything but Sujata. One Christmas, following the local custom, we dropped greeting cards through our neighbours’ letterboxes. My card to Paul said, ‘Merry Christmas from Gopi, Sujata, Savita, Sulekha, Sunanda and the rest of the harem.’
I saw Paul a few days after Christmas. “You know, Monty,” he said with a paternal hand on my shoulder, “I have written her name on a card and stuck it on my fridge. S-U-J-A-T-A. I’ll never forget it now.”
Monty was our chocolate Labrador.