Name Game

The hunt was on. For a name for our first-born. Nothing sounded good enough-from Utkarsh to Aakash to several others. Either the spouse or I would find something amiss. And the little fellow turned from one day to one week and then to two, almost three weeks old and still remained nameless. Of course, this didn’t prevent him from coming up with new antics every day (turned in the direction of the TV no matter where you placed him on the bed, could recognize me and would look in my direction as I deliberately did a half circle of the room when he was 18 days old) but what took the cake-among his characteristics-was his complete refusal to sleep even a wink during the day time. No infant, my almost-sixty mom would wail in despair, had ever been seen who could defy sleep post a nice bath and a bottle of milk. As the empty feeding bottle fell in one direction, the sated baby was always seen to topple off in the opposite! But not so my little boy. All fresh and content, he would grin chirpily (and call it a harried young mother’s imagination-a mite cheekily) back at the world in general and me in particular, as if to say, what next? It was only when the day was done and it was well past 9 pm that the kiddo would finally show signs of dozing off.

To come back to where I had left off before these fond perambulations got the better of me, all these signs of energy and enthusiasm had to be attributed to a nameless infant because, in our striving for perfection, we simply couldn’t decide on a name. The Bard’s historical/rhetorical question notwithstanding. And so the quest for an appropriate name went on. Folks close to us came up with many suggestions but I would dismiss them all as not sounding quite right; not striking a chord within. The ‘look no further’ kind of feeling didn’t envelope one, if you get the drift. Till one day, a cousin of mine-a doctor by profession-with wisdom well belying her comparative youth, asked me point blank what all the fuss was about. “What difference,” she quipped “will it make what you name the baby? Give him a lovely name or call him Ganesh, it will all sound the same-with the appendage Prasad attached to it! Ganesh Prasad or whatever!!”

Call this what you will: winning candour, healthy disdain; for me it was a timely eye-opener! I sat up straight and did some serious introspection. All my life, I had maintained that I didn’t like this surname one bit but finally-and in the days when girls, with touching naiveté, changed their surnames-had changed mine after marriage. I was suddenly determined that my son would not be called Prasad; after all, the family name was Sinha and it was only because the dear spouse, in a moment of misplaced admiration for his grandfather, had got his surname changed from Sinha to Prasad (again in that golden era when all this could be done at the drop of a hat) that I had had to adopt this surname. No daughter-in-law of mine would have to do this, I promised myself. And, as if like a logical conclusion to this decision, the name Saagar reverberated in my mind. Out of nowhere! Just like that and that was it. Twenty one days old, and the little one finally had a name; in letters I wrote to dear cousins (in those good old days when letters were exchanged regularly) I expressed the fervent hope that (here I quote) ‘we’ve finally named him: Saagar and I hope that he has the potential of the unbounded seas, the vast oceans….’ I could never live down that hyperbole-the ribbing I received on being thus carried away was endless……..

This line of thought came unbidden to my mind, suddenly, this afternoon. At the venue of a corporate client, assessing a new set of middle-management guys for determining their level of proficiency in the language and assigning batches to them, I was circulating the attendance sheet for them to sign on. There were eight names in my list but nine people in the room. When the paper was passed to the chap whose name wasn’t there, he added his name to the list and signed with a flourish-Ganesh Prasad.

The wheel had come full circle.