Naming a tall story

Naming a tall story

Kiru Naidoo

Arianna. She's called Arianna Hope Pillay. The little princess announced herself into the world almost three months earlier than she should have.

We absolutely love her name but I mischievously call her Rhianna because she is like a diamond in the sky. (That sounds like the corny lines I deployed at the Unit 3 bus stop in Chatsworth in the late seventies. They were as unsuccessful as my Percy Sledge haircut.)

By the grace of powers spiritual, medical and parental Arianna is doing fantastically well. Last night I noticed that she has sprouted a dimple and cleft to match mine. That confirms our blood relationship. She translates into my grand niece. Go figure.

I have grown up in a culture where we claim and create relationships that we cherish. That is in sharp contrast with the Anglo-Saxon world view and its gardening of linear family trees.

In Chatsworth we claimed the kitchen door neighbours of our third cousins twice removed as our connections. It was a good entry point to eat in their houses and to land a date on a slow Saturday night.

Conservative Indian mothers happily sent their daughters out with their "cousins". It was not really incest because all agreed that we "came connection" in a roundabout way.

Now returning to the diamond of our eyes. I am going to take her to soccer matches. She will be a Pirates supporter. Once a pie-rat always a pie-rat. I can hear her taunt Amakhosi fans on the school play field with missing front teeth.

Fortunately her father supports the right reds. One day we will take her to our Church of England at Old Trafford.  I don’t know if United jerseys come in prem but we will have to get her kitted out really quickly.  There’s a lesser branch of the family where the other reds lurk and they are always recruiting the unsuspecting.

It's also read in her fortune that I will drag her to political meetings like my father did, like his father did unto him and like I have done with my sons. Our blood runs black, green and gold.  No quarrel there.

Right now she barely sleeps in her cot.  Every moment woken or sleeping she is carried in one arm or the other.  It’s twelve years since we have had a baby in the family. One stamp collecting ballerina Gabrielle Teria being the last.  No guessing that she will be spoiled rotten like her mother was.

As I was passing around Arianna’s dimpled picture on my Blackberry bbm in the wee hours of this morning, one mate asked her name.  She followed that by asking “wut happened to Goindamma, Muniamma, Saraswathi & all?” 

My retort was that her full name is Muthumarianna and that Arianna is her ‘house name’.  For a better explanation of that you will need to refer to Professor Rajend Mesthrie’s entertaining Dictionary of South African Indian English.  Lest I get into trouble with Arianna’s grandma, let me confess that the house name business is a tall story.

Now names are a minefield.  My first class friend Solly was christened Solomon Ananthan Kuppan.  The choice of his family was to take one name from the Bible and the other from their ancient Tamil heritage.  I am at a loss to explain Darren James Raoul Gangapershad whose name I once heard hollered by an austere nursing sister in outpatients at the RK Khan Hospital!

We are fond of abbreviating too.  I for instance was christened Kirunavavalakarasu Thirunyanasambandarmurthi.  My mother called me Louis.  But then I am a teller of short stories, long stories and tall stories.  By the way my sister is really called Thirupurasundri.