Name Game

Two days ago I read with great pleasure and relief the decision of Government of India to permit the names of mothers to be listed as primary parent—to begin with in records of examinations.

I hope this slim ray of sunshine on bureaucratic cobwebs takes on proportions of a solar flare, like a final solution to clean up a ludicrous system. I’m sure many of us have suffered the abominations that variously masquerade as S/O, D/O, all ‘O’ applicable to the male parent; and to refer to a deceased father as “(Late)”, even if the poor man was fanatical about being on time for everything. This application holds true for a range of activities from begging for passports to begging for alcohol in the allegedly “dry” state of Gujarat where a person has to write the male parent’s name under the slug “sharaabi ka baap ka naam” (Name of the drunk’s father).

When I tried to explain the new gender unbiased ruling to my young daughter, she thought it was idiotic to begin with. She calls her mother “ma” and me “baba”. Sometimes, when one of the parents is not around—and sometimes, even when that parent is around—she refers to her parents interchangeably as “ma” or “baba”.

We don’t mind. Matters of formative biology have, in our daughter’s mind, become irrelevant. To paraphrase Jean Paul Sartre, her parents did, therefore she is. And now that it is done, parents can get on with being parents—gender unbiased.

Her mother and I had a rougher time of it. For us, a simple matter of D/O became a complicated matter of W/O.

Long before our daughter came along, her future mother and I were unmarried and living together. Those of you that have a problem with this concept, please exit here, here, or here, thank you. (But I commiserate with you. The government too is quite anal, so you’re in glorious company.)

One day, an enumerator came to our place to check on us, enroll us for our Voter Identity Cards. After asking my name, he asked: ‘S/O?’

I dutifully provided my father’s name.

He then turned to my partner.

‘D/O,’ she promptly said, and offered her father’s name.

‘No, no,’ the man brushed her away. ‘W/O.’

‘D/O,’ she insisted. She was beginning to boil. I was beginning to giggle.

The man blushed. Then he resolutely wrote “W/O”, put my name after it, and fled.

A month later, my partner and I were photographed for Voter Identity Cards. Another month later, we received our cards.

We had been married off.

A few years later, in 1998, we wanted to get married, and have a child that eventually turned out to be our daughter. So we approached a magistrate.

He asked to see our Voter Identity Cards, by then counted as acceptable proof of identity. We handed these over. In a minute, he started to yell, accusing us of defrauding government and wasting his time. Protestations of our innocence and honesty amounted to nothing.

I next went to a lawyer. ‘We want to get married,’ I told him. ‘But we’re already married.’

‘To whom?’ he wanted to know, eyes alight, evidently keen to rake in the cash on a set of divorces as well as a marriage.

‘To each other.’

‘Unngh,’ he said, and stroked his brow. He said journalists had a reputation for eccentric behaviour, but this was too much. Out of kindness, I explained what had happened, showed him the cards. He finally suggested a divine loophole.

We accepted, despite being avowed atheists, and despite being believers that generally, brokers of any religion were in the same bracket as brokers of narcotics, sex and guns, in no particular order. My partner and I went to a temple, went around the fire a few times as some of our friends stood around and guffawed and sentimentally sniffled in turn.

My wife and I decided she must retain her pre-nuptial surname. It turned out to be a major act of rebellion, as we had to progressively tackle and soothe suspicious policemen (for verification of passport applications), bankers (for verification of a mortgage application), passport officers (for verification of visa applications), with registration officials at the hospital where our daughter eventually arrived (for verification of our unholy matrimony), and the registrar of births (for verification of our daughter’s parentage). All because of names and surnames that wouldn’t appropriately fit official expectations of W/O, D/O, and H/O.

The rebellion became more acute when it was my daughter’s turn for a passport and admission to primary school: in their impartiality towards parental nomenclature, her parents had decided to gift her a hyphenated surname.

My daughter isn’t permitted to read this blog for another three years, so on her behalf I have a message for the government: F/O.