What's in a Last Name

PART I

 

Have you seen a guy roaming around the streets, unshaven, in ragged tatters for clothes and sleeping on park benches?

No. Stop right there. That’s not me. That’s a guy without money. I’m a guy without a last name, which contrary to what you may think, is an intangible form of wealth.

I hail from the southern part of the Indian peninsula, almost the tip of it, if you want to be specific. Where I come from, people have been living for centuries and millennia, without the need for a last name. People were born, people procreated, more people were born and the racket continued without anyone coming and asking us what our last names were.

Suddenly, some of us decided to migrate abroad, to the United States and elsewhere. That meant passports. That meant forms which had a column the smartest of us couldn’t complete because they wanted to know what our last name was. The consulate did not seem to agree with our views on the redundancy of a last name.
We came back, dejected, devastated. That night, at a roadside restaurant, the frenzied discussion was all about this.

“Machan, what’s a last name da?” asked Vijaykumar, with his mouth full of Dosa.

“What’s in a last name?” misquoted Ramesh who was known for his puns and would later become a celebrity on Twitter.

“Dei, hit that fellow. Some of us here are struggling for survival and he’s making bad jokes as always.”

After a gentle nudge from Swamy, Ramesh kept quiet.

Vijaykumar repeated, “What IS a last name? They never asked you for one at school, right?”

Krishna cleared his throat. His father was in the Railways. He had spent some time in places like Delhi and Bombay (collectively called “North India”) and was considered to be an authority on all things wheat and Hindi.

We all turned our attention to Krishna. “Yaar, see.” We chose to ignore the “Yaar” which we considered to be some kind of infection Krishna had picked up.

Krishna continued.

“I have seen North Indian names split into two parts. They call the second part as the last name or surname. It comes from father to son, like Male Pattern Baldness, you know.”

“OH, like we use initials?”

“No, no. Initials are the first letter of our father’s names, which means that you and your son would have different initials, provided you put some imagination into naming your kids. But surnames remain the same, over generations, over centuries, sometimes.”

“Oh! Interesting” Vijaykumar said, drawing out the “interesting” on an unnaturally stubborn piece of Dosa.

“But what’s the point of having one? You are called by your first name and that should be enough to identify you, right?” This was Karthik, who shared his name with a flock of Karthiks and never seemed to have a problem with it. The others though, would refer to him as the “short” Karthik, as opposed to the “tall” Karthik and the “thin” Karthik and the “C” Karthik who spelled his name as “Karthick”.

“Ok, fine. I don’t see any point to this. Let’s assume that we all need surnames or last names, whatever they are. It could be a conspiracy that the West has imposed upon us, but I really don’t see any harm in having one. I have always been happy that I had a short name. A long name would have been a pain when you are filling up forms. But it looks like it’s more of a pain to not have a last name. I think we should start thinking about what names we want to have.”

Swamy was a practical kind of a guy. He categorized anything that involved effort as a pain but had the accuracy of a monsoon mosquito in picking out the least painful path of action.

“Swamy is right. We can’t deliberate upon this while scarce visas are being distributed to those privileged to have been born with a last name.”

“So do we get to choose what last names we take? Because, I didn’t have much of a choice with my first name.”

As the others-proclaimed (I presume this is an opposite of self-proclaimed, which seems to be the norm these days) nerd of the group, it was my duty to speak up.

“I think we should learn a little more about this last names/surnames business before we make our decision.”

As is the norm with meetings everywhere, be it the boardrooms of corporate giants, or the standing eatery Karthik Tiffin Center (This was an outlet run by another Karthik, whom we never had the good fortune of meeting), anyone making a sensible suggestion is immediately made in charge of working on it and producing positive results. This simple cause-effect relation has led to muted mouths in many a meeting. Forced alliteration notwithstanding, I took upon myself the onerous task of delving deep into the bowels of knowledge, also known as Wikipedia.

I will summarize my findings here. Turns out, Krishna was only partially right. In some places, the surname was inherited from the mother, like Harry Potter’s eyes, as Rowling drilled into all of us. And some places, perhaps to ensure gender equality, went the distance to have the surnames of both the parents hyphenated , and added to the child’s name, in the process denying the child the chance to write his complete name in the few given boxes on any form.
In England, some people were too busy or too lazy to come up with a name, so they chose the profession they were in at that time. Thus we had the butchers and the butlers, among others. This was a little unfortunate as the 20th descendant in the family of Butchers could testify. He was a vegan and was the butt of bad jokes on his food preferences. Talking of butt, we move to the next type of surnames in England, based on your body parts. Basically, if you were called names in your childhood, based on how you looked, you picked the least nasty of them and made it your surname. So, if you were a Longbottom, well, you get the idea. The Youngs and the Browns and the Whites were in the same category. Some people decided to choose the easiest way possible and added a “son” to their father’s name, thereby affirming their inheritance. The name of the brand you grew up hearing, “Johnson and Johnson” were actually “John’s sons” but chose to refer to themselves in this weird fashion.

I conveyed my findings to the group over some delicious chilli bajji. Swamy was the first to respond, although his response of “SSSSS” was variously interpreted as a reaction to the spicy chilli, or the irritation of having to think up a name or an attempt to say his newly created last name.

The first assured sign of success came from Vijaykumar who decided unilaterally that henceforth he would be known as “Vijay Kumar” and all his descendants, even if they were Kumaris (girls) would have the last name “Kumar”. Ramesh chose this moment to suggest that if Vijay Kumar named his daughter “Kumari”, she would be called “Kumari Kumar”. Vijay threw the oil-stained newspaper at him. Ramesh dodged it and said he would discuss the issue with his grandfather. The latter was known for his creativity, going by the tales he spun about himself. Ramesh would later be enlightened that he hailed from the Srivatsa gotra and might as well use it as his surname. Swamy decided to honor his father Subramaniam by taking up his name as his last name. We decided to celebrate the birth of these new names by ordering another round of bajjis for everyone and telling the bhajji anna that he should consider getting a last name for himself.

The success with the last name was not replicated at the American consulate. They had forgotten to tell us that a last name was only one of the requirements. So we returned again, dejected and devastated but with a last name. At least, those of us who went to the Consulate. I did not. So, until that point of time, I continued to thrive with a single name, proudly flaunting my obstinacy to my friends. But that would change. 

PART II

Have you ever seen a guy, roaming around, pursing his lips and running his fingers through the lips of his purse, every time he has to use the metro? That’s not a guy without money. It’s me, a guy without a last name.

As you may recall, my problems started thousands of years ago, when my ancestors decided to not complicate their lives with the requirement of a last name. And so we went around with names that could be written down on a small leaf and tied to the rest of our wardrobe. And even after we moved to wearing dresses made of cloth, our penchant with single names had continued. Not that no one asked us to change. The resistance had been strong. After all, do we know if Socrates was a Sabharwal or a Sadovnikov? Or why none of the cities Alexander founded had his last name? Similarly, I told myself, the truly great do not use, or rather do not need, last names.

A few of my friends had, in a manner of speaking, gifted to themselves new last names. But my obstinacy (and frankly, the absence of a compulsion to visit the American Consulate, having not entered the hallowed premises of an institute whose abbreviated name started with two “I”s) prevented me from giving myself a last name. Vijaykumar, who later became Vijay Kumar, suggested that I follow his path and become Jey Sundhar. But that appeared lazy and frankly, purposeless to me. I had even got a passport without a last name which was, for a brief while, the source of universal envy. But trouble started after I moved to Russia.

In Russia, everyone had a last name, everyone. And sometimes, their last name was more unique than the first name, considering that I had met several Alexeys and Dimitrys, but no two people having the same last name.
I continued to flaunt around the fact that I had gotten so far (geographically, I mean) without submitting myself to the tyranny of the last name. Until I faced an even bigger problem than being denied a passport. I was denied a student pass on the Moscow Metro.

The Moscow Metro calculates fares based on the number of trips and not the number of stations. So, it was quite expensive if you travelled just a few stations. The teachers, from whom I was learning Russian, told me that I was eligible for a student pass and could get one if I applied.

The application process was right out of the bureaucratic planet of Douglas Adams. You had to get a form from the university, fill it up and submit it back at the university. The university sent it to the corresponding government department, and then you both waited, the university and you, I mean. After you waited long enough for a random passerby to call you a happy couple, the form returned. If it didn’t have any comments on it, you submitted it back at the metro station from which you had taken the original form. This is very important. Moscow may have several metro stations, but the forms are held at only a few, and you always submitted it back to the same station and in fact the same clerk you took the form from.

After submission you waited again, but this time, you have to periodically call on the clerk to see if your form and along with it, the student pass had come. Thus having laid the foundations of a good international friendship, we found to our dismay, we being the station clerk and me, that my form was not accepted. You don’t have a “Familia”, she patiently explained to me. No, no. I have a lovely family back home, parents and what not, I told her. “Nyyyyet, nyet nyet. This is not family, this is familia. A last name. You need a last name.”
I sat down with my teacher and we brooded about this, over a pack of French fries with nostalgia of Karthik Tiffin Center drifting in. “Why don’t you have a last name?” I explained the history of my people to her. She seemed fascinated.
“An entire civilization, thousands of years of history, and you people don’t have a last name?” “Civilizations are not built on last names. They are built on steamed rice served on a banana leaf.”
I got a pat on my cheek. Anyway, we digress.

Eventually, she convinced me that I should get a last name. Now, this was a problem. I, the guy who had adamantly refused to get a last name, and even refused a visa (not that it was offered to me, but hey, why should you be offered something to refuse it? I even refused the post of the President once) should I surrender to the tyranny of the last name?
“Get one, it’ll be fun.”
“I will think about it.”
“I have thought about it and I have decided to get a last name.” I told her one day as I went to recharge my metro balance.
“Does it have anything to do with this being the end of the month?” she asked with a grin.
“Well... But it will not be just any last name. It will be a name that conjures catastrophe, triggers terror and strikes fear in the hearts of people who ask me for it.”
“Now, what would that be?”
I did not tell her. But I had made up my mind. When I visualized the effect an “effective” last name would have in the heart of the hearer, I had seen the earth shaking, trees swaying, volcanoes erupting... volcanoes, wait that’s it. What was the name of that Icelandic volcano that caused chaos to air traffic and other things and became the only Icelandic word other than Reykjavik whose spelling you remembered? Yes, that’s it. Eyjafjallajokull. Now spell that out slowly in your minds.

“E Y J A F J A L L A J O K U L L”
Do you feel your heart beats skipping their rhythm in fear? Do you feel your breath going uneven, ready to run away from the scene where the name is even mentioned in a whisper? Yes, yes. That’s it. That’s the effect I want my new last name to have.

From now on, I shall be known as EYJAFJALLAJOKULL. Thou shall know me and learn to fear me.

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