Immortal Names

Over time it became a game in my head … uh, oh, they paused, my name must be coming up. The dreaded … Marty? Amar-t-aaa? I would correct the teacher and explain it is pronounced Amar-tya, usually to no avail. In the part of India my family hails from, Amartya (which means immortal) may not be quite as common as John, but definitely Josh. But alas we were in east Tennessee in the 1980s and 1990s.
In the schoolyard when childhood bullies got wind of my name they found some great material. The classic taunt was “Amartya Smoke a Cigar-Tya,” thought up by one of the most vicious of my tormentors. Every time my name came up, the kids, as if on cue, would all sing “Amartya Smoke a Cigar-Tya.” Another kid morphed Amartya into Ama-rotty, which subsequently morphed into Maserti. As a little kid I was deeply offended, even though I didn’t know what a Maserti was.

I imagine that if I were asked by a judge the reason for wanting to change my name I would have explained that my name is “cumbersome” and caused embarrassment. Many people are teased about their name, although few go to the extent of changing it. What can I say? I was a sensitive child.

When we moved to Alabama from Tennessee, I made the fateful decision at age 16 to ask my father — Baba, as I called him — to change my name. Well not exactly change so much as rearrange. I asked to swap my first name with the less difficult to pronounce and spell middle name (switching from Amartya Raj to Raj Amartya).

The idea was to utilize a nice short first name, and there’d rarely be a need for anyone to know, let alone hear, my middle name. I was going to create a clean slate. No more “cigar smoking.”

During roll call my classmates would hear the nice simple, staccato “Raj.” Raj has a nice ring to it. Perish the thought, but maybe I would even be cool. After all, there was that character in the show What’s Happening who went by the same name. I frequently heard people abbreviate the name Roger as Raj. There would still be the occasional “Rag” or “Rage,” but for the most part the taunts would be minimized, at least for a while.

Unfortunately, I failed to anticipate my new classmates’ cunning. They came up with Jar! They picked up on the fact that the name Raj is Jar backwards. Wasn’t it obvious? So before I could even appreciate my “clean slate,” the jar came crashing down for the rest of high school. That’s when I realized how silly it was to think that I could simply change away my name problems. I only ended up trading one for another. All I was trying to do was change my name to suit someone else’s tastes, but not everyone should or could be named John. Amartyas learn other people’s names, so they should learn ours.

Looking back it feels unnecessary, or even silly for me to have changed my name. Of course, as a teenager, I was genuinely distressed at being ridiculed. But now, I regret asking Baba to go to the trouble of changing my name. He had to argue with a judge using my reasoning, which I can only imagine the judge found quite amusing. My name remains Raj Amartya officially, but if it was easy to change it back in court I would do so. I have come to be thankful for the name I was given. I could even reach out and tell my elementary school tormentors that they are forgiven. The problem is that there are 44,000 of you on Facebook.

But at a time when we have a president named Barack Hussein Obama and a Nobel Prize winner named Amartya Sen, I feel much more at home. To the other Amartyas considering changing their name … isn’t the Maserati a fine sports car?