In the beginning was my name, and my name was with my great-great-grandfather, and the name was Imnamangyang Aier. Sometimes I cannot even say my name aloud without choking up because—and I am sure some of you will empathize with me when I say this—I am repulsed by it. Perhaps my grandmother was right in fearing that I could not bear the weight of my own name.
As I shuttle around in the Hyderabad heat with my delivery packages in tow, my thoughts often travel towards a different permutation of my life if I had just been named differently. Tajungkaba would have been good; it had a nice ring to it—a no-nonsense SBI banker perhaps. Even Takosashi would have been acceptable—a genial shopkeeper in Dimapur with a smile that greeted Welcome, what would you like aunty? But sometimes the name Mhokuolie wafts into my ears and I find myself having to stop the scooter then and park for a while before my visor gets too misty.
Mhokuolie (Tenyidie): victory over dreams OR a dream come true
Mhokuolie. My mother announced, breathless and hoarse yet smiling. Only her Tenyidie-speaking tongue could adequately pronounce that name without the greedy biases of Ao. The nurse, Onü Sashi as I called her—who had battled the rain for seven kilometers to reach our old house in Mokokchung where I was born—was irritable. Her ire was goaded further by my mother’s insistence on holding me even before I was rubbed clean of the blood and bodily fluids. Despite all that, about forty years later when I ran into her during my father’s funeral, Onü Sashi, trying to distract my mind off of the recent death, recounted the story of my birth with a certain hefty cadence, betraying her attempts to hide her awe at my mother’s boldness in naming me right after my birth.
She named me the minute I was pushed out of her, as if I was a dismembered limb that needed to be reattached immediately otherwise I would shrivel up and die.
She named me as if I was truly hers, as if nobody else had the right to claim me. As if her husband was not waiting outside to take me away and showcase me, a glorious son, to the eager family members, salivating over what they would name the new Aier boy in their family.
The un-named bubbling was popping along the surface of our rain-soaked walls and my mother held me tighter. Leave my Mhokuolie alone, pleaded the spaces within the comfort of her tired arms.
Tebu (Ao): term of endearment for male children
I don’t remember why but even after I was given my official name, most of my neighborhood friends and family continued to call me tebu. I didn’t mind it as much, but as I grew accustomed to my subtly balanced world, I came to realize the venom embedded within that seemingly endearing name—the venom that silently festered inside my mother’s relationship with my father and his family, which would eventually become the impetus she needed to do what she did.
By the time I screamed, My name is not tebu! Don’t call me tebu! to my childhood neighbor Temsü, it was too late. But this un-naming meant, of course, that tebu could only live to a quarter of its lifetime.
My father’s mother was the one who burdened me with that name. I can almost envision her entering the dimly lit room where I was born and stealing me away from my mother, who could only whisper Mhokuolie under her tired breath. Even if she had protested, my grandmother’s ears, capable of tuning in only to Ao, couldn’t have understood my mother’s Tenyidie or Nagamese pleas.
The stealing was marked by a heavy pulling-away, like they were holding the opposite ends of a two-handed saw. My mother was too tired, too subdued, to pull it to her side. The heaviness in turn, was a sniggering whisper escaping from my grandmother’s old arms clasping my infant body, declaring, and maybe even conceding: At least you were able to bear me a grandson. These arms still foreign upon my new skin prompted me to cry. It was the beginning of the chafing that would eventually cut off my connections with my grandmother years later. But for now I was sternly swaddled and carried out, away from my mother’s arms, waiting to hold her son again.
Tebu, my grandmother would occasionally coo into my ears as though saying it aloud would make me hers. But then, my infant body had no choice but to allow the quarter-name to stick, and my grandmother continued to spread it to the rest of her family. She was laying her roots inside me until she could plant a deeper, stronger one three days after my birth, when it finally came the time to officially name me. Even my mother had to call me tebu in front of my father’s family because I hadn’t become Imnamangyang Aier yet. Mhokuolie was a name only she could enunciate under the solitude of her breasts, to me, her only audience, as I sucked furiously, understanding—as infants often do—that this connection was bound to be severed soon.
***
She has untethered herself from our family, my father informed me the year I turned eleven in the same tone that one would say, “Dinner is on the table.” I couldn’t fully understand the implications of someone untethering themselves from the family and my father’s tone did not provide me much cause to worry either. I rushed to their room then and saw that her clothes were still there, neatly tucked inside the same rickety drawer of the wardrobe as it had always been. This fed me hope. She hadn’t really left. She hadn’t untethered. She was just out for a morning stroll down the road and would be back in time for breakfast. But my grandmother, who came to visit us a few days later, promptly burnt all of the things that my mother had left behind. As I watched the blaze consume her possessions then, I felt an urge to be burnt along with them. And maybe some part of me did burn that day. My whispered name was never uttered in the house again after this incident, which came to be referred between Temsü and me as, The Burning.
***
Only the rancid smell of her immediate absence lingered within the forgotten nooks of our old home. I remember going on all fours trying to sniff out her scent from these niches, but was soon beaten out of that wild habit of mine. Then I began to see her absence in the kitchen, hear her silence from beyond the clothesline. Some nights I jerked awake, feeling like she had only just left the room, I could feel her imprints upon my skin. Strangely I never dreamed of her. Instead, I experienced her absence one sensation at a time. She felt far-away, absent yet present, all at the same time.
***
Whenever I naively asked my father when she would be coming back, he’d give me the strangest of looks. It wasn’t exactly disgust, but a kind of affected pity that seemed to say you poor motherless child, too bad she left because of you, after which he would proceed to beat my mother’s name out of my lips, just like he had beaten me out of my frenzy after The Burning. His brutality would be part of the reason why my mother’s memory would slowly get erased, only for Temsü to inadvertently bring it all back into place through his mispronunciation, but that is later. For now and for the longest time after, I believed my father. I was the reason behind my mother’s untethering. If I had not fallen down that day two years back, the accidental naming wouldn’t have happened and perhaps my mother wouldn’t have had to untether.
***
My mother was always careful not to call me Mhokuolie in front of anybody else. Of course Onü Sashi knew that I was named something else at birth, but it had dissolved in her memory with disuse. My mother never explicitly mentioned it, but the whispers always made me feel that Mhokuolie was a secret that only I shared with her, and I felt immensely proud of myself for keeping it that way. It was the one thing that guaranteed my connection with her. It was my responsibility to guard it against prying ears. Probably because of that, I remember feeling unreasonably betrayed the day my whispered name accidentally spilt out of my mother’s mouth.
Other than the biding silence, my memory has strangely retained the hues of that day. The sun was an overzealous red, as if only just painted, prone to rouge the palms of careless artists. Almost all of our neighbors were out and about basking in the redness. My father sat reading the newspaper, right outside our kitchen door with his chair strategically positioned below the edges of the roof. At the further end, my mother was hanging our laundry in the clothesline while keeping me in sight as I ran around the yard with Temsü and his younger sister. When I tripped and fell, my ears were so unused to hearing Mhokuolie being shouted that for a split second, I felt as though someone else was doing the falling. The fall was bland like the putrid colorlessness of sweat.
But the pain sharpened my senses, and I suddenly realized what my mother had done. It must have been only for a second or two, but those were some of the most oppressive moments of my young life. I cried, partly because of the pain and partly because I felt utterly betrayed. My father stood staring at my mother as she ran towards me with fear in her eyes—for me first and then for herself. They didn’t speak to each other that whole day and for three days after. I realized then, that something irreparable had been broken.
I was not acquainted with my father’s anger yet. He had put a leash on it and only occasionally let it bite my mother and me. And so when he finally erupted after the silence of the third day, it came as an unrecognizable shock. It helped me understand why my mother had to whisper Mhokuolie and why the name she gave me was the only thing she carried away with her when she untethered.
Imnamangyang (Ao): A mourning of two villages.
I like to imagine that it was a quiet affair. My grandmother and father off to one side with the rest of the guests: my father’s brother and his wife with their daughter saddled on her back, all of them pampering me with attention as they squeaked tebu with their indulgent voices.
My mother, sitting alone with her still swollen belly, a reminder that she was part of the family now, occasionally looking up and smiling at the guests, hiding a monstrous longing as she looked at me sleeping soundlessly in my grandmother’s arms.
It was the third day after my birth and I had been stamped with two names already, one whispered and the other quarter. My third and official name was to be pronounced that day. My grandmother for her part had not been idle during the three days prior. She had phoned all her important relatives, enquiring about the prospects of my name. It was to be a prominent name seeing as I was the first-born grandson in her family, but it should also be subdued enough, befitting the family’s status. She wouldn’t have minded a name like Linukkumzuk or Chubayanger, but her excitement was short-lived when she remembered that my mother was an orphan, and an orphan’s son could hardly carry such names. So she had surrendered them painfully, left to be scavenged by more deserving children from the village.
With her own suggestions running dry, she turned to my grandfather, who had offered two names over the phone: Merenyatet and Imnamangyang. Merenyatet, he had said, should be proper for the boy, but Imnamangyang sounds right. Ehh, Imnamangyang was my grandfather. You see, his mother had died giving birth to him and his father drowned just a day before his naming ceremony, poor boy. And so even before her mourning had stopped in her village, the mourning began in our own village. I think his grandparents did well in naming him.
Before my grandmother started to protest about the ill-omens surrounding the name, my grandfather, expecting her response, placated her: but, despite his circumstances, he was raised strong by his grandparents. You know, he was one of the strongest warriors of our village. Not many men could boast of having taken three female-heads. Our grandson’s fate is tied with that name, I know it. Name him accordingly.
Name him accordingly. It sounded so final, not so much a suggestion but a decree.
My grandmother had doubted then, that the name Imnamangyang was too heavy for me to bear. That the glory associated with my name might weigh me down and restrict me from living a simple, fulfilling life because my family was not rich enough to support such a heavy name. Keeping these circumstances in mind she pointed out that perhaps Merenyatet would be more apt.
But ultimately it was my father who would decide and he would not let his manhood be challenged by the superstitions of senile old women. So he obeyed his father and gave me my great-great-grandfather’s name. I, that tiny baby cocooned inside layers of cotton and human flesh, was to face life with a name that had been a remnant of two deaths for its previous owner.
***
Imnamangyang Aier was nine when the accidental naming happened, nine when the silence of three days gave way to his father’s wrath. His mother had anticipated that his father would eventually start talking and she had prepared herself to act as if nothing had happened when he did. But she wasn’t expecting her husband to flip from his long silence to a sudden yell, how dare you give Imnamangyang another name, you fatherless bitch! It wasn’t really his vulgarity that brought her down to her knees, but the stark contrast between her expectations and his reaction.
I- she began, but she wasn’t going to get to speak yet, for he had three day’s worth of silence to expunge. Remember where you came from, you miserable slut! If I hadn’t taken you in, you would still be out there, birthing children of dog-pigs. He is Imnamangyang Aier, my son! Not some Angami bastard you bore before coming under my roof! If you ever use that name again, trust me, that pig-trading uncle of yours will have treated you very kindly compared to the things I’ll—Do you understand me, woman?
She was prostrate in front of him, thanking him for not hitting her. Of course she wouldn’t call Imnamangyang another name again. It was only a mistake. She would never disrespect her husband like that—would you like me to take out the plates for dinner dear?
When he saw all this playing out in front of him, Imnamangyang Aier felt it bubbling up inside him. But he knew he just couldn’t let it pop in front of his father.
He bottled it up for a whole year, fermenting it inside his stomach and sometimes bringing it up only to chew it like cud, unable to spit it out. It was almost comical the way he finally screamed at Temsü, Don’t call me tebu! My name is not tebu! When all he wanted to do was shout at his father. And even though he was sure that his name wasn’t tebu, he wasn’t sure what his name actually was.
Imnamangyang could feel his mother’s gaze changing over the next year. What he had inherited from his father was revealing itself. Even though she still whispered Mhokuolie to him, he knew that her eyes saw Imnamangyang Aier when she looked at him now. He recognized the fear in her eyes because of what she saw within him, the un-named bubbling inside that could make him burst at any time. Their conversations used to be so full of life before, but now Imnamangyang could sense her distance every time they talked, as if a part of her had already gone ahead, leaving her body behind to follow later.
A week before The Burning, the day before she untethered, Imnamangyang was sitting in the verandah with his mother, unaware that it was the last time he was going to be with her. She was strangely talkative that day, and Imnamangyang Aier thought things were finally going back to normal again. They were chatting about all sorts of things when he saw, what he presumed to be, a bird hanging from a branch of the neem tree in front of their house.
Why is that bird hanging like that?
That’s a bat, Mhokuolie. They’re sleeping now. But come night, they’ll be flying up and about.
How can they fly when they’re upside down?
They don’t always remain upside down. When they know it is their time of the night, they turn upright and take flight.
***
Her absence was so complete that after she untethered, I sometimes wondered if my mother was just someone I had thought up. At that time, my memories were still at the non-remembering end of things. I still remember when you were this big, people would say when they met me after I had grown old enough to retain my memories, when I never seem to remember meeting them at all.
My father’s insistence on not naming my mother did not help, but as if in agreement with him, no adult acknowledged the fact that my mother had ever existed as well. Our neighbors knew most of what had happened before my mother untethered, but they weren’t going to interfere in other people’s lives. I remember them trying their best to evade all possible discussions about my mother whenever I brought her up. We don’t talk about such things, they would say. As if my mother was a thing to be used and forgotten.
But with time and with nobody willing to talk about my mother, her existence started dissipating slowly. There came a period in my life when I began to feel like I never had a mother in the first place. I was my father’s and my father was mine. If not for Temsü, I would have eventually stopped remembering my mother. I would have never been able to unravel the incomprehensible emptiness that grew inside me shortly after her untethering, because even if my mind had forgotten her, my body would have continued to remember.
Perhaps his reminder came at the proper time because as it were, I was having a particularly empty day. My father—as became his habit after my mother’s untethering—had snuck out for the day and would only return sometime around midnight, bringing with him the noise and stench of the drinking-house. My grandmother, who had been almost permanently staying with us now, was also not in the house. She was probably out, to make a better life for my father and me. That’s exactly how she put it, when I blocked the entrance to our house one day and demanded where she was off to. By then I had developed this irksome obsession to know about everybody’s whereabouts whenever they moved to step out of the house.
It wasn’t their absence that hollowed me out when I came back from school that day. In fact, I was expecting no one to be there. This was a different, particular emptiness that enveloped me. It had been gnawing inside me, aching, void for some time now. I initially thought it was hunger, but the leftover fried-potatoes from the morning did not satiate me one bit. I grew emptier still, null, I was threatening to disappear.
That is when I remember Temsü barging into our house. Mukule, he said, cautiously as he tapped on my shoulders, still careful not to misname me after how I had shouted at him before. Tebu had completed its allotted quarter-life and everyone else had started calling me Imnamangyang, but Temsü knew that I hated being called that most of all. And so he was often in search of something to call me by, other than the oy or hey that he used to invite me outside to play. He must have remembered it then, a vague spark, my mother’s name for me, shouted that day of the accidental naming.
It was real! I hadn’t imagined it. He knew it and I knew it too. It sounded so familiar yet so distant, so different. That was not how you said it, I suddenly thought as I turned around to face him.
That’s not how you say it, I said.
Then how do you say it? He asked with a grin, more excited to have chanced upon a name that didn’t rile me up than to actually know the answer.
It’s a secret, I said with an equally excited smile.
You can’t pronounce it right even if I told you how, I thought. I could feel my insides filling up then, slowly-slowly-slowly.
***
It took me eight years to come to terms with my mother’s disappearance. Eight years had been a long enough silence. Eight years after my mother’s untethering, I realized that it was time to disown my family. For the nineteen year old me, the decision felt like a stream carving its path down to the base of the mountain—inevitable.
Distance, I thought, would make me forget them faster, and the further I travelled away from my family, the lesser I felt like being Imnamangyang Aier. And so began my nomadic life. I travelled to Guwahati, then to Kolkata, then further south—Hyderabad, where I finally settled down at twenty-seven. Secretly I had hoped that I would run into my mother during my travels. I thought I would see her face wherever I went, I thought I would be sitting inside a dabha when she would come inside and we would make eye contact and she would shout Mhokuolie again, without any fear. But of course my life is hardly a movie, I didn’t see her in the many railway stations that I chugged by, I didn’t tap on a woman’s shoulder only for her to turn around and realize that she wasn’t who I thought she was.
She was complete in her silence, in her absence. Just like the days after she untethered. But this time I promised myself that I would remember her, remember the name she gave me, remember the emptiness that formed inside me as I realized I would never see her again. I was the only one burdened with her memory. Only I could remember, and as long as I was alive, she would continue to live on in my hope, in her complete silence and, in me, no matter what name I choose to live with.
