My Name Has Been Mispronounced My Whole Life
I answered to approximations until I learned to correct the room.
There are eleven ways to say my name wrong, and I have answered to all of them.
My name is Jyotsna. The J and the Y arrive together, a small monsoon of a sound, JYOTS na, and then it settles. It means moonlight. My grandmother chose it, overruling two aunts and a priest, because she said I was born at the exact hour the power failed and the moon did the electricity's job.
I have been Jot-sna. Jyot-see-na. Justina, on a coffee cup in Indiranagar, spelled with a heart over the i. A geography substitute in Class 6 looked at the attendance register, made the face people make when a spider surprises them in the bathroom, and said, "J... I'm going to butcher this one, sorry in advance." The class laughed. I laughed too, which is the part I think about now... I laughed first, actually. I had learned that if you get to the joke before they do, the joke belongs to you, sort of, the way a rented flat sort of belongs to you.
Anyone with a name like mine knows the pause. Roll call moving briskly, Ananya, Divya, Ishaan, and then the silence before mine, a silence with a shape, like a car slowing before a speed bump. I used to raise my hand into that pause before the attempt even came. Present, miss. Sparing us both.
By college I had been shortened to Jo. I shortened myself, to be accurate. "Just call me Jo," I said at the first hostel dinner, breezy, generous, as if I were doing everyone a favor, handing out a convenience. Jo got invited to things. Jo was easy. Jo fit in a text message and in an American client's mouth and on the cake they got me when I left my first job, which read, in blue icing, We'll miss you Jo!
My grandmother refused the whole project. On the phone she would say my full name twice in the first sentence, like she was watering something. "Jyotsna, listen, Jyotsna, are you eating properly?" When I visited her in Cuttack she introduced me to neighbours with the entire name plus lineage, a full address of a human being, and I would stand there feeling both embarrassed and, in some room of myself I didn't visit often, deeply located.
The last year of her life, her memory started letting go of things. Dates first, then recipes, then which city she was in. On my final visit she asked me three times whether the mangoes had come in yet, and once whether her late sister was waiting downstairs.
She never once dropped a syllable of me.
She forgot the month. She forgot her own street. My name she said the way other people say their prayers, worn smooth but never wrong. Whatever shelf she kept it on was apparently the last shelf to empty.
She died on a Tuesday in March.
I took the train back to Bangalore afterwards because flights were too expensive that week and grief does not check your bank balance before arriving. Twenty nine hours. I sat by the window and watched half the country go past, paddy, then rock, then sunflowers, then the long yellow evening, and somewhere around Vijayawada it happened... I heard her voice saying my name, complete, both syllables given their full weight, and I understood that no one alive said it correctly anymore.
I had shortened myself all the way to zero people.
Every time I answered to a name that was not mine, I taught the room that I was negotiable.
The following Monday, my new project manager, a perfectly pleasant man, read my name off his laptop, winced cheerfully, and said, "I'll just call you Jo, easier for everyone."
And I heard myself say, "No."
The word came out plainer than I expected, no apology stapled to it. "It's Jyotsna. I'll say it slowly. You'll get it." And I said it slowly, twice, the way my grandmother used to, and the room did that tiny shift rooms do when a piece of furniture turns out to be a person.
He tried it... He got it wrong. He tried again and got it nearly right, and I said, "Close. Again." And the third time it came out whole, and he looked faintly proud, because people generally do not mind the effort.
That was the great anticlimax of my life: I had spent twenty years protecting everyone from a task that takes nine seconds.
Not everyone gets it, still. There are meetings where I correct the same man weekly, gently, like a tide. There are coffee cups. Last month a barista squinted at me and, instead of guessing, asked, "How do you actually say it? Properly?" I told her. She wrote it right, every letter, and I carried that cup back to my desk like a trophy from a small war.
I started writing around then, because the name thing turned out to be a door with a lot of rooms behind it. The first poem I ever finished was called Say It Twice, and I posted it on a community wall for poets at one in the morning with my whole name under it, no initials, no Jo. Strangers read it. Two of them had names that had been sanded down too, a Thanushree who had spent a decade as Tanya, an Oghenekaro who had been Karo since primary school. We recognized each other the way people with the same scar do.
I fell into reading profiles of writers nobody had heard yet, and I noticed how many of them opened with the name, the real one, spelled out and sometimes with a pronunciation guide, planted at the top like a flag. It is a specific kind of courage, going first with the hardest word in your biography. It costs something every single time. It also pays.
Because here is what I have learned, and I learned it embarrassingly late. People take their cue from you. Say your name like an apology and they will file it under things that do not matter. Say it like a fact, like the time or the temperature, and most people will simply adjust. The ones who refuse to adjust are giving you useful information about themselves, free of charge.
My niece was born two years ago. They gave her a long name, a gorgeous cargo ship of a name, and at the naming ceremony one uncle joked that she would shorten it herself by kindergarten. Maybe she will. It will be hers to shorten, which is different. But I have already decided what my job is in her life. I am the aunt who says the whole thing, every visit, both syllables of every part, the way moonlight was once said over me. Some inheritances are just sounds, said correctly, on purpose. Lately, when I write about childhood, that ceremony is where the poems keep wanting to begin.
On the train back from her first birthday, a woman in the seat across asked my name. Old habit lifted its hand... offered Jo.
I said, "Jyotsna. I'll say it slowly."
She repeated it once and got it right on the first try, casual as anything, and went back to her book, having no idea she had just done something that took me thirty one years.
I looked out the window for a long time after that... The moon was out over the fields, doing the electricity's job, and my grandmother's word for it was intact in my mouth, whole, unshortened, going home.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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