Call Me By My Name

On naming as ritual, as violence, and as commemoration

Like every story that defines the course of a life, the story of my name began long before I was born. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves because the story of my name is hardly a story. Much to my dismay or maybe my relief, I have not decided yet, no one debated it over candlelight. There were no lists, no vetoes, and no heated negotiations. It simply came to be that my grandfather liked the sound of “Megha”. It was straightforward. Efficient, if nothing else. Practical, at best. And everyone else went along with it.

Names debut like preludes to a play. There’s something ceremonial in how they are revealed to the world, in hushed tones and celebratory bursts. They are whispered to the Gods, stamped onto our now yellowing birth certificates, and paraded on family WhatsApp groups with more fanfare than the child ever asked for, like an absurdly theatrical ritual. Meanwhile, the baby, pink and barely formed, lies unaware, missing the memo that the first act of its life has already been written.

As far as arcs go, my name’s journey has not been particularly dazzling. Most of the time, it does not do much heavy lifting. Not for the barista around the corner of my apartment building, and not for professors who I credit for my academic development. By the time it makes it to a receipt, it is just five letters to get through and occasionally morphs into Mega on my Starbucks cup, like I was planted on Earth to sell software.

But officially, on the record, I am Megha. Not short for anything. Just Sanskrit for “cloud.” Atmospheric. Elusive. Always somewhere in the sky but rarely tethered to the ground long enough to explain myself. A cloud in my own right. Which is to say, my name and I have been eerily well-matched since day zilch.

There is no finality to Megha, it ends mid-air, unresolved. Its meaning, cloud, carries no urgency, and no fixed address, which, unfortunately or not, does a suspiciously good job of describing me. I tend to hover. I walk into a room with a breezy ease but leave before the plot thickens. My emotions register more in atmospheric pressure than in direct speech. People have called it calm. Sometimes vague. They are both technically correct. If the universe was taking requests when I was born, someone faxed one in on my behalf.

But say it out loud, and it stops short. Two syllables, cut cleanly, like the beginning of a thought no one finished. Which, frankly, feels weirdly fitting and in its own way, forgiving. Because I have never taken much interest in the idea of being pinned down.

Lately though, the sound of my name has begun to do more than summon me. It has been behaving erratically now, like an instruction manual that gives too much away: a glimpse into who I might be. Classic case of nominative determinism, I suppose, the idea that names determine who we are, and who we become.

A name that floats, and a person that drifts? How convenient. A perfect coincidence? Maybe.

Naming feels like a harmless no-brainer, dressed up in the garb of affection. But it is the first thing that happens to us without our consent. The earliest attempt at authorship over a life that has not even commenced yet. That inaugural act of naming is coercive, an assertion of control that sets the terms for how a person will move through the world. As for renaming, in many parts of the world, that control has looked like colonisers renaming cities, slaves being stripped of their ancestral names, or immigrants shortening their names for easier digestion, to soothe and comfort others. The blade of naming is dull, but it cuts all the same. There is a kind of soft violence in that, not bloody but slow. It is so deeply normalised that we only ever register it in hindsight. It is so thoroughly embedded in the everyday that most of us live and die without thinking to question it. I think about this a lot at night..

As time peeled itself bare, people found creative detours around my name. In school, a close friend delighted in calling me Mega. Others, for no earthly reason, went with Meghan, as if syllables were suddenly on clearance sale. Megha was not hard to say. But perhaps the urge to rename me was far more about access to me than anything else. It felt like they needed to rebrand me just to feel closer to me in some sort of twisted way. That reinvention was the price they paid in exchange for intimacy.

College brought new aliases. Maya. Megatron. Nutmeg. Each more unrelated than the last. Childhood friends went with Maggi. Closer friends and family stayed close with Meghu and Megs.

My memory has refused to cough up an instance when I declared a fondness for these nicknames. I was neutral, always on the fence, because I understood the math of it. If this person calls me Nutmeg, it tells me more about them than it does about me. Most of it was playful. But, at times, the concept of nicknaming someone unsettled me; something about how quickly they make it theirs. It was not always cruel. But it was rarely innocent. Does familiarity with someone give you the license to edit? Or in my case, maybe my identity needed better marketing?

Maxi is what my father has called me since I was a baby. It is a name no one else uses, and it belongs entirely to him. Childlike, almost silly, but ironically, he says it most often when I have done something that, in his eyes, makes me a good child. Occasionally, he adjusts the ending, and Maxi becomes Maxu. A minor syllable shift that is barely noticeable to anyone else, but to me, it is the sweetest sound in the world. Over time, his delight in me has become something I have silently craved. It is not surprising, then, I suppose, that I take boundless delight in his delight. Of all the names I have been given, this one has always felt the most like love. It is not my name, not technically, but it is the one I have most wanted to live up to.

Are names the precursor of our identity? Or does identity slip in first and wait to be named? Is it possible to become one’s name, or are we made of other things entirely? Does personality bloom on its own, or does it bend to whatever it has been called enough times? These are the questions that find me in the attic of my memory, elbow deep in mislabeled boxes, wondering who packed these versions of me and why no one left a legend behind.

In rare moments, a name becomes something gentler, not a means to control. Less a claim to the world that “I am here, I exist”, but an honorary keepsake and a way of remembering. A bundled archive of language, lineage and love.

Like any other inheritance, a name is both a gift and a burden. A gift because the first time you are named is the first time you are truly seen. A burden because it gets here first, before you have materialised into anything of your own making.

If you care about freedom, as I do, being given a name is like signing up for lifelong negotiation. You do not get to choose your name, but you do get to decide how lightly you will wear it.

Mine has shaped me, but I have worked hard not to let it contain me. I have loved it, outgrown it, circled back to it and watched it take forms.

And through it all, I have learnt to treat it like I treat most things that try to define me: with a peculiar kind of detached affection and deep reverence. I carry it with grace, but I do not cling. It matters to me, but never more than everything else I have become and I am yet to become. Like everything that has changed me without owning me, my name gets its place under the sun.

So call me by my name, but say it lightly.