Naveen

I told Shaune when we were trying for a second child that if we had a boy I wanted to name him Naveen. I’d been trying on other Indian-sounding names but kept coming back to it. I liked Tariq and Arun but Shaune did not. We both liked Kalpen for a few months but I tired of it.

When he suggested we name our first son Deaglan William – I didn’t argue but was acutely aware of how Caucasian it sounded, not reflecting my contribution to his DNA one bit. I loved the name. It had always brought to mind handsome men with British accents – Declan Mulqueen in The Jackal, Declan Gormley in Mission Impossible.  When Shaune suggested it, I knew it was perfect and imagined a time when our son was in his late teens, early twenties, young women swooning over him and whispering things to each other like – “He’s so gorgeous and that name is just perfect.”

What?

Don’t tell me that surprises you – I’m his mother, I can’t help it.

In Bangladesh I had three sisters. It would have been nice to honour their names if we’d given birth to any girls. I don’t remember my uncles’ names – my birth mother had many brothers. I have no recollection of any of the little boys we played with in the orphanage. And most of the men I’ve known in my life here have been locally raised with names like Mike or John, Chris.

Naturally I looked to Bollywood.

I became smitten with Balraj in Bride and Prejudice back in 2004 – the Bollywood version of the Jane Austen novel. He was handsome, exotic and to my delight had an English accent. And when I learned that his name was Naveen Andrews I instantly liked the name and tucked it into my back pocket.

Years later I learned that it meant “new”.

Shaune hemmed and hawed with the name during my pregnancy. Sometimes he thought he liked it and at other times he thought the v in the middle gave it a harsh-sounding quality. By then we knew we were having another boy. I’d already begun referring to him in my mind as Naveen.

Naveen came out of my body with dark brown skin and enormous ears. He had Mongolian scars on his bottom, feet and arms and looked nothing like anyone we knew. In the first few months Shaune often joked about it. One time he came home and said he saw someone who looked exactly like our new baby. Excited I asked him to describe the child. “Well he was about 80, definitely Indian, short with a round belly and was wearing a lungi (he didn’t say lungi but described the dress of rural Indian men so that's what I  assumed he meant).” 

Very funny I thought but had to smile because I did wonder if somewhere in a small village of rural Bangladesh sat an old toothless man with cocoa skin and giant ears – a long lost relative of mine who’s face Naveen had inherited.