Dinner conversation

Last night at dinner Deaglan told us a story about a new kid in his class. The kid had the same name as another kid. I asked him if he meant that kid – thought maybe he was still referring to him in this way because he was a junior kindergartner while he himself was a senior kindergartner this year. 

 

"No." he explained. This new kid was not the one  I was referring to. This new kid had “brown all over himself.”

 

Shaune and I looked up from our plates.

 

We have never had any lengthy discussions about race in our house, mostly because the kids are young. But also because a conversation about race these days is made considerably more complicated by the fact that a noticeable number of the kids our kids' ages are of mixed ethnicity just like our boys.

 

One time before this, when we’d landed on a channel airing The Karate Kid movie (the new version with Will Smith’s son), during a fight scene between a group of Chinese boys and the Karate Kid, Deaglan jumped up and exclaimed very excitedly, “Mom, those are Shilo’s brothers!”

 

This was at the beginning of the year when we still hadn’t put names to faces of his new class mates. When he kept bringing Shilo (pronounced Shee-lo) up I’d thought maybe it was an Arabic name. 

 

“Oh, does Shilo look like those boys honey?” I asked.

 

“Yes! I think those might be his brothers. They even have the same hair!”

 

So when he described the new Nathan and clarified the difference between the old Nathan by telling us that he was "brown all over himself", Shaune and I were amused. The Nathan I was referring to, the son of a work colleague is of African-American descent. Although he is biracial.

 

“Is he brown all over himself like Mommy and Naveen?” Shaune asked.

“No, he’s dark brown with balding hair.”

 

I bit my cheek to stay very serious. "Like Daddy's hair?"

 

"Yes."

 

“What colour am I?” I asked, trying to get a better sense of Nathan’s background.

 

“You’re light brown.”

 

Delighted by the way he saw us, I probed further.  “What colour are you?”

 

“Yellow.”
 

 Yellow

 

 Light brown

 

 Biracial

 



  

Balding hair:)



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.