Why on earth do otherwise intelligent, educated people put themselves in thrall to such superstition? I am all in favor of the innate human desire to propitiate the heavens, and I am even prepared to entertain the notion that the cosmos might be sending us signals in every planetary realignment, but what makes us so credulous as to believe that our godmen understand the code? I suppose it is entirely possible that Ms. Jayalalithaa will attain political successes that a mere Ms. Jayalalitha might not have, but on what possible basis can it be argued that the addition of a superfluous vowel made all the difference? I remember when I was about to publish The Great Indian Novel and a friend's guru advised me solemnly that all that was lacking was an extra vowel in the title. Put in another a, he advised, and success was certain; otherwise the book's prospects could not be guaranteed. I could scarcely believe he was suggesting that a retelling of the Mahabharata would work better as The Great Indiana Novel, or that a 432-page tome could get away with calling itself The Great Indian Novella. So I ignored the advice, and I am glad to say the novel is currently in its eighteenth printing while the godman himself, having been arrested a couple of years later under Section 420 of the Indian Penal Code, is now spending his eighteenth year in prison.
I must confess, however, that there has been a spelling change in the bosom of my own family. My son Ishaan was named Ishan on his birth certificate, but growing up in America he soon tired of people pronouncing his name as if it rhymed with “I can,” and around age seven he did a Jayalalithaa and baptized himself Ishaan — a spelling less liable, he felt, to mispronunciation. (His twin is named Kanishk, without the conventional final vowel, which puts us doubly out of sorts, since to the purist Ishaan has one a too many and Kanishk one a too few.)
I was quite willing to accept this precocious act of individual affirmation by my little son, but had he based his preference on the suggestion of a trusted astrologer, I would have resisted it stoutly. I do not believe God dispenses his favors according to the number of vowels in his creatures’ names.
Bollywood, of course, disagrees with me; our cinematic history is full of the titles of movies being chosen, amended, or misspelled on astrological or numerological grounds. (Think of that absurd second u in Ek Duuje Ke Liye or the bizarre extra e in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Ghum.) Actors, too, have had their names tampered with for luck: I recall the actor Rakesh Roshan, after a couple of undeserved flops, trying his hand at being Raakesh Roshan for a film or two before giving up and finding success behind the camera rather than in front of it. And wasn't Raaj Kumar a plain “Rajkumar” once upon a time?
Not that other fields are immune from the contagion. As a longtime cricket fan, few things drove me as much up the wall about the exhilarating and exasperating Krishnamachari Srikkanth as that irritating second k in his surname. Was it idiosyncrasy, illiteracy, or numerology? After all, no Indian language renders this Sanskritic name with a double k sound.
But in all fairness, I have to admit that the rendering of Indian names into English follows few consistent principles to begin with. Why do many Maharashtrian names end in e (as in Borde or Godse) when they could as easily be spelt with an ay (as in Mhambray or Thipsay)? Even more confusingly, why do the Sinhalese use the same e ending (as in Ranasinghe) to convey not the ay sound but the “uh,” the half vowel that comes at the end of many Sanskritic names? Yet that only reaffirms my point: spellings vary for assorted reasons, so do people's fates, but a correlation would be impossible to find. Do Naidus, Nayudus, and Naidoos enjoy different kinds of divine benediction? And what about those Bengalis who spell their common name Mukherjee, Mukherji, Mukherjea, Mookerjee, and even Mukherjei, because the Brits couldn't wrap their tongues around Mukhopadhyaya?
Spelling cannot disguise, let alone alter, the essential nature of the thing itself — the person, the name, the title, the book, the film so labeled. As Gertrude Stein so memorably put it, a rose is a rose is a rose, whatever else you choose to call it, and Shakespeare beat her to it by famously asking whether a rose by any other name wouldn't smell as sweet. (If it were spelled “roase,” though, it might not look as attractive.) Bollywood might hope that a different spelling on the marquee would alter an actress's fortunes, but would it matter whether a woman was Priti, Preeti, Preety, or even Preity as long as she was pretty?
Of course not. But nonetheless, we are all wedded to our own spellings — to the ways in which we are used to seeing our own names written down. I can only hope that some Indians will stop writing to me as Sasi Tarur.
45. Indian Realities, Virtual and Spiritual
ON A RECENT HOLIDAY IN BANGALORE, I made two trips out of the city that captured, within a span of forty-eight hours, a simple truth about the Indian reality.
Late one night I set out on a four-hour drive with my mother to the town of Puttaparthi in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. We arrived after 2 A.M. in a remarkably well-lit and orderly town. Buildings gleamed white against the streetlights; the sidewalks, patrolled by volunteers even at that hour, seemed freshly scrubbed. Puttaparthi, once a humble Andhra village like so many others, had become a boomtown as the birthplace and headquarters of the spiritual leader Sathya Sai Baba.
My mother had been a devotee for eighteen years, attending prayer meetings of Sai Baba followers around the world and singing devotional bhajans. I was a skeptic myself, but joined her among the early-morning gathering of thousands, all waiting patiently for a glimpse of the great man. Sai Baba emerged in his long ochre robe and made a stately progress through the throng. He paused here and there to accept a petition from a believer, or to materialize vibhuti (sacred ash) from his palm into the cupped hands of a worshiper. We were privileged to be invited through an ornate door into a small room for a private audience. There we were joined by two other groups that had been similarly favored: an Indian family of three and half a dozen Iranian pilgrims, wearing green scarves that proclaimed their Islamic faith. They looked up at him with folded hands, their adoration glistening in their eyes.
“Would you like something from me?” Sai Baba asked me.
“Peace of mind for my mother,” I replied.
“Yes, yes,” he said somewhat impatiently, “but would you like a gift from me?”
“Whatever you give me is for my mother,” I replied. He waved his hand in the air and opened his palm. In it nestled a gold ring with nine embedded stones, a navratan. He slipped it on my finger, remarking, “See how well it fits. Even a goldsmith would have needed to measure your finger.” He shook some vibhuti into my mother's grateful hands before taking the Indian family into an inner chamber for what devotees called an “interview.”