Almost everything foretold my ordinariness in a family of extraordinary beauties – my unspectacular horoscope, the positioning of the stars at the time of my birth, even the inauspicious start to my life.
“How could a child so… ordinary-looking possibly be mine?” my father is said to have exclaimed moments after my birth, a frown marring his extraordinarily handsome face.
“Donkey’s egg,” Grandmother said with uncharacteristic rudeness towards a son-in-law of the family. “Whoever heard of a newborn being beautiful?”
But this was exactly the excuse he was looking for. Our mother had died in childbirth minutes after delivering us twin girls. This, after she’d already burdened our father with an older daughter. Had any of us been born the right gender, with the consequent ability to take care of our father in his old age, this question of paternity would have never come up. With no son and no wife, he felt justified in discarding us and taking on a new life.
Grandmother stepped in after the abandonment, not that she had much of a choice; my father had no family. Who else would take on the headache of raising, and marrying off, three girls? Other than a grandmother, that is.
My twin and I remained nameless for almost a year after our birth, a period of intense agonizing for Grandmother. She finally settled on Pullamma – twig girl – for me, the older twin. To bestow a fancier name would be to risk the wrath of the Gods, the current misfortunes being more than she could bear. She debated on Pichamma – mad girl – for my twin; the Gods must have been smiling on my sister because they intervened in the form of Grandmother’s mother-in-law. The old lady decreed that it was only proper that such a fair and pretty child be named after her. So my twin ended up being named Lata.
Fair-skinned Lata was as delicate as the creeper she was named for, while our older sister Malli, with her pinkish-white complexion, couldn’t be more flower-like if she tried.
All through childhood, I was teased mercilessly for my name. I was more a branch than a twig; a stump really, and the other children never let me forget it. They called me Nalla Pulla – black twig – for the colour of my skin. I swore when I had children of my own, I would give them the most beautiful names possible.
Ten years later I find myself in an ashram, the detritus of my life about me. I’m married, but not married; I’m a mother, but not a mother.
I sit at the feet of the Swami Chidananda.
Chidananda. Eternal bliss.
If I had been named differently, how might my life have turned out?
