Column

Tales From The Locker Room

My wife, who now is quite a separate building in our lane, is in her eight month of pregnancy. With time running out, the search for a name is on.

Since the to-be-born baby will be a mix of four, (some say even five, we’re not sure) different communities, trying to settle on a name almost always leads to violence.

Yesterday, the entire household sat down and tried to thrash out the issue without using any sharp weapons and most chose to offer two optional names. The sex of the child is unknown as we Broachas can generally only determine the sex of the chid when she or he is around 27 years of age.

My mother who has never been one to put great faith in gender, and that is proven time and again when she breaks into what could be loosely and politely called Hindi, offered the name ‘Chotu’.

Her logic for the name was that with the possible exception of a couple of operatic tenors, all babies are born small. ‘Chotu’ would thus be a name that would reflect this smallness in a cute and positive manner.

However, my wife rejected this outright as she felt Chotu would be too close to Choti , a name of one of our pet building stray dogs and could at some stage affect the mental and spiritual well being of the said doggie.

My father, who believes you can’t be a human being without an overgenerous influence of western classical music in your life, opted for Enrico or Stephano for the male, and Maria or Kiri Kanawa for the female. Well, as expected, he was chased down the stairs by my wife’s side of the family.

Our cook and resident temperamental artist Praveen, chose the name ‘Shamlu’ a name he was called by his wife who perished inexplicably in a cooking accident many years ago.

As Praveen was sacked instantly, other relatives and well wishers threw their hats into the ring. Henry, Sholaka, Sai with or without the Baba, Uttaranchal and Desdemona were the few mentioned as favourites.

Sadly at the end of the debate, the wife turned violent again and all our support staff were thrown out of the house. Unable to resolve the name issue, we’ve come to a temporary understanding that till we can clear our minds, we’ll just call the baby number two for the first few years. Of course, that’s just till we hear from Madonna.