Don’t call me baby

You walk into a department store. And there is a shelf-full of Xbox and Playstation games. You go, yeah baby. Walk a little ahead and there is a section of beauty products. You shrug and you tell your wife, OK baby. And then looming ahead is the largest section in the store. Johnson’s baby lotion. Baby creamy. Pond’s baby moisturiser. Baby huggy nappies. Baby icy-cool powder. Baby hair oil for oily hair (do they even have hair?), and what not.

These things called babies. They are like a black hole. They suck in and suck in and reflect nothing, wasting mother earth’s limited resources. So why does anyone have a baby? They don’t – they have sex. And babies are an unfortunate byproduct.

Now if there is anything more utterly meaningless than having a baby, it’s the let’s-go-meet-the-baby. It’s obvious the couple is paying the sad price for their carnal pleasures, why go celebrate their woes? We don’t go to see the couple’s newly-acquired LCD TV, or their fridge that can store an entire crate of beer. Why go see this bawling entity? The TV or the fridge at least have their uses, and you can say something like, ‘man it’s awesome’. But can we look at the newborn and tell the mother, ‘woman, that’s awesome’? Or, for that matter, ask ‘how much did you pay for it?’

And thus, with much consternation, I set out to meet my aunt and her husband. And their newly-born. My mother had begged, pleaded and threatened till I gave in. But how bad could it get?

Well, I found out.

I thought I had my back covered. When I see the child, I shall resort to ‘so cute’, or ‘awww sooo cuteee’ or other variants of that expression. And if I was required to spend more time, I’d say, ‘he has your eyes’, ‘he has your nose’, ‘your chin,’ and continue linking every part of the child’s anatomy to that of the mother or the father. Well, almost every teeny weenie part.

But I had not adequately prepared myself. For what I saw was a baby, a real live baby. With its tiny hands and its tiny fingers, moving in slow motion like the limbs of a creature from a horror film, reaching for me. His nose and lips looked ill-formed and his ears were too large. And when he opened his eyes he looked like a cross between The Lord Of The Rings’ Gollum (remember the ugly creature that goes ‘my precious, myprecious’ every five minutes) and the alien from ET. And I could have sworn he smirked like Lord Voldemort. It took time to recover from my initial shock and when I did, I told my aunty that he was ‘awww sooo cuteee’. I did not dare tell her or uncle that the baby looked like them.

So there I was, sitting in a corner, away from the family members assembled adoringly around Gollum (I had decided on calling him that), smiling to myself, thinking of how naughty my uncle and aunt were (it had only been 6 months since their wedding and they already had Gollum), when my aunt yelled out, “Lhendup, I want to you to name my son.” Then the whole family turned around in chorus, “Yes he should name the boy.”

Holy shit!

Now there’s a little backgrounder to that holy shit. My name is Lhendup Gyatso, and back in school, my Nepali friends who found my name too long called me by my initials, LG. Lg also happens to be Nepali slang for the penis. So you know what I was called. But even after school, when I left my hometown for university in Kolkata, the schlong did not leave me alone. My Hindi speaking friends broke my first name in two: Lhend up, but pronounced it Lund up.

So yes, who else but poor me to come up with a name that the kid would like. ‘Gollum’ came to mind at once. But Gollum’s folks had exacting standards. My aunt is Tibetan Buddhist and my uncle, an Afghani Muslim. And my brief was a name common to both faiths, and one that is rare yet famous. I took my job seriously. So I pondered and pondered. Tibetan as well as Afghani. Rare as well as famous. And then it came to me, and I realised the greatness of the name I had come up with.
I went up to them beaming. I smiled, hushed up all the noise and din that my family was creating, and I swear even the gurgling baby shut up. I looked at Gollum and called him, “Osama Lama”. But my family didn’t seem to get it. So I, like a great management problem solver, gave them another option. “How about Dalai bin Laden?”
Anyway, they didn’t take my advice. What a colossal waste of time.

That too on a baby.

A few months later, my mother was looking at Gollum’s photographs. By then Gollum had been named. She looked at it this way and that, turning the photographs around their corners, and said, “Lhendup, you know the baby looks a lot like you.”