What’s In A Name?

I get a lot of questions about my name, because it’s an unusual one. My first name, Bisha, was picked off of a flight plan. My grandfather was a pilot in what was once the Royal Indian Air Force under the old empire and then the Pakistani Air Force after partition. He died in a bad landing after a rather mundane, routine flight. His younger brother, who fiddled with planes and eventually worked as a flight engineer, married his widow and became my step-grandfather, and the only grandfather I would know. When I was born, the choice of name was supposed to go to my father, but he wasn’t about, so my grandfather was given the task and since I hail from incredibly creative stock, he looked at his flight plan and picked a ‘feminine sounding’ city.

When I complained that they had nine months to come up with a name, and that their methodology seemed a bit laissez faire, I was always told: “Aah, but Bisha is famed for its dates! Really. I hear they grow delicious dates.”

I’ve never run into much trouble explaining away that part of my name. I’ll just say ‘It’s an Arabic name,” if I’m feeling lazy, or I’ll say, “It’s like being called Paris, or Berlin, or London, but, you know, foreign.” My dad came about in time to give me my middle name, Kanval, which means lotus. So that’s nice.

It’s my last name that fills me with dread. It’s Ali. Three little letters! That’s all. Yet it’s loaded with connotations and a check-list of assumptions. Yes, it’s a Muslim name. And of course I see how easy it is to put that together with my race, and apply a bunch of stereotypes and nuggets of genuine knowledge as a framework for understanding what my life may or may not have been like, and who I may or may not be. I get it. I do it too.

When I was at school, I would confide in my friend Elizabeth about how it felt to balance a clash between my parent’s beliefs about right and wrong with my own, and how and why that colours my interactions and what I’m comfortable talking about and doing. That even by telling her about my misgivings, I felt at risk and exposed. I didn’t have the words for it at the time (and I barely have the right ones now,) but I was trying to express a fear for my well-being if I were honest with those closest to me about who I am, and how I want to live.

What I hadn’t factored in was a response along the lines of “Your parents are just strict and can’t let go — when you get older they’ll get more used to it and it will be fine. All parents are like that. It’s all a bit childish that you’re not being honest, you should just do what you want. Plus you don’t cover your hair so they can’t be that strict.” Not surprisingly, I talked about these experiences — the compromises, the white lies and the rules I’ve had to bend to make living easier — a lot less as I came up against this thinking more and more.

Actively coming out as a non-believer when you’ve been raised in an environment like the one I was raised in is heart breaking at best and incredibly dangerous at worst. And the fun part is, you never know where on that spectrum you sit until it’s too late. Some people in that situation know from a very young age that if they want to be happy, at some point they will have to destroy the relationships that were all they knew for most of their lives. As a kid, it’s hard to explain to your peers that participating, dressing and hanging out in a way that’s ‘normal’ to them, is a gut-twisting, guilt-ridden and terrifying juggling act to you. It feels embarrassing and painful to express it as an adult.

I was amazed when my second cousin came to visit one day. She wore skirts with tights (something I’ve only been able to ‘get away with’ out of school uniform in my twenties,) and sleeveless tops — I still don’t wear sleeveless tops. In fact, I’ve only once worn one outside of my bedroom. It’s so ingrained in me now, I have no idea how I’d feel comfortable leaving the house in one. I’ve also never worn a skirt with my legs uncovered, again, aside from a school uniform. There she was, in a skirt and tights and a sleeveless top. And yet I had always been taught to revere her and her immediate family for being of a more elite caste than ours — and therefore, shouldn’t they be more pious and religious than us? Shouldn’t her family be more strict, more demanding and more traditional? I had so many questions that I didn’t dare to ask. I wasn’t able to process the discrepancy, and in my childish eyes, the absolute injustice of it — why didn’t she have to ‘suffer’ too?

I didn’t have the tools to understand that we didn’t share the same ‘culture’ or ‘traditions’ or ‘religion,’ and that these are just blanket labels for ease of discussion. It feels like it’s just too much work to dig deeper than those terms, but here we are, sharing a name, a race, a culture, a religion, and a rather charming one-sided dimple, with incredibly divergent narratives.

I will never know what it’s like to be an individual black man, or what it’s like to be an individual white woman, or to be a second generation immigrant from Spain, or a Lebanese fortune teller, or a man-with-a-van, or a dude who works at McDonald’s his whole life and one day dies in the drive-thru booth, uttering “Can I take your order,” one last time before passing into sweet, sweet oblivion. I can read personal accounts, read history, read context, I can sympathise with all my heart, but I will never be able to experience one other individual’s struggle and story.

I know I have a load of assumptions in my head but I’m working on flushing them out and listening, rather than nodding my head knowingly, or telling a story about a guy I knew who worked at KFC one time, and you guys must be totally alike right? I’m doing my best to stop thinking ‘Oh, I got it.” Because I haven’t, I haven’t got your story. But I want to know it, and I want to be with you in your shittiness and say “I hear you dude, that sucks. Let’s talk about it.”

I guess what I’m trying terribly hard to express is that, regardless of colour or creed or lack thereof, we all suffer our individual little shitty tales — and hopefully enjoy beautiful jelly and ice cream filled tales when the shit is taking a break. So maybe let’s not be lazy and assume they’re all the same and clumped together, and every brown person is gonna have an arranged marriage, and every person with the second name Ali shares the same beliefs as a boxing legend, or had to go through x parameters and types of shit. Because my shit is at least a little bit different from yours, and yours is a little different from everyone else’s — and there’s something kinda magical about that.