The “other” Gadhia
I like my name.
Fun fact: 100% of my friends with babies have named their baby Arjun.
Other fun fact: just yesterday I received a message from a mate saying that if his mom had her way, he’d be named Arjun as well.
My last name is okay too. I mean, there is the occasional niche name-calling. Gadi, meaning car. And Gathiya, the popular gujarati breakfast snack. But generally speaking, it’s obscure enough to go unnoticed and unperturbed.
That all changed in college. I was looking down a registration list of all the students, and to my astonishment found that there was another person with my last name. He had, for all intents and purposes, the same name as my dad. By this point I had already unearthed another long lost cousin at my Catholic college, so that seemed like the logical explanation.
So I went home, and asked my Grandma.
Usually Grandmas (or “baas" as we call them in my culture) are an infinite fountain of wisdom when it comes to extended family. Drop them a fraction of a name, or partially obscure feature and they’ll tell your their entire employment history, relation status, bloodline, and a heap of information you really didn’t care about.
But not this day. This day, she couldn’t answer. What I got instead was a cold, derisive response: “Oh, they must be the Kisumu Gadhias”. Kisumu is a town in Kenya.
And that was it. No further comment. No clarification. No follow-up questions.
This wasn’t the first time, nor would it be the last. There’s the CEO of Virgin Money. A Canadian rock star. Some dude that writes JavaScript. All the Gadhii that weren’t objectively a relative were bitterly discarded as a Kisumu Gadhia. And there were so many follow-up questions.
- Who are they?
- Why are they so distinct from us?
- Why are all Gadhii not related to us assumed from Kisumu?
- Are they related to us?
- Why does nobody want to talk about them?
- Did something happen? Are they our enemies?
- Do they refer to us with equal animosity?
It’s all very surreal. As if they reside in a parallel universe that I’m not supposed to know about, but by some force of nature we chaotically cross paths at random just as we hit our formative teenage years, as if in a Disney movie.
I never spoke to to the other Gadhia. I think somewhere, deep down, I wasn’t ready to hear what he might have to say.
