Shreyasi, by whatever name you call her

I was one of the youngest children in my generation on my paternal side and the eldest in my maternal family and the only one to my parents. So chronology and the number one did have a major role to play on the baby’s importance.
I arrived (as related by my mother) howling and bringing the hospital ward down on a chilly January evening. My family (especially my older cousins) could not wait for the snail mail to carry the news after a fortnight so they proactively started sending names of both genders. The winner was the strange one sent by my eldest cousin, R-didi. The name she sent was sweet, rare, confusing in its meaning and above all had an Anglican touch. Henceforth I was called ‘Runcie’ (to be pronounced roon-see). Thus I was saved from the train of ‘khuku, khuki, buchun’ or some such typical Bengali pet name.
Much later in life my curiosity (I wonder if I will meet the same fate as the cat one day) led me to quiz R-didi on the origin of the name. She nonchalantly said it belonged to a small girl she was really fond of, in her neighbourhood, who in turn got her name by assimilating her parents’ names. That was the unceremonious end to my pursuit of name root. I finally saw that Runcie was the surname of a Harvard Business Review contributor and that was the last nail in the coffin.
However ‘Runcie’ was surely not a name to be accorded to a respectable dame from a cultured middle class Bengali family so the name game didn’t end here. The suggestion box kept brimming. Finalists were ‘Saheli’, ‘Sohini’. My mom thought that the former would draw unnecessary attention from the rowdy category of men folk (Oh Maa! what impeccable logic) and Sohini was common. My erudite maternal uncle immediately suggested ‘Shreyasi’ so Shreyasi I became within 10 days of reaching this place. The English spelling was decided by my mother after careful consideration of Sanskrit-English phonetics.
Now I had a serious life long problem at hand. My class teachers could never spell my name right and all of them including my classmates resorted to the smaller and sweeter ‘Runcie’! Most of my friends still prefer calling me that.
Bengalees would typically pronounce my formal name as ‘Sreyoshi’, the correct Sanskrit one being ‘Sreyasi’—with emphasis on both ‘sa’-s. To make my life and others' simpler I just pronounce my name as the English spelling goes. I also found that ‘S’ is the easiest way to sign an email and that however much I explain that am far removed from ‘Shreya’ although the root word in Sanskrit is the same, some people (especially my former admirers, some heuristic there?) insist on calling me so.
I have been called by various names in my not so long life. Names which do not even remotely sound like my real ones but which, the callers insist, are exactly how they know and read my name!
The cake however goes to the guards of my college in Delhi. They almost killed my parents (don’t worry it was just remotely generated shock therapy). Nothing could make them change their belief since the time when during the wee hours of the morning in the second week of my hostel life a half-trembling, sonorous voice kept on calling for a ‘Sher Singh’ and interspersed it with a knock of the huge wooden stick on the floor. It took me a week or so to actually believe that it was a call from my home and it was I who was being called to be informed of the same.
My parents were so shocked that they never ever called me on the hostel landline during my two years of stay there.
So much for a name…..