Through the Green Doors

"Family ties run deep here, coloring virtually every detail of life. I tell him that just a few doors down is the house that my mother’s family owned, the house where I was born.

That house was called “Dalmejiem.” The name was an acronym that included every member of my mother’s family: Devaram, the father; Agnes, the mother; Leela, the oldest daughter; Margaret; Elizabeth; James; my mother, Isabella; Ebenezer; and Manickam, the surname."

“Coming Home” by Ravi Zacharias

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Dear Alex,

Something ancient is withering in our modern ways of relating with one another: our calling of names.

Devaram. Agnes. Isabella. Names grind in throats as exotic fruits, wringing deep memories out of the voice who knows them. To know a name is to know a voice.

This morning I find an old photo of my 7 year-old self in a one-time reunion with my paternal grandparents at the entrance of their 4 or 5 storied home. It was my last visit in the village by the mountains before I moved to Canada.

I could almost walk through the same freshly painted green doors that would draw out virtually around the clock the flavors of grandma’s spicy stir-frying and steaming. Ground floor was their convenient store jammed with life’s essentials from cigarettes to pesticides. The rest was living space to include the family’s Grey Cat which claimed its honorable name as hunter of neighborhood rodents. I remember in the photo every face whose name I have known mostly by number: uncle #1, aunty #3, cousins # 3 & 4 of uncle #5.

I do not know the name of my maternal grandmother. I have been told she was a widow soon after World War II, a homemaker with 3 young daughters whose collective voices must call for survival at the closure of daddy’s casket. Whatever he had gathered and stored for their nest before his premature passing, the lady of the house could not touch. His voice was lost and with it, his collection of things under his name. She neither knew his will nor title of deeds signed.

One cannot grasp a name by its letters. 1, 2, 3 or more in strokes or symbols, each grunt baseless, nameless, waiting with others to ride on sound wave as a body of being, not alphabets.

My daughter is picking up her cap and gown for her high school grad ceremony on Zoom tonight. She will post her name online with her portrait. I chose her name 17 years ago, her every letter flickering on my eyelids in dream and vision. They must go - names that do not speak of identity beyond a few syllables, named posts or positions that sound grand in amplitude with no altitude, naming alchemy as faith. She has never walked through wooden doors as green as the one in the photo.

What you see may not be what you know. Let’s not get muddled over fake names.

Yours, Kate