(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
Traditionally the people of Bengal are identified by a nick name, first name and surname. The nick name is used only by close relatives when they are quite young and fades away as they grow up and are being called by the first name by relatives and close friends ; their surname is used commonly by all others when it comes to calling them. In the records and telephone directories the full name appears with first name and surname. Some surnames are Anglicised in to a short form as : Ganguli for Gangopadhyay, Mukherjee for Mukhopadhyay and Chatterjee for Chatopadhyay and so on. The nick names do not carry meaning but are easily pronounced by the family members ; the first names are decided generally by the grand parents on the basis of a sacred meaning or in the memory of great leaders or religious Deities.
Ashima was a Bengali girl of about nineteen years age, living in Calcutta, in 1966 and studying in a college with English as her main subject in Calcutta. Her full name was Ashima Bhaduri and Monu, nick name. She was five feet four inches, tall for a Bengali woman, ninety- nine pounds and her complexion was on the dark side of fair ; but she had been compared on more than one occasion to the actress Madhabi Mukherjee. Her nails were admirably long, her fingers, like her father's, who was an illustrator for a magazine, artistically slim. Ashima had a brother studying in a high school in Calcutta.
Every pet name is paired with the first name, also called good name, bhalonam in Bengali. Good names tend to represent dignified and enlightened qualities. Ashima means "she who is limitless,without borders." It was awarded on the naming ceremony by her grand-mother.
Ashima also used to tutor neighborhood children in their homes, on their verandas and beds, helping them to memorize Tennyson and Wordsworth, to pronounce words like sign and cough, to understand the difference between Aristotelian and Shakespearean tragedy. But in Bengali, a finger can also mean fingers, a toe toes.
It had been after tutoring one day that her mother informed her, when she reached home, that a family was visiting them in an hour for her marriage proposal. Ashima's mother took her to the bedroom and prepared her suitably. She, obediently but without expectation, had untangled and re-braided her hair, wiped away the kohl that had smudged below her eyes, patted some toilet powder from a velvet puff on to her skin. The sheer parrot green sari she pleated and tucked into her petticoat had been laid out for her on the bed by her mother. Before she was escorted in to the sitting room, Ashima could hear her mother saying, "She is fond of cooking, and she can knit extremely well. Within a week she finished this cardigan I am wearing."
Ashima smiled, amused by her mother's salesmanship, it had taken her better part of a year to finish the cardigan.
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