Our youngest brother Nadeem will soon be putting his bachelorhood to an end. Only the other day he was a baby and we still remember how we --- the three brothers and a sister who preceded him --- fussed over him when our mother came home from the hospital with him. When the question came up about a name for him, we thought Nadeem was a fine name. And it was because we were yet nostalgic about the Pakistani actor Nadeem. So our youngest sibling was named Nadeem. He has turned out to be the most handsome among the whole lot of us. This matter of names in our family brings to mind the way in which our sister was named Baby. When she was born, my maternal uncle and aunt, playing with her little hands and fingers, called her Baby. Soon everyone else, including our parents, began calling her Baby. The name has stayed. A brother of ours, the fourth child of my parents, was named Shopan. We have never stopped calling him by that name. Shopan's twins, who certainly have their formal names, have for me always been Gudu and Tuni. That is how I call them and they respond without complaint. Their cousin, the very first grandchild of my parents, is called Puti or Putputi by me. So there we are, three babies in the family who, from my point of view, are Puti, Gudu and Tuni. Into all this name-dropping I must make note of certain other names which have always aroused pleasing curiosity for us, in light of the fact that they are names of our relatives from both our father's and mother's clans. My aunt, elder sister of my father, was forever known to her parents and relatives as Porosher Ma. You would think she had a child named Porosh. Not so. The name somehow was appended to her name, but no one has ever been able to explain why she was called Porosher Ma. In our clan we happen to have cousins whose names are redolent of food. It is thus that we have Kushum Dada, Makhon Dada and Pyara Dada. They are all wonderful people, pure joy to be with. Two cousins are throwbacks to Mughal times, for they are called Jahangir and Alamgir. My mother had a cousin named Angur. One of her uncles was known as Chini Mama. Where names are the point, in my mother's clan they are easily subjects of careful social study. My Nana, or maternal grandfather, and his brother were clearly driven by a sense of geography as they went about naming their children. Two of my maternal uncles were named Iran and Turan, in that order. The former served the government of Pakistan and then that of Bangladesh, while the latter spent nearly a lifetime at Adamjee jute mills even as he played regularly for Dhaka Wanderers. Turan Mama was a remarkable football player whose playground exploits are yet remembered by many. My mother, whose formal name was Suraiya, was called Shiriya at home. That reminds you of Syria. As if that were not enough, her younger sister, who was a raving beauty in her youth, was called Asia. We of course call her Eshi Khala. The youngest of daughters in my Nana's family has been known as Persia. You can simply close your eyes and imagine all the exotic tales you heard in childhood of lands far away. My mother's cousin, another beautiful woman, was named Russia. We have always known her as Rashi Khala. One of her brothers was known as Kiron, which of course has no link with geography but with the nature of the sun.
I keep telling myself that someday someone in either of our clans should be writing a book on our family tree. In my village, the homestead of our clan is known as Mir Barhi. The village, known as Noagaon, is part of Araihazar Upazila in Narayanganj. No one knows how the name Araihazar has come to be. Could it be that in the beginning there were no more than two and a half thousand people inhabiting the entire upazila? We might never know, for those of our elders who could have given us an explanation are all in their graves. There are quite a few mosques in and around Noagaon these days, but the oldest one, where most people regularly assemble for prayers, was built in 1857, the year of the mutiny that was to end in misfortune for India and especially for Bahadur Shah Zafar. My mother's village, our Nanabarhi, known as Demra, lies adjacent to Taraganj on the banks of the Sitalakhya. The pond, or pukur, where my mother used to bathe is yet there. My Nana, whose dawns began with music, a trait passed on to his children, died fifty years ago. My Dada, who was born a year after Rabindranath Tagore, in 1862, lived to a ripe old age and in full possession of his faculties. He was a hundred and thirteen when the end came for him on the last day of June 1975. It is this heritage from which will sprout new blossoms when Nadeem ties the knot with his betrothed. Syed Badrul Ahsan is Associate Editor, The Daily Observer
