"Why couldn’t you be Margaret?" a customer once asked after I’d told him my name. He was nice, so I said I’d be ‘Margaret’ the next time he called. He laughed and I laughed but I’m not always that easy-going.
Another time when a man demanded to know my ‘Christian name’, I told him I didn’t have one.
"But you must have a Christian name," he replied.
"No," I told him, "I’m not a Christian".
He told me testily he meant my ‘first name’. That I could tell him, no problem.
This scenario repeated itself recently, when a complete jackass asked me the same question. Only this time when I told him I didn’t have a Christian name because I was a Buddhist, he replied that he was ‘offended’ by my explanation which he found "unnecessary".
Why is it unnecessary to know that the world is not full of Christians with Anglo names, even in ‘Western’ cultures imported south to Australia. I would think it was very necessary to grow up and stop being proud of this insensitive, ignorant arrogance.
I have met Chinese friends who’ve changed their names on the plane coming over, picking Anglo sounding-names at random to make it easy on their ‘hosts’. It’s not ease of pronunciation alone that helps if we Ethnics assimilate into the Anglosphere.
During a job training session a few years ago, we were split into teams of three to play-act sales scenarios. In one team, the leader was an Anglo who had to manage an Indian named ‘Rahul’ and a Sri Lankan named ‘Warren’.
Rahul had worked in the industry for more than a decade and he drew on his vast experience for his sales pitch, but all his team leader could focus on when summing up his performance was his unusual name, whether she got it right after he’d corrected the way she said it the first time they met (three days prior).
Warren fared better. Instead of focusing on his name, the team leader managed to evaluate his performance.
That’s when I realised that in this race to succeed, our names could keep us out of the running. Perhaps that’s why my cousin ‘Dharshan’ changed his name to ‘David’. Or why one of my Greek friends changed his name by deed poll from 'Dimitrios' to ‘Jim’.
People could say 'Dimitrios' is a bit of a tongue-twister, that’s reason enough for a change. Really? When said people can make an effort with ‘Sauvignon Blanc’ when they want to appear cultured or use ‘Louis Vuitton’ as a throwaway phrase to underline their status. These people can’t say "Dimitrios"??? As if.
Working in call centres and living in Australia, which is not my country of birth, has produced a veritable treasure of name-is-an-issue examples, but not many opportunities to explain the real reason I could never think of changing my name. (Thank goodness for blogs).
So when I was asked, "Why couldn’t you be Margaret?", what I really wanted to say was that my name wasn’t randomly chosen from a baby book, nor is it the name of my parents’ favourite popstar; or a hastily feminised name when a girl popped out instead of the boy everyone was expecting.
No, the Sinhalese Buddhist naming process in Sri Lanka is a bit more complicated than that.
When I was born, based on the date and time of my birth, the astrologer told my parents the most propitious letters to start my name.
One of the letters was ‘R’ and suggestions were sought from my vast extended family. Second, third, fourth cousins, great aunts and great uncles were involved in the name search.
From the lists made, my parents eventually chose ‘Ruwani’, from the Sinhala-Buddhist Pali word ‘Ruwan’ meaning ‘gem’, 'pearl' or 'precious' (a thing of value at any rate!). I even know the cousin who found that name for me.
Yes, my name means a lot to me. It tells me who I am, it identifies my culture and my religion, but most of all it tells me that I was loved; that my family cared enough to find a ‘good’ name – a name that carried potential before I had any idea of where I would go in life, who I would become and what I would achieve.
That’s why I could never seriously be ‘Margaret’. I could never disrespect all that effort from my family whom I’ve known all my life to make pronunciation easy for a caller I would only know for half a minute.
"So, hello. How are you? My name is Ruwani. BTW that’s pronounced Roo-were-nee…not Roo-WAH-nee."
When an Irish friend demanded to know why I couldn’t pronounce my name ‘properly’ I had to tell her that Roo-were-nee is the proper way to say my name in Sinhala. It’s not my fault that English is limited to five vowels, when Sinhala has about 20 – yes, that's vowels alone. The total alphabet has more than 50 letters which helps say words as we see it, instead of guessing at sound variations. But more on this theme another day. Until then… Ayubowan and G’day.
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