How May I Help You? by Singh

Author:Singh [Singh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520293311
Amazon: 0520293312
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2017-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

My Name Is Deepak

My grandfather gave me the name Deepak, which means source of light. But no one called me Deepak at home. I was known as Deepu. It was short for Deepak, but it was more than that. Deepu was supposed to be a little kid, no more than age ten, a kid who ran around the block playing with other little Deepus. Deepu was not supposed to be a grown-up man. Everyone knew me as Deepu where I lived. No one knew who Deepak was. I was Deepak only at school.

There, no one knew who Deepu was. I wanted to keep it that way. I didn’t want my schoolteachers or classmates to know that my nickname was Deepu. There, I was embarrassed about being Deepu. If there was a boy in school who also happened to be my neighbor, I begged him not to call me Deepu at school.

The two names came with two different personalities. I didn’t want my teachers or friends in school to know what I did as Deepu. I didn’t want them to know how Deepu’s mother pulled his ears and paraded him before other kids in his apartment complex if he was caught doing mischief. I didn’t want them to know how Deepu sang in his bathroom. For my school friends and teachers, Deepu didn’t exist. There was only Deepak. Deepak was someone who always wore a clean white shirt and ironed blue trousers and a monogramed necktie, and he looked the same every day.

At school, I was always conscious of what other kids thought about me. There were girls in my school, and that made me worry more about how I spoke, how I laughed, whether my teeth were clean, whether my hair was neatly parted, and whether I’d left a wet drop on my crotch after peeing.

I loved Deepak. I didn’t like Deepu so much. Deepu was timid, shy, inept. Deepak was confident, brave, and ambitious. I whispered my name to myself to see what it sounded like. When I heard someone call me Deepak, it put a smile on my face. It felt like someone was giving me respect. When a school friend came to visit me at home, and he called me Deepak, I looked around to see whether my friends in my apartment complex had heard that. I wanted them to know that I was not just a Deepu, a Deepu they could take for granted.

When I moved to the States, people pronounced my name different ways. The name Deepak has two short syllables, and I learned quickly that Americans couldn’t say a name that didn’t have at least one long syllable. The correct way to say Deepak is Thee-puck, but most people in America called me Dee-pack. The American English D falls in between the two Hindi Ds, but I got used to that. When I introduced myself to Cindy, she asked me to explain how to say my name. She called me Dee-pack, which was not perfect, but close.

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