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Dhruv Saxena
My mother calls me Pappu in front of people.
Not privately. Not at home when it is just us and there is nobody to witness it. In front of people. At family functions. At the kitty party when I have come to pick her up and her friends are there. In front of the neighbour's son who is my age and who I now cannot make eye contact with. In front of my father's colleague who I met for the first time at age twenty-eight and who I will always be Pappu to because that is how I was introduced and that is how he filed me.
I am thirty-two years old. I have a job. I have an apartment in Bangalore. I have a professional email signature that does not say Pappu on it. None of this is relevant to my mother when there is a relative or a family friend in the room and she is telling them something about me.
The name was given to me at approximately age two. I do not know the specific origin story. I have asked. The explanation I have received is that it just stuck. This is not a satisfying explanation for something I have been carrying for thirty years but it is the only one available.
My friend Nikhil's childhood nickname is Tinku. He is six feet tall. He works in finance. He has asked his mother, on multiple occasions and with increasing specificity, to retire the name in public contexts. She has agreed each time. She has not retired it. The agreement and the behaviour exist in separate compartments and the behaviour does not update when the agreement is reached.
He told me he attended a work event once where his mother happened to know someone's mother, as Indian mothers always happen to know someone's mother, and the information about his nickname was transferred between the two mothers in a conversation he was not present for. By the time he got to the event, one of his colleagues already knew him as Tinku. He has not worked out how to address this without making it worse.
I was home last month. We were having chai and Mom's Magic biscuits at the kitchen table and the neighbour came by for something and my mother called out to me from the other room, Pappu, come and say hello. I came and said hello. The neighbour said oh, this is Pappu, your mother talks about you so much. I said yes. I did not offer a correction. The correction window had been open for thirty years and I had not used it and at this point using it would require more explanation than it was worth.
I am Pappu to approximately forty people. This number has not decreased since I was twelve. It has, if anything, increased, because my mother continues to make new friends and continues to introduce me.
The Nickname Ecosystem
The childhood nickname is not the only name in the ecosystem. It exists alongside other names that also have not retired.
There is the full name, which she uses when she is serious. When I hear my full name from across the house I know immediately that something has happened or is about to happen that requires my full attention. The full name is reserved for occasions. It carries weight precisely because it is not the default.
There is the beta, which is not a name but functions as one. Beta is the general address. It means you, specifically, my child, in a warm way. It arrives at the beginning of sentences that are going to be gentle and at the end of sentences that need softening.
And then there is the Pappu, which is the nickname that should have retired and did not, which arrives in front of other people with a frequency that suggests my mother has no awareness of its continued use, or has complete awareness and has decided the awareness does not require action.
My friend Karan's nickname is Munna. He is thirty-four. His mother uses it. His wife has heard it. His wife now occasionally uses it privately, in the way that partners absorb the domestic vocabulary of the family they have married into. He said the first time his wife called him Munna he had no idea how to respond. He said it felt like a file had been transferred without his knowledge.
The Context In Which It Arrives
The nickname does not arrive uniformly. It has specific deployment conditions.
It arrives most reliably when my mother is proud of something and wants to share it. She is telling someone about my job or something I have done and she says Pappu did this or Pappu works in that. The pride and the nickname arrive together. The nickname, in these moments, is affectionate shorthand. It is the name she has always used for the person she is proud of and she is using it now because it is the truest name she has for me.
It also arrives when she is worried about something and wants to communicate the worry to a third party. Pappu has been working too hard or Pappu is not eating enough and the nickname in these moments carries a specific quality of maternal concern that would not survive translation into my actual name.
And it arrives when she has simply forgotten, in the moment, that the name requires social management. She is talking, she is animated, she is thinking about what she is saying rather than how she is saying it, and Pappu just comes out because it is the name she uses for me when she is not thinking about names.
The Part I Have Made Peace With
I spent my twenties with mild feelings about the nickname situation. Not strong feelings. Mild ones. The low-grade embarrassment of being introduced as something that does not match how you think of yourself.
At some point in my late twenties the mild feelings became something else. Not pride exactly. Just acceptance. The recognition that the name is not about me at thirty-two. The name is about me at two, and five, and twelve, and all the versions between. My mother is not introducing me as Pappu because she has not noticed I have grown up. She is introducing me as Pappu because that is the name she gave to the person she loves most and she has not stopped loving that person even as the person has changed.
The name is a continuity. It connects the two-year-old and the thirty-two-year-old in a way that my actual name does not. My actual name belongs to anyone. Pappu belongs only to me, in her vocabulary, in her world.
The neighbour knows me as Pappu. Nikhil's colleague knows him as Tinku. Karan's wife has started using Munna.
The names have not retired. They were never going to retire.
I have decided this is fine.
It is, in its way, the oldest thing anyone will ever call me by. And she is the only one who does.
