Growing into a Name

In The Boy Who Tried to Shrink His Name, Malayali-Australian writer Sandhya Parappukkaran endows her protagonist with the long, long name promised by the title. The name is “long like shoelaces that always come undone,” says the boy. “It trips me up every morning.”

The whole premise seemed to contain echoes of a rather obscure poem by (I’m pretty sure) Ogden Nash about his “good friend” who had a very long Indian name. I digressed by hunting all over for that poem. It had once made me laugh. I wanted to see if it still felt that funny, after years of living in America and having to assure people that they would not collapse from exhaustion if they dared to try pronouncing my own longish last name.

Of course, among all the bears and fleas and Custard the dragon citations on the Internet, that poem was nowhere to be found. So back to Sandhya’s book, in which the boy’s name is Zimdalamashkermishkada.

Young Z shrinks his name in the dryer before school but it “springs back to life like a scared puffer fish at sea.” He crumples it up, folds and refolds it, origami-style, but there it is again. It just won’t get smaller. Skateboarder friend Elly and Z’s mother play a role. The boy finally discards his self-consciousness, accomplishing this in sync with mastering a full turn on the skateboard.

Generations of people from South Asia have changed their names, shortened them, folded them, mashed them up, for very similar reasons. I’ve always felt a need to hold onto mine—more, to locate the problem with those whose own insecurity and resistance is holding my name hostage. This book strikes that nerve—and delivers a message that its leaps of story serve to underscore. Your name is your name and it’s up to others to get it. Whether they say it right or stumble over it, that’s their problem, not yours.

As for that Ogden Nash poem, I hope it shows up for me someday. Now I really want to revisit it and see how it unpacks.