They Changed My Name
My name is Adesh. Pronounced Aa-de-sh. Aa (आ) as in arm. de (दे) as they. sh (श) as fresh. It’s a Sanskrit word for command, order — in my case used in judicial sense. Aa is the prefix. It was supposed to be pronounced ādeś but my culture had already changed it.
Everybody I know has called me Aa-de-sh. This is because I was born and raised in Nepal and in Nepali language it is written आदेश and pronounced Aa-de-sh. Aa as in Aardvark. Sh as in fresh.
Long after my culture changed my name and before anyone else did, I changed it when at some point in school, I dropped an a from my name and started writing Adesh. I may have done that because double A looked boring. But still everybody called me Aa-de-sh.
But one school teacher who taught Social Studies called me A-de-sh. A as in all.
‘There’s only one a in your name. So it’s not Aa-de-sh, it’s A-de-sh,’ he warned. I laughed and continued to write Adesh.
Here I am — six months in Canada — and people at work have started to call me by name. I have always felt both weird and good when someone else took my name. But turns out it feels weirder and better when someone from a different tongue takes your name.
For some here my name it is A-de-sh. For some it’s A-de-sh (where the a is pronounced as in apple.) But in all this variation there is…
