A rose by any other name

"What's in a name?" Shakespeare's Juliet asked circa sometime way back when in the 16th century.

The answer, she ultimately learned the hard way: a whole hell of a lot.

Three hundred years later, it seems that for better or for worse, our names are still more than just an assortment of letters, no longer an arbitrary identifier developed as a device for the sole purpose of differentiating one caveman in the desert from another.

Take for example my own family: me, Naureen Fazrana Khan, only daughter of Humayun and Nasreen Khan, all of whom have always taken an interest in names-their origins, their history, their implications, their weight.

My father likes to tell me on occasion that we are descendants of the noble Khans, who were once warrior-kings, the most respected leaders of their time. We too are like warrior-kings, he'll say. Resourceful, determined, brave.

Perched on his computer, reading the Bangladeshi national newspaper online, and wearing decade-old reading glasses, he doesn't look like much of a warrior or a king, but I do my best to hold my tongue.

My mother, too, has a strange kinship with names, endowed with the uncanny ability to discern all kinds of biographical details from the last names of eligible male bachelors.

"Choudury?" I ask for kicks.

"WHAT?"

"Kidding!"

As for me, as much as I would like to say I'm above all this silliness of the Choudhuries versus the Rajendrans, I have a small secret pertaining to my own name known only to a handful.

Fifteen years ago, when my teacher told me to write my name on a sheet of construction paper on the first day of kindergarten, it was not N-A-U-R-E-E-N that I spelled out in crooked, unsteady letters. Rather, it was a P, an A, a Y, an E and an L that wound its way through the page in a tickle-me-pink crayon.

Payel.

Poor Mrs. Kramer was a little confused. Although all of my documentation told her I was Naureen, I stubbornly spelled out "Payel" every time I was told to write my name.. Mrs. Kramer chocked my behavior up to a strange symptom of culture shock-at the time I was five years old and had immigrated to the United States only a few months earlier in the summer of 1992.

I did not yet have enough mastery of the English language to tell her coherently where Payel was coming from. Naturally, she called a parent-teacher conference about my "development problems," at which point my mom insisted that I appropriate my official name for good.

Although having two disparate first names may seem like an oddity in a country where middle names are often forgotten or disused, in Bangladeshi culture, most children are given two functional names at birth-one used for all official purposes and another familiar name used by family and friends.

My mom, an accomplished classical dancer, named me Payel after the jingling anklets that South Asian classical dancers wear to accompany the rhythm of the music. And until I was five years old, no one called me anything else.

Immediate and distant relatives, cousins, playmates, friends of my mother and father all knew me as Payel. Old faded photographs hanging on the walls of my house reveal a miniature me smiling toothlessly next to birthday cakes adorned with big cursive Ps in frosting,

It was only after taking that leap from one continent to another that Payel slowly began to fade from the world and Naureen began to take her place.

Unofficial name changes or at least name-tinkering is not uncommon. Stories abound of Marys becoming Mary Beths, Katies becoming Katherines, Lil Bow Wows dropping the Lils upon their entrance into manhood... or maybe that was just the once.

Senior Alex Ahearn has forsaken his generations-old family name of Marshall in favor of his much more common middle name.

"People who think they're clever call me Marshall," Ahearn says, explaining that his parents always wanted him to be an Alex. "They chose to make Marshall my first name as opposed to my middle name as a matter of aesthetics. They decided that Marshall Alex sounded better than Alex Marshall."

Similarly, senior Sunny Kantha permanently shed his birth name of Abhishek upon coming to the States, adopting a nickname given to him by his uncle.

"For this many years, I've been Sunny," Kantha explains. "You think of yourself as one thing and it's really tough to go back to another."

Just like that, changing names is for many people a painless form of reinvention-one with no money or ink or needles required. For those among us who are not as fortunate, the transition is fraught with a few minor complications.

Take Cindy, for example, alias of junior Chengcheng Ye.

Embarrassed by a name that no one could pronounce correctly, Ye made the change to the closest American approximation she could think of in elementary school. Now, Chengcheng has taken a backseat to Cindy, only to reemerge in the company of her parents.

"They aren't two different people," she says. "It's just that when I'm called by my Chinese name, I feel more in touch with my culture."

I too feel different-slightly uncomfortable in fact-when others discover "my secret name" as it has come to be called. Hearing my parents call me "Naureen" is bizarre enough in and of itself; hearing friends butcher "Payel" when they chance upon it is practically torturous-like hearing the wrong note in a favorite song.

For me, Payel and Naureen occupy alternate universes: the life that I could have had as Payel and the life I have now as Naureen.

Payel would have gone to an all-girls' school in Bangladesh. She would have inhabited a sheltered world, most likely never leaving the confines of Dhaka city where natives often spend their entire lives. If she had been particularly stout of heart, she may have learned how to drive.

She would have gone to university, yes, but there is no telling whether she ultimately would have had a career. More likely than not, she would have led a perfectly happy but insular existence. She would have been confined by her gender and her circumstances in those subtle ways that I, as Naureen, have never experienced. Remnants of her endure, of course. Payel is the alter ego that keeps Naureen tethered to her culture and her heritage in a way that Naureen could never do on her own.

Naureen grew up in Plano, Texas, thinking that the sky was the limit for who she could be. She has lived on three continents, traveled thousands of miles from home, seen the sun rise over the Duke Chapel and set on the Venetian lagoon. She has seen presidents, congressmen and journalists make speeches, studied under Pulitzer Prize winners and even been published in her college newspaper.

But the metamorphosis from Payel to Naureen was not without its price. In their first years in this country, as my parents took their hesitant steps into this strange world, they scraped and sacrificed and reached. Despite their advanced degrees, they worked unsavory jobs and suffered through the thousands of little indignities that all first generation immigrants face quietly.

But in the end, I (and they) would say it was worth it.

Naureen can strive to embody the spirit of the warrior-king Khans of old in a way that Payel never would have dreamed of.