I dislike meeting my relatives. Although they’ve seen me since my infancy, their tongues still fail when I introduce myself. They know me as my father’s son, even though I’ve never introduced myself that way. Each time I tell them my name–often ten minutes into the conversation once they’ve all acknowledged that I’ve grown taller, become fatter and morphed to look like my dad’s teens–they bring their head in front. They make their dead skin, acne and untrimmed hair on their nostrils more visible. I smile, and reintroduce myself. Mom tells me to be more sympathetic to their old age, so I prevent myself from charging out. Seven characters, I possess, but each time one reads them out aloud, I find three new characters added.

My name in Sanskrit means divine belief. I do not understand why my maternal aunt–the only other English major in my relations–entrusted me with such divinity when all I did was piss, cry and vomit out porridge. I’ve seen pictures of me as a toddler, and I do not see any points of inspiration. It seems apt though, for someone who was raised super religious. We have a mini mandir at home, which houses the idols of Lord Krishna and Lord Rama, with portraits of my great grandparents. My paternal grandmother asked that I bow before them whenever I was to go out of the house. Until thirteen, the only place outside home I went to was my hometown school. A year later, I changed cities and went to boarding school–she handed me pocketbooks of religious texts and asked that I keep them under my pillow at all times. I did. Even outside the premises where my grandma would tell me retellings of religious epics or where I was named, I seemed to be connected to religion beyond my name. My name made sense for who I was.

No one in my family calls me by my name. They substitute it with endearing terms, or just call me kid. If they take charge to introduce me, they say: this is Dev. I belong as Dev to most. ‘Dev’ in Hindi means god. I remain too inherently flawed to accept that title. In boarding school the pronunciation would mimic the Devanagari script. It would be what I thought was the only way of pronouncing it; there’d be minimal difference in how you heard Dev and they’ve. It’s only in the last two years in Toronto, that I realise Dev is verbalised as the dev in developer–a distant understanding of my personality. It feels as though one is spitting air when enunciating the prefix to my full name. I’ve been called Devansh, Devraya, Deven, David, Devriya, Devairya and Patel across the years, dating back to as recently as last week. I’ll touch upon the last one soon. None of those mean divine belief. I’m often asked by my NRI friends or North American classmates, nervously, on how to pronounce my name. There’d be a confident monologue on an opinion of mine, but when it would come time to cite, they’d pause. They’d begin to perspire, and their hands would go up against their chin. It makes me laugh. These days instructors and classmates just point at me, or continue glaring at me as I take notice–I’m often confused on whether they’ve forgotten my name or have a big ego–and belong to them that way.

On all the Slack platforms I’m a part of, I’ve listed the following as a pronunciation tutorial: day-vaar-ya. It’s a pronunciation I disagree with, but a compromise of a few steps lends me greater optimism than the prospect of sudden, total correction. It’s not proven helpful, but I hope someday I’m greeted with a surprisingly accurate pronunciation of my name; I might cry but at least I’d be crying as myself.

To rectify the burden of tutoring everyone–and avoid my own impatience at their mispronunciations–I’ve opted for the more bastardised, North American substitution: Dave. I’m sure the Daves out there are great. It’s just, I was never trained to be one. Had my name been a derivation of theirs, I’d approach my identity with more research into my ancestry. These help the coffee shops, but even still, I feel they deliberately remind me of my Indianness. I only wish to get a cappuccino, but the baristas turn into my relatives. I ordered coffee as Dave last week. It was pretty standard routine: usual coffee shop, familiar barista, same coffee order. Only, his handwriting was slightly fragile. There was no one waiting in line for their order. A different barista–a white woman–was preparing my coffee this time. It would have taken her no effort to know whose order this was, and yet, she bore the pain of misshaping me. She looked at the coffee cup, gasped, threw her head back in a jerk as if she was questioning all her understanding of the English language, before she began to investigate the name. She looked at me, and looked at the cup again. And there it was: Patel? I’m not one to usually carry their mispronunciations with me to my day, but I hated validating her felony by accepting the coffee. Those around me glared as if the answer was obvious. I felt undertones of who else? There was no letter, not even a dragged line at the end of the ‘E’ in the name. I nodded, and brisked out. I came close to being North American; I am now, I realise, a captive of those reminders.

I often reminisce with my name when I narcissistically think of having my biopic made. I envision the title and final line to be the same: My name is Devarya Singhania. I recoil when I say it aloud. Too much metre, too symmetrical for it to seem coincidental; my tongue despises me. My name belongs to me, but I’m seldom it. I struggle to categorise my own fascination with my name. I’m forced to encounter it more actively than I’ve predicted or prepared for. Coffee is one of my only daily purchases. Often my mornings begin with a reminder of my internationalism. Although even the mobile app allows me to have my actual name be called out, the baristas are stubborn in their customs. I wouldn’t say I’m embarrassed of my name anymore. For a while the temptation to reduce myself to Dev was driven by the ease it would give those around me to know me. I don’t even know if I pronounce it correctly anymore. There’s a yearning to teach everyone at a glance how I’m pronounced. But seven characters often seem overwhelming, especially when it’s hard to translate even the three.