What’s in a name?
“Aapki shaadi legal nahin hai. Yeh farzi hai (Your marriage is illegal),” said the lawyer in the black coat and white shirt, dismissively tossing the papers I’d handed him on the small metal desk.
“Arre bhai saabh, 3 saal pehle shaadi ho gayi hai. Aap bas sign kar dijiye. (We’ve been married 3 years. Just sign the papers, please.)”
He reads out our names slowly, holding up the papers again.
“Kaise ho sakta hai? Convert hue? (How is it possible? Did you convert?)”
“Aapse matlab? Aapko nahin karna hai toh kisi aur ke paas chale jayenge. (What is it to you? If you don’t want to do it, I’ll find someone else)” I respond, sharply, defensively.
It was 3pm on an October afternoon in Mumbai. I could feel the sweat trickling down my back, soaking through my still damp cotton shirt from a sweltering ride on the local. My (supposedly illegal) spouse, Abbas, had to apply for a new passport. As part of the paperwork, he had to include a notarised copy of our marriage certificate so that my name would be updated in it.
Outside the court in Bandra is a clutch of tightly packed hole-in-the-wall ‘shops’ of lawyers, typists, assistants, touts all neatly lined up like sardines in a tin, waiting to offer some kind of service. From my time working at a legal aid NGO, I knew my way around the court and its workings. I’d gone armed with all the requisite paperwork and figured it was a matter of paying for the service and I’d be on my way.
I was caught out by my own unpreparedness at what I should have anticipated that afternoon. A similar exchange followed with a second lawyer before I finally managed to get my papers notarised by the third.
This wasn’t the first time my attention was drawn to the religious identities our names are associated with. Nor was I a stranger to the raised eyebrows and questions that inevitably followed.
House hunting in Bombay in 2011, I’d had similar conversations with brokers and landlords. So much so that before I described the kind of house we were looking for, I’d first announce (almost as a disclaimer), that my spouse was Muslim. I was matter-of-fact, my tone brooking no questions. It was when our almost-home in a society in Four Bungalows fell through that I allowed myself to feel the shock of rejection, the injustice of having to defend my choices, of not even being given audience. Our almost-landlord came back to us with the cash deposit we had given him the evening before saying that the society rules didn’t allow for anyone ‘outside the community’ to live there.
“We can make the contract in your name, but if they find out he is your husband, it will become a problem. You can be asked to leave and I can’t do anything. I want to maintain good relations here,” he said.
Abbas nodded impassively, thanking him for trying to find a loophole on our behalf.
In the evening, at the guest house we were staying in while we entered week 2 of our search, angry tears flowed. I felt helpless. In an attempt to seek reassurance, found myself looking up the Right to Freedom in the constitution that I had a memory of from school: All citizens shall have the right to reside and settle in any part of the territory of India.
I’m not sure what I planned to do with this information but I wanted to know the specific article and sub clause. To say it to myself. In my angry imaginings, I had a vision of marching into the office of the society that had turned us away, Article 19 (1)(e) on my tongue. Another part of me wanted to say: Meet us. Have a chat with us. You can’t decide who we are or what we stand for based on a name.
I knew that what had transpired was egregiously wrong. That there wasn’t anything I could do about it. That because of our savings account, we actually had choices. Money gave us that cushion. We would have to look longer, harder, but building gates would swing open somewhere because of it.
Abbas was calm through it all. “Don’t be upset. This is how it is. It’s the first time you’re experiencing it directly, that’s why it’s so difficult.”
I was angry that he wasn’t affected. Angered by the many exclusions he had experienced that I didn’t even know of and which had shaped the matter-of-fact person now talking to me. I was unwilling to accept that this is what and who we had been reduced to. Names on a paper.
41 houses later, we found the place we called home for the next three years in a ‘mixed’ building. In the three homes we’ve lived in since over 11 years in Mumbai, our landlords have been from minority communities. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
When the love jihad bogey first started doing the rounds close to a decade ago, my sister sent me a message: I didn’t know you were being rebellious by marrying Abbas. We’d laughed about it. A writer friend joked with Abbas that they should make a film on it. A satire. The jokes are tinged with the colour red these days. Red for the heartache and brutality that has slipped into the everyday.
What’s in a name, you might ask. Is a name taboo? An anomaly when two different sounding ones are placed beside each other?
In the summer of 2020, Abbas and I decided to adopt a baby girl. As part of our prep, we spoke to other families who have adopted to get a better sense of the process and what to expect. “When you go to court to sign the papers, be ready for some humiliation. They’ll ask how you will bring up the child, what her religion will be,” warned one of the women I spoke to. “Just nod along and tell them what they want to hear.”
I’m reminded of my brush with the lawyer outside Bandra court. This time, I hope to be conscious of tone. Not to be defensive. To hold my own in quiet awareness of my choices. Our daughter, when she finds her way to us, will have both our names. A living breathing taboo of the kind I want to celebrate and hold close as testament to who we are individually and together.
