My grandfather gave me the name Deepak, which means source of light. But no one called me Deepak at home. I was known as Deepu. It was short for Deepak, but it was more than that. Deepu was supposed to be a little kid, no more than age ten, a kid who ran around the block playing with other little Deepus. Deepu was not supposed to be a grown-up man. Everyone knew me as Deepu where I lived. No one knew who Deepak was. I was Deepak only at school.
There, no one knew who Deepu was. I wanted to keep it that way. I didn’t want my schoolteachers or classmates to know that my nickname was Deepu. There, I was embarrassed about being Deepu. If there was a boy in school who also happened to be my neighbor, I begged him not to call me Deepu at school.
The two names came with two different personalities. I didn’t want my teachers or friends in school to know what I did as Deepu. I didn’t want them to know how Deepu’s mother pulled his ears and paraded him before other kids in his apartment complex if he was caught doing mischief. I didn’t want them to know how Deepu sang in his bathroom. For my school friends and teachers, Deepu didn’t exist. There was only Deepak. Deepak was someone who always wore a clean white shirt and ironed blue trousers and a monogramed necktie, and he looked the same every day.
At school, I was always conscious of what other kids thought about me. There were girls in my school, and that made me worry more about how I spoke, how I laughed, whether my teeth were clean, whether my hair was neatly parted, and whether I’d left a wet drop on my crotch after peeing.
I loved Deepak. I didn’t like Deepu so much. Deepu was timid, shy, inept. Deepak was confident, brave, and ambitious. I whispered my name to myself to see what it sounded like. When I heard someone call me Deepak, it put a smile on my face. It felt like someone was giving me respect. When a school friend came to visit me at home, and he called me Deepak, I looked around to see whether my friends in my apartment complex had heard that. I wanted them to know that I was not just a Deepu, a Deepu they could take for granted.
When I moved to the States, people pronounced my name different ways. The name Deepak has two short syllables, and I learned quickly that Americans couldn’t say a name that didn’t have at least one long syllable. The correct way to say Deepak is Thee-puck, but most people in America called me Dee-pack. The American English D falls in between the two Hindi Ds, but I got used to that. When I introduced myself to Cindy, she asked me to explain how to say my name. She called me Dee-pack, which was not perfect, but close.
Ron never asked me to explain how my name sounded. When he said my name I always heard the letter T instead of D. When he addressed me that way, Cindy and Jackie giggled a lot.
“Ron, you’re funny,” they’d say. I didn’t understand what was funny, but I didn’t try to find out. Then, one day, on the notice board, I saw there was a note that said, “Tupac, can you work this Monday. I forgot I had a doctor’s appointment—Ron.” I didn’t know anyone named Tupac who worked with us, so I asked Jackie who the note was for.
“Deepak, that’s for you. Ron calls you Tupac, you didn’t know?” She laughed. I didn’t know what the name meant. Later that day, I learned that Tupac was a famous rapper.
I didn’t know how to feel about being called Tupac. Ron continued calling me Tupac. Sometimes, when he called me Tupac in front of the customers, they would laugh and say, “Hey, that’s easy to remember.”
Ron didn’t just call me Tupac in private—he also introduced me that way to the UPS driver, the FedEx guy, the mail carrier, and everyone else who happened to come to the store.
“This is my man, Tupac,” he’d say. I felt there was a sense of camaraderie, friendliness in his manner. The people he introduced me to seemed to like it, too. I didn’t grow up in America, so I didn’t really know what it might mean to be called Tupac.
It got to the point that new employees in the store and people who worked in the mall started calling me just Tupac. When I told them that my name was Deepak, not Tupac, they said, “Oh, okay.”
It bothered me that people were calling me by a name that wasn’t mine. They hadn’t asked me whether they could call me that. They had just decided on their own without ever thinking about how it made me feel. I wasn’t sure whether they were drawing me close or ridiculing me. Ever since I had arrived in the United States, I’d had to adjust to a variety of changes in my life—food, language, weather, customs, culture. I had very little opportunity to act like my familiar self, or to express my feelings. I often wondered about my identity, and who I was as a person. When people called me by a name that wasn’t mine, I felt like screaming, “Could you guys at least call me Deepak?”