What's in a name?

Door: Everlasting

Geplaatst op Sep 22, 2009

It was mid-October, we had just spent our first half-year living in a village close to Kullu in Himachal Pradesh, India. It was harvest time and there was lots of work to do, getting in the crops and maize before the cold winter set in. The full-moon often brings with it a festival in India and October in this region was no exception, a fertility festival. All the young married girls of the village spent the three evenings of the moon making puja (prayer) at the temple for their fertility. Being a young girl at the time, I was coaxed into joining them, there was no point explaining that I was not ready to have children or that maybe I had other plans for my immediate future, the difference between our cultures would make that too hard to understand. So, for three evening I participated with the other village girls in the songs and prayers and lit incense and candles. On the last evening, the matriarch of the village offered a personal prayer for each of us and told us her predictions. To one, “you must drink (herbal) tea and then you will have a boy”, to another “a boy is on its way – Nathua Ram” and to me, “within a year you will have a girl born on full-moon night, Chandra-Devi, (moon-goddess) “. Having no intentions of starting a family, her wise words were soon forgotten, until February the following year. I suddenly realized that this queasiness that I had been feeling for some mornings was not due to my Indian diet. And yes, pregnant. The baby was due 29th October, and although a month later than was predicted, I remembered her words with a thrilling chill, would we have a girl.
Back in Europe on the 27th September, a month early, on a full-moon night I gave birth to our beautiful daughter, the mid-wife asked her name. There was never a choice – Chandra–Devi.
Chandra will be 30 this weekend, and still, if I think about this story I get goose-pimples.