Nomenklatura By Anne Vithayathil

My first panic attack was when my eyes opened, just out of the womb. Naked and facing the ridicule of white-coated doctors. Less than a minute old, my panic attack was viewed by the staff of Stanford Hospital as the shuddering cries of a newborn babe rather than an innate discomfort with the world and a desire to escape. A second panic attack occurred at my christening, in front of a white-coated priest and waters of absolution, facing a purported original sin passed on by vague ancestors. This was when I was given the name Anne. Anne, after my paternal grandmother. A name with dubious biblical origins that, thanks to later Christian hagiographies, managed to make a saint out of the once-sterile wife of Joachim. And somehow, a name shared by numerous forebears became indelibly linked to those first moments of crisis. 

As the panic attacks continued, the name Anne–a name that conjures up images of prophets and headless heretic whores–took on the pressures of my Indian immigrant mother and her mother before her. Our women succumbed to affectations to hide madness from strangers: my mother charmed Californians with a Shelly Long-inspired lilt; her mother faked fluency in Hindi to survive mid-century Bombay; that one’s mother (the last I can remember) absorbed a host of boorish mannerisms to fit in with the plebs of Northern Kerala. And centuries before, a Chaldean grandmother named Hana left the Crescent for India and presumably developed an odd case of lactose intolerance, upon seeing no cows. 

Above all, these women faked devoutness. Spanning a history rife with exile and excommunication, my Syrian Christian ancestors feigned piety to moral authority and paterfamilias. And when they died at what was hopefully an old age, their impeccable characters remained as legacies. The shrinks said I had multiple generations’ worth of terrific neuroses but…what a crude diagnosis! Neuroses, we told ourselves, were the product of not playing those roles well enough. 

“Anne” was an obviously odd choice then, for it was not a popular name at the time in the United States, even among the numerous Roman Catholics, nor did it have that badge of originality that baby boomers so appreciated. The Hebrew etymology implied Anne was “favored” or “graceful,” characteristics that as a child I could not reflect less. Yet, my paternal grandmother Anna had insisted on the name and no other. The names were truly sacred. They were the unadulterated chain between globe-trotting women, and the only faithfulness we received after our deaths. Names were anchors to prolong a day of total oblivion, a natural eventuality, a day when the last filament of that long and thinning thread of generations would finally break. 

Considering our fatalist upbringings, it was never clear to me why my mother and grandmother chose to return to a place where they would likely be persecuted. Perhaps martyrdom was an effective counteractive to future dependencies on Xanax, Lexapro, and Klonopin. Or did they mistakenly think, like so many others, that we were at the end of history in the aftermath of the Cold War, and we finally deserved to be in a place that was even modestly ancestral in some way? I was only nine when Mum and Gran Anna dragged us children to India, to live in Anna’s craggy and plant-overgrown bungalow at 30 Church Street in the southern city of Bangalore. Here, for the first time without the company of men, we fell into unusual ceremony. The aura of godliness was broken. We allowed the screaming voices of a hundred predecessors inside of us, those who had birthed us, to be unleashed. We became reclusive within the walled fortress, amassing dogs and geese and allowing the mango trees to grow tortuously and even hideously around the property. 

Slowly our guard started to drop. As my mother quit her accents—she went from Mum to Amma—and as Ammamma Anna-amma traded Macy’s pant sets and English for cotton sarees and Malayalam—there was a brief moment, all in all two months during a hot Indian summer, of freedom. We brought back the old ways, ones that existed before the mythic tales of Saint Thomas and Prester John, the ancient Syriac traditions of Pesaha and Qurbana, in full messy force on banana leaf plates and in screaming hallways where we allowed the ancestral ghosts of our women to roam. Life and death became welded together as an unimaginable aura around us—in the mirror I saw a hundred Annes/Annas/Annammas/Hanas before me; their madness shone with an ebullient vividness that overshadowed the grey simplicity of remembered sainthood. And for a moment we were not fearful of the raw desires and carelessness within us, the genetic coding we had been so terrified to let out, that which we had we suffocated with generations’ worth of endless posturing and performances. 

It lasted only two months. Our frenzies of remembrance at Church Street—drunken sloppily as if by desert-starved refugees–were noted by prying neighbors, in the whispers of maintenance men, across the rumors of disgruntled household employees. And soon Oneida TVs and crème brûlée and peanut butter trickled around our Eden. We tried our best to shield off the oppressive force of liberalism, armed with its twin agents, consumer capitalism and grand populist narratives, that would assuredly end all hopes of an atavistic return. But could we go forward again? The roads behind us were being bulldozed, but so were the ones in front. Slowly, and very literally (when our neighbors started building a neatly pruned flower bed next door), the walls around our property started to crack. 

We felt it in our bones too. My mother, a stranger to Brahmin shibboleths, experienced minor missteps as social blunders. Our geese were poisoned because they guarded us as viciously as our dogs. We were bullied into culling our overgrown trees with threats and shouts. But these were all warning shots—what they truly wanted was inside the house. Where our bared bodies had danced with ghosts for two months. The greedy eyes outside wanted us all. 

For me, the shelling started with my name. 

“Anne” is quick and furtive like water, spurious even, with the beguiling, gliding “æ” that by unfortunate coincidence does not exist in Indic languages. Teachers attempted to pronounce my name: only three letters and one syllable, yet there were so many possibilities: Ain, En, On, Ennie, Enna, Ina. Once aware of the correct pronunciation, very few avoided an offensive voiced retroflex nasal for the double n’s—the equivalent of the Hindi “ण”–as they sputtered the word out in one go. Then came absurd questions. Why had my parents chosen such a difficult name? Why was it so short? Where they aware of the colonial legacies of the name? I would have easily bartered for a name that was cool and state-sanctioned, one of those “P” names that the Popular Punjabi Princesses had: Pooja, Poojita, Pia, Priya, Priyala, Priyanka, Preethi, Preetika, Parul, Parnavi, Pallavi, Payal…the names were like honey on tongues as they clucked to each other in a seamless Hinglish patois that we could not speak.      

At thirteen, I fainted. For no apparent reason at all, the chemistry teacher Mrs. Pai growled out “Aynnne,” with an unparalleled nasality that would have made dogs weep. I spotted the weary look of distaste on her face as she saw my own ridiculous countenance–perhaps she noticed a flicker of lunacy where there should have been blankness. It was my last mental image before collapsing on my desk. I came to consciousness less than a minute later and saw the other students: backs straight, hair neatly plaited, heads at attention, faces filled with a meditative calm. It was worse than public judgment, rather, no one had noticed. Least of all, Mrs. Pai, who continued on with her lecture on atomic mass units. I feared death in the immediate wake of collapse, knowing full well that if the earth were to swallow me up more permanently next time, the surrounding silent coven would disregard my passing like a stomped cockroach. And the mourning we so badly crave in our most despondent and self-pitying moments of life—the mourning of a worthy woman–would only occur via a vague, forgettable, possibly snubbed figure they chose as my dedication. 

……………………..In Memoriam: Ann of VII Class

……………………..Non-veg, non-teetotaler, non-caste;

……………………..Hated Theoretical Chemistry and good at Maths;

As the troubles wore on, I could not bear to see the gradually unhinged women in my life; my mother force-feeding us rosaries like a cult leader, her mother purging herself of all collectibles from the past, the other grandmother devoting herself to buying everything under the sun, my little sister frequently crawling into the dog kennel. Were these darker farces they conspired to: The nun, the ascetic, the addict, the animal. Or, more unspeakably, had our ghosts been stolen, the thread finally broken. I could not imagine a worse fate, as the women sank into their grotesque, broken identities. 

And who had I become in all this chaos? I was in no way more immune to a psychological pummeling. Yet I continued to function with a self-perception of coherence, unaware of my own wrecked mysticism and what it was doing to me. Less than a year later, we finally gave up our sanctum, with its animals and wild plants, and despondently moved to a place with no known adversaries connected to our past: Connecticut. We attempted a pretense of holiness again, trying to normalize among strangers. Mass was with the Italian-Americans, sacred and neat. We started eating like Romans too, to the point that Ragu Bolognese became more prolific in our household than rice. The accents all came back, and blistering American cadences returned to my mother and my now old-enough sister. But somehow, they didn’t reach the same achievements as before. The mark of an erstwhile-freedom overwhelmingly cut into their rituals and accents and made them exaggerated, even borderline histrionic. 

Here, in terra nova, we had been unsettled by the unusual years spent in India. In the new millennium information was easy to share. My mother and sister’s personas were jarred by a realization that it was impossible to hide. We all felt the subtle glares of our neighbors, half-expecting to hear pounding fists and shouts all over again. And I, who had internalized fear and torment unawares, who intentionally told herself she was taking lessons from the embarrassing incident in Mrs. Pai’s class, was already turning into the worst golem. I blamed the wrong people for my misfortunes and chose to forget them altogether. To cut that fucking thread and be done with the whispers of a thousand hapless ancestors who abused my sense of equilibrium in the world. 

And so I became “Anjali.”  

It was a name that had a positive precedent (as all Hindu names do), that quality that Sanskrit female names have of rolling off the tongue with beautiful assonance, their profound meanings—in this one’s case, “offering”—providing onomatopoetic perfection. Frankly, the name was boring in its exoticness. Amongst the global pretensions of the twenty-first century, Anjali was perfectly banal. 

Which is exactly why it worked, even when initially half-assed. My new moniker made me sustainable for an unprecedented era of packaging and distrust. As with so many generations before me, the ruse managed my relationships with unfamiliar people. I was an oriental muse in the neatly corporate-packaged way like the items found at Urban Outfitters and World Market. “Fit for the mantle of your fireplace, bound to bring a little pop to your décor’s utilitarian simplicity.” I was taken to be part of a tribe according to the most primitive of a tribe’s rules: based on pigment, on comportment, on highly specific language, on mundane everyday rituals, on totems, and most importantly, on name. 

There is another word that harnesses those same connections: mob. And while the mob has many collective bonds, it does not share memories. I understood this and became like Pygmalion, obsessive with possible cracks in my model. I frantically hid photographs, icons, and sacred family heirlooms in favor of cheap New Age trinkets from TJMaxx. All of me that was disordered and barbarously anachronistic, so unwanted by human society, was shrouded away to sulk at the far ends of my stomach. But it did not disappear. 

I marched with my nom de guerre from university clubs to political protests to Diwali celebrations to glitzy Hollywood dinners to courtships with men who were all to eager to lengthen that first “A” beyond its tipping point, to titillate the “J” as if it were as wobbly as Jello. In the new world, in the halls of polite American liberalism, with its undercurrents of diligent evangelical Protestantism, I was an exemplar of a reverent multiculturalism, a person unconditionally devoted to the rules of the cultural technocrats. I had seemingly reached the highest aspirations of my family, an extremely successful ruse that made my panic attacks stop. But the hidden fever that lay in my belly was festering the whole time, for years even, until it finally burst on the scene as a chronic case of irritable bowel syndrome. 

I refused to believe I had an illness—much less that it could be brought on, like a panic attack, by nerves. Even when it one day released itself with an unprecedented fury of spasms: the day the old world, the ones who beat on our Church Street walls, accepted the monstrosity too. On my 27th birthday, at an event less than 10 miles from my birth city, where I had once been given the name Anne, I met Narendra Modi, a populist who would have butchered the name Anne should I have proffered it to him. As he shook my hand, our images picture-perfect, no one noticed my body had become a wreck. My stomach was bloated, my eyes tired, my muscles tense. 

I wanted to vomit that whole day. I had become generic perfection of the Indian-American, the new liberal American, and above all, a valuable global citizen. I now meant something in the public imagination because I had effectively become a brand, which was perhaps the ominous deadline that our farces were leading up to. The complete annihilation of the human spirit, at its very individual level the only thing that I imagine can be called one’s soul. My ancestors knew of the struggle all along—the old ways had taught us about the soul and its eternal battle with the mob, from Jerusalem to Edessa to Al-Mada’in to Cochin to Bangalore to Bombay to San Francisco–and that was why we were mad women. 

I had told myself that unlike the other women in my family, I would murder what Rilke called tödliche Vögel der Seele, the deadly birds of the soul, to sever that thread and move on with a new line of acceptability. But those dreadful angels within us, the spirits who had surrounded us so many years ago, refused to disappear without a fight. Not until there was only left a half-carapace called Anjali, whose stomach had slowly consumed her insides. I began to relent to my pain, knowing eventually that my belly demanded I return to the hermetic paradise we had left so long ago with its mangled trees and beasts.  It was a silent and hopeless acceptance, for the house had long been demolished.

Then, in the last ten years of my life, something began to change. Gradually, the elder women started to die. As we mourned ever so deeply for them, the last of a people, we could not disguise the memories of them. We mourned not just their names, but also, their hidden wild spirits and the ones who begot them. And in doing that, we found a private space that mimicked Church Street: our tombs, where the disorganized invocations and laments and sobbing and screaming and laughing could be unwatched and unadulterated. There is no room for piousness or hypocrisies at funerals. It was a place again, where our raw—yes I must use the word!–souls, existed as delicate and tenable, chaotic and fragmented, away from outside influence and ultimately, revelation and corruption. Deaths began to involve days of rituals, the old ways, where we released ourselves and called each other by our true names. 

Our lines we realized, with our persistent stubborn women, could be salvaged and rewoven—and they always had been. The Christians of the East, older than any other Christians on earth, older than indulgences and inquisitions, keepers of the oldest forms of Christian mysticism, and once a large, motley population stretching from Turkey to Japan, have managed to survive with memories. In my blood were the battle scars of Roman prefects, Mongol hordes, Portuguese conquistadors, unpleasant British bureaucracies, and bald Hindu zealots. If those men couldn’t destroy us, why on earth would the liberal technocrats be victorious? 

Among funerals, I began to hear melody in the cries. And nothing less than the beautiful sound of my true name: the short a, the nasal n’s, the quick and deceptive way in which “Anne” left one’s lips in a millisecond. There was nothing more powerful than carrying a name that was societally useless but that was pregnant with a history of incredible women I had come to know through my own struggles of identity. When we buried my grandmother Anna, I took the name Anne–along with the heirlooms, the icons, and associations with fictional saints and whores–back. In my own little house, I began collecting plants and soon added a dog with a horribly wild personality. The faces of the dead–old women, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, great-aunts–float around my home as if they lived here all their lives. Fallen soldiers, guarding those who come after to fight an endless battle. Soul and mob, mob and soul. 

I chose madness in the end. It is a glorious and delicious madness. And finally, the ailments have stopped.  

Anne Vithayathil is an intelligence analyst with a regional speciality in Russia and the CIS. A victim of the “Russian literature-obsession curse,” she has devoted all her free time to writing. Anne is a graduate of Dartmouth College and Stanford University. She lives with her dog in Los Angeles.