Random Root thought

I make no exaggeration when I claim that there are at least 33 million different streams of racial blood racing through my veins. I am a man of confused ancestry and can hardly point out a particular state to which I belong. To top it all skin color in my family ranges from European white to African black, my brother is 6’3; tallest of Ashrafs’ and my father is 5’5 not that tall Ashraf you can say. Five different words, which makes up my full name is like a fusion of five different continents and culture.

I have seen this work to my advantage being confused for a Mallu down south. The confused connection helps me win a few Mallu liaisons on occasion, that is till they start rattling Mull tongue twisters and I stare back at them like a fish out of water.

Up north, they tell me I’ve got a definite Bong connection. One mustn’t blame them because all my queen bees are purebred Bengalis from the heartland of Kolkata. My father is posted in Kolkata for last 8 years and I have developed an uncanny habit of speaking in Bengali with Non-Bengalis.

A psychic friend of mine tried to lend a helping hand.

“Do you hear voices in your head?” he asked with the narrow piercing gaze of a clairvoyant with crystal-ball-reading.

“I do… there is always a orchestra or a Broadway show going on in my head”

“I knew it” he remarked with delight raising a few million hopes in me, “Now what languages do you hear them in?”

“I don’t know”

“If you know the languages, you know where you’re from.”

I decided to give supernatural methods a skip, not that I was interested in them in the first place anyway.

During my last journey homeward, my fellow passenger decided that the best way of robbing my few minutes of high-altitude peace was to jabber away near my right ear lending a disconcerting sense of sonic asymmetry to my entire body.

“So where are you actually from?”

I know India is a not an acceptable answer here neither my ancestral goof up be explained to simple human beings.

“But your parents must live somewhere?”

I agree that there was logic to his statement considering the fact that my roots were definitely non-nomadic.

“Jharkhand!” I said, giving the syllables the rustic twist that in other words says I can eat you raw and find it delicious.

“You can’t be from Jharkhand! You don’t look like that!”

I was clueless about what I was supposed to infer from that statement. Do I need to throw in some tribal headgear and do a war dance around him to prove the Jharkhand connection?

Well, that’s the problem with having an ambiguous name in a country that is racially, a lot more diverse than most continents. The up-side of course is the multitude of alternate theories that come your way as all and sundry around you present you with a surprisingly huge number of authoritative explanations concerning your birth.