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Showing posts from June, 2016

A History of Length

"Morvillil Valsakumar Unnikrishnan." To say it was a mouthful, like a foot long subway sandwich, was an understatement. Just like the sandwich, you had to chew through the sparsely filled outer crust, in this case my family and my father, before you got to me, little boy Krishnan, the literal translation of the name. It was my grandmother's idea, the little boy, and my parents always swore off any involvement in its creation, a crafty move considering the creator no longer existed to give me an explanation. Not that it mattered then. In India, I was the 2nd Unnikrishnan in the class and the 3rd Unnikrishnan in the neighbourhood, living in a society devoid of imagination and filled with grandmothers who could not bear to see their grandsons grow up. The first signs of trouble arose when all packed up and ready to move to a new country that I had earlier great difficulty finding on the map, I ran out of boxes to write my full name on the immigration card.  He