The Story Behind a Name

By Ruchira Gupta

Translation is interpretation. A translator chooses how a voice will sound in another language and what a new reader may come to understand about a place. In John Vater’s English translation of Alka Saraogi’s Register Me as Kulbhushan, that work feels especially consequential. This is a novel about a man known by several names, each carrying a different account of who he is.

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I grew up in Kolkata, where Partition existed around us but was strangely invisible to my generation. We knew, faintly, that some families had come as refugees from East Bengal, later Bangladesh. But we did not know what they had left behind, what the journey had cost them, or how long it took to feel at home. Their histories had become part of the city’s everyday life without becoming part of the stories we were taught to hear. Saraogi brings one of those histories into view.

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Kulbhushan Jain comes to Calcutta from Kushtia in East Bengal. His brothers have already made lives there; he arrives needing a place in theirs. To his family he is Bhushan Chacha, someone available to run errands and absorb indignities. Elsewhere he is Gopal Chandra Das. These names reflect the different lives he has made, but they also raise the question at the heart of the book: How much of himself can a person preserve while adapting to what others will allow him to be?

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One episode captures the cruelty of that question. A silver plate goes missing during the confusion of the family’s flight. Kulbhushan cannot say with certainty what happened to it, and his brothers suspect him of taking it. Years later, the plate is still present in their minds, even though no one has established that he stole it. Saraogi lets this small domestic mystery carry the weight of a much larger loss. Kulbhushan has lost his home. Now, in the home where he has sought shelter, he must live under a suspicion he cannot put to rest.

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What makes the episode painful is its familiarity. Families do not need a war to wound one another. Yet displacement makes Kulbhushan dependent on the judgment of relatives who arrived before him and have more secure lives. Their welcome has conditions. His uncertainty about the plate becomes, in their eyes, a reason to doubt his character. It is possible to cross a border and still find that every room you enter requires an explanation of why you belong there.

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The novel also follows Kulbhushan’s childhood friend Shyama Dhobi. Their friendship reaches back to Kushtia, a place Kulbhushan remembers through companions and a shared life that cannot simply be packed into trunks and carried away. Shyama’s path takes him through the communal violence and upheaval surrounding the creation of Bangladesh. Through these two men, Saraogi moves between the history of nations and the particular obligations people feel towards friends, neighbours and family.

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That movement gives the novel a reach beyond any single account of exile. Its characters’ relationships do not fit neatly into the religious or caste identities that violence demands of them. A child may be raised by someone who is not her biological father. Care may come from a person whom society has taught others to look down upon. These choices do not erase prejudice or brutality. They show how much is lost when people are reduced to the categories assigned to them.

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Then there is the “button of forgetting.” Shyama teaches Kulbhushan to imagine pressing it when a slight or a memory becomes too hard to bear. It is a tender invention, offered by one friend to another as a way to keep going. It is also unsettling. Forgetting may protect Kulbhushan for a moment, but he is living in a world where other people are already willing to forget his history for him. How does he survive without surrendering the memories that tell him who he is?

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The title gives that question a public form. Register Me as Kulbhushan sounds like a request to be entered in a record, to have a name acknowledged beyond the shifting judgments of other people. But a record can establish only so much. It cannot restore a lost home or describe every relationship through which a person has made a life. Saraogi holds both needs in view: the practical need to be recognised by institutions and the deeper need to be known.

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That is also why the novel feels so timely in India. Questions about who belongs, what documents can prove, and whose account of their own life will be believed are part of the country’s present, especially for people whose families have crossed borders or whose records are incomplete. In such a climate, it is easy to speak of migrants and refugees as categories to be sorted. Saraogi insists on the long, complicated life within the category. Kulbhushan’s history cannot be settled by asking for a name and a piece of paper, even though both may determine how he is treated.

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I think of this often in my work with women and girls whose lives are shaped by poverty, migration and exclusion. A missing document can keep someone from school or from services to which she is entitled. But documentation alone does not guarantee that anyone will listen to her. People can be counted and still remain unseen. Kulbhushan’s story asks us to look past the name that fits on a form and attend to the life behind it.

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The English translation extends that invitation at a necessary moment. The story was already available to Hindi readers; its arrival in English allows it to enter another set of conversations, including those in which India’s history and present are discussed by people who have never heard much about the eastern Partition. Vater’s task is more than carrying events from Hindi into English. He must carry the changes in register between family conversation, remembered friendship and the language of official recognition, while allowing a reader to feel the distance between Kulbhushan’s old home and his new one.

English can open a door, though it cannot stand in for the languages in which these histories have long been told. The value of this translation lies in bringing more readers through that door and asking them to listen closely. For those of us who grew up in Kolkata, the book offers another way to see a familiar city. I remember knowing that refugees were among us, while knowing almost nothing of their lives before they arrived. Saraogi asks us to pay attention to what that casual knowledge concealed.

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Register Me as Kulbhushan is about a man asking for his name to be recorded. It is also about the histories a city carries when its children have not yet learned to ask for them. In India today, learning to ask—and learning to listen—feels urgent.