Chasing New Dawn

What’s in the name - Raveena (?) Mazumdar

Crossposted from Livejournal

Usually, when I come up with a character, I figure out their first names pretty quickly. if a character comes from the culture I don’t know much about, I usually have to dig a little deeper, but it isn’t insurmountable. Usually.

For Chasing New Dawn, the novel I’m working on right now, I came up with the names for Maddie, Riley and Daisuke pretty quickly. Corey I had to think about, and it took me quite a while to settle on the names for Liamhain and Tony. But one name continues to give me trouble.

Back when Chasing New Dawn was still going to be a novella, Raveena wasn’t even mentioned until the very end, so I didn’t even give it that much thought. I did already have some ideas for her background. I decided fairly early on that she was going to be Indian. Sumitra from Urbis Arcana was Punjabi, and I thought making her Punjabi as well would be repetitive, so I decided she was going to be a Bengali (Why Bengali in particular? Because that was literally the first non-Punjabi subcontinental ethnic group I thought of, and I just went with it).

As the novella became a novel, Raveena became progressively more important to the overall plot, to the point where it seems kind of weird to think back to how small of a role she originally played. And I knew that I had to give her a proper name. I wound up doing similar to something that I did with Sumitra - I looked up Bengali celebrities. By that point, I already started to get a decent idea of what her mom was like, and she seemed like a kind of person to name her daughters after Bengali actresses, I focused on that. And Raveena Tandon seemed to have fit the bill.

Many months later, a writer friend of mine introduced me to Dipika Mukherjee, a Chicago writer who happened to be Bengali (and, incidentally, a fellow journalist). She was willing to take about 15 minutes to answer some Bengali-related questions, and she:

• Immediately realized exactly where I got the name
• Pointed out that Raveena Tandon wasn’t Bengali, and that “Raveena” isn’t a even Bengali name.(I’ve since figured out my mistake - just because an actress appeared in Bengali films doesn’t mean she herself is Bengali)

My first instinct was to wave it off, because I kind of liked the name by that point… But, by then, I had some second thoughts about the name for a different reason. Participating in writing groups requires me to read the work out loud, and I was starting to notice that “Raveena” sounded kind of similarish to “Riley,” and, to the lesser extent, similarish to “Liamhain.” (It’s pronounced “Leah-WEEN.”) So now I had two good reasons to change it.

It’s not like it would be unprecedented. Liamhain was “Connie” until I realized that it sounded a little too much like “Corey.” So it shouldn’t have been too hard to change it to something more appropriately Bengali and not Riley-or-Liamhain-sounding, right?

Well, it’s been over a year and I still haven’t settled on the alternative.

I toyed with just naming her “Dipika,” but while it doesn’t sound too similar to “Daisuke,” I figured it would be better to avoid “D” names. Or names that start with “C,” “M,” “L” and (obviously “R”). At one point, I did contemplate naming her “Sushma,” after the aforementioned writer friend, but it sounds too similar to the name I picked for Raveena’s older sister, Supriya. (I did give the Mazumdar sisters a Sushma Aunty, because I figured they deserved more positive and supportive Indian influences in their lives).

I toyed with calling her “Poonam…” But if I did that, I’d get plenty of side-eyes, because they’d know exactly who that would reference. And that actress isn’t Bengali, either.

So I’ve been looking at the Wikipedia list of Bengali actresses, I’ve been kind of leaning toward “Paoli”… but not enough to actually commit to it. Because none of them grabbed me quite as much as “Raveena,” or as much as “Liamhain” did when I came across it. At least not yet.

For now, I’m just continuing to use “Raveena,” while feeling grateful that Microsoft created Word Replace.