the day i became "niall" again

I witnessed something beautiful and visceral last week: I got my identity back. 

It was ten months ago that I had my new "identity" shoved into my arms in the blink of an eye (quite literally so) as a near-bald, bespectacled army recruit, too damn petrified of the terrors of the tangled bureaucracy (and of arbitrary, almost whimsical punishments from just a step up that shaky ladder (three chevrons, anyone?), on which I was perched upon the lowest, most depressing rung). 

The first horror I encountered on that diabolical island was my new name. On the right side of my chest, inky threads like squirming black worms wound themselves up into a maleficent formation, wrapping themselves stubbornly around the fabric of my new rough, green uniform. 

"S H YANG", it read. 

Understatement would it be to claim that I felt nauseatingly frustrated, oh shock horror, at my "new" name. "Uh, sorry sergeant, but this is actually not my name," I mumbled in subdued tones. He responded with a deafening torrent of words, honestly unintelligible and utterly incomprehensible to this day thanks to his very…oriental…rendition of "English". I later had another conscript translate into bona fide English what he had bellowed to me: bluntly reworded - "I don't give a f***". Charming first day it was. 

And so it was that I lived for months on end as a recruit, then as a trainee, and so on, with a strange other name. Feeling foreign to oneself is a feeling foreign in itself to me, and feeling scorn for something is something foreign to my emotional palette, and I hated feeling foreign to myself, and so I felt layers of scorn and foreign-ness for many months. Such is my life. 

But habit is indeed a great deadener, and glances at myself in the mirror that used to yield great ire and distress at my new name stamped on my chest melted into the vicissitudes of life. Until one day I realised how utterly idiotic it was that a last name, "SOHAN", very much Indian (though only a quarter of me captures that heritage), was transformed by some truly narrow minds into a very Chinese name - "So Han". The ire and distress returned that fateful day. 

Ire and distress more at my own inaction, rather. So that day, I simply picked up the phone, made a quick order for a few dollars of name tags that spelled out "NIALL", and smiled in relief as I went to bed that night. 

They came a month later. I witnessed the little old hunchbacked lady behind her antique Singer sewing machine grin in glee, ripping off my erstwhile name with unprecedented force and vigorously piercing the same rough, green uniform with my "new" name, hammering it in with a pounding needle. I watched and smiled a tired smile. 

And one short minute later, I became "me" again. Niall. Me.