In the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, where I was born and raised, I was given a beautiful name: Chidambarakumari. It may be too long and unwieldy for most non-Tamil speakers, but it’s beautiful all the same. Within my family when I was growing up, I was always called the much shorter and easier to say Ammai, which is a common pet name for girls, meaning “mother” or “goddess.”
Most girls age out of Ammai when they’re still toddlers, but for me it stuck. It wasn’t just my parents who called me Ammai but the entire extended family, including aunts and cousins. That one word meant the world to me, a symbol of unconditional love and support.
Various nicknames followed me through school and college, too many to remember. Decades later, I ran into an old classmate who couldn’t recall my full name, saying she could only think of me as “the girl with the weird long name.”
I didn’t complain.
One February day two decades ago, when I was 24, I agreed to meet a potential husband from my town who had been living and working in the United States and was back home for a visit. Over the previous years I had been introduced to and turned down many men who had met with me and my family, but this man was different.
Maybe his candor in inviting me to be part of the discussion made him more interesting to me. In the past, I had not been allowed to ask questions of the potential husbands during our meetings; the elders in the families conversed, and I answered only when spoken to. But he welcomed questions from me during our 15-minute meeting. He even smiled at my flippant remark about not knowing how to cook and said, “I know enough for us both.”
So I agreed to marry him, and it was arranged. Four months later, in early June, we were wed in a grand yet deeply personal ceremony in the city of Tirunelveli, our birthplace and where our families had roots.
Two weeks later, I began my new life in New Hampshire — nearly 9,000 miles away from the only world I had ever known.
To my husband, I was now Chellamma, which means “honey” or “dearest,” and Ammai drifted into the rearview mirror along with the homeland I had left behind. But I found solace and safety in Chellamma.
“Chellamma,” my husband would say. “Where is the remote?”
“Chellamma, here is your coffee.”
“Chellamma, ‘Seinfeld’ is starting — come soon.”
Chellamma became the soundtrack of our lives, and what a gorgeous life it was.
A few years later, my very own Ammai arrived — our eldest child — followed by our son two years after that, whose pet name was Kannappa. We fulfilled the quintessential American dream when we moved into our own home with a backyard in New Hampshire.
I always believed my husband truly fell in love with me when he held our first child in his arms. Of course, while he stood mesmerized by his Ammai, my parents walked in with an extra pillow for their Ammai, me. Twenty-eight years later, as a new mother, I was still Ammai to my family.
Our evenings were always marked by the back door creaking open and my husband’s booming voice announcing his arrival: “Chellamma! Ammai! Kannappa! I’m home!”
There were sprinkler dances to summon Totoro from the movie “My Neighbor Totoro,” bedtime stories that never ended, movie nights and Disney World trips, and a never-ending background score of Chellamma.
Life was beautiful. Until it wasn’t.
In 2017, when our oldest child was 9, she fell sick and needed to be taken to a hospital in Boston to be seen by brain specialists.
One look at my husband and I knew we were in uncharted territory. What did this mean? Would she get better? She hadn’t spoken to us in days, much less opened her eyes. After a week at Massachusetts General, we came home for what I mistakenly believed would be a journey of recovery. Instead, our days were marked by our daughter’s moods, which swung from one extreme to another without warning.
In our small South Asian community, mental health issues are still taboo, so girls with emotional dysregulation are not easy to discuss over chai. My husband, who saw his sweet, funny daughter transform into an anxious, angry tween, retreated from us and became a shell of his former self, but I found it hard to pay attention to my marriage as my every waking moment was filled taking care of my daughter and son.
I took my daughter to therapy so my husband and I could learn skills to help her. But as I later realized, that choice stirred a quiet discomfort in my husband, who wasn’t yet convinced that therapy was appropriate for children. The silence that followed between us widened a divide that we didn’t know how to bridge.
Funny how two people can like the same movies, TV shows, music and books, and share the same politics and worldview, and yet differ on the most important aspect of marriage — how to raise children.
The children and I included my husband in as many activities as we could, but most days it was just the three of us. The back door might have creaked open with the same sound as in the past, but without any booming greeting, as his return now came well past our bedtimes. And the biggest change of all was the absence of hearing him call me Chellamma.
Names have power, but only when they’re called. I could gauge the temperature of any relationship by how I was called. When my father, Appa, used my full name instead of Ammai, I knew he wasn’t happy with my behavior. Even now, at 44, I remain Ammai to my 77-year-old Appa. That name holds no judgment, only love worn smooth over decades.
As Chellamma slowly disappeared, it wasn’t replaced by anything — not at first. So I remained hopeful. I told myself Chellamma was just hiding in the shadows, and if I spoke less and showed up often enough for my husband, maybe she would return.
She did not.
Three years later, during the height of the pandemic, Chellamma was still nowhere to be found. But disappointment was everywhere, declaring its presence in banging doors and hushed silences. Which was better, the banging doors or the silence? I could never tell.
After a while, Chellamma became a distant memory. The loud doors got replaced by louder insults. After years of not hearing Chellamma, I began to wonder: Were these insults the only names I had left? Were they who I had become?
In the decades-old Tamil movie “Sindhu Bhairavi,” the male protagonist never calls his wife by her name. The movie is so disturbingly sexist that I didn’t want to go back and watch it to confirm, but in my recollection, the husband constantly berates his wife as an imbecile or an idiot for her lack of musical knowledge. What went through her mind? Did she even remember a time when she was “Bhairavi” and not “idiot”? I longed to know how she coped with that erasure.
Yes, Chellamma was just one facet of my multilayered identity, yet for me, her disappearance was the most painful and brutal aspect of our deteriorating marriage. There are no words to explain the pain of being invisible to your loved one — even as you tirelessly work to make whole a broken life.
Two years after our divorce, I still feel the raw hurt of the seven years I spent in our family home being ghosted by my own husband. I am unable to explain to friends why this continues to weigh so heavily. Most days I am glad they cannot understand this pain. Every week, in therapy, I talk about how to fill that Chellamma-shaped void in my heart.
But in the wake of losing that identity, Ammai has returned. I needed help taking care of my children as a working mother, and my parents stepped in, coming from India to visit for months at a time and bringing Ammai and all my other nicknames from childhood and young adulthood along with them.
Maybe one day the names I have regained will outweigh, outlive and out love the names I lost. Maybe, just maybe, I will finally no longer miss Chellamma. But even if Chellamma never comes back, I find strength in knowing that I did.
Chidambarakumari Ponnambalam is a software engineer in New Hampshire.
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