My Name Is Hitler

A second-hand bookseller in Mumbai dreams everyday of liberating himself from his name

The late Vettumperumal Nadar, vegetable vendor from Alankulam village in Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu, decided his first three sons would be called Ganapathy, Nayanar and Thangaturai. His fifth son was named Arumugaraj and his daughter Selvi. Only once did Nadar break the pattern of respectable Tamil names. Hitler, his fourth son, never found out why.

“In my ninth standard, my physics teacher, asked me whether I knew what my name stood for. That’s the first time I became aware of it,” says Hitler Nadar, 42-year-old second-hand bookseller and a resident of Matunga, a predominantly South Indian suburb of Mumbai. “The next day I asked my father why he had named me Hitler. He just said, ‘I liked it, so I kept it’. It’s a mystery to me how he even knew about Hitler. He was not literate. God knows what went through his mind.”

Hitler thinks about changing his name every single day. There are three reasons for it. One, their personalities don’t match. “I am the kind of person who, when he sees a banana peel on the road, immediately thinks that someone might fall and throws it away. And that man, we know what he did,” he says. The second reason is that people look at him strangely the first time he’s introduced. And lastly, his eldest son (Siddeshwar), who’s studying in the fifth standard, has told him to change his name. “Once he was asked his father’s name in class. He got up and said, ‘My father’s name is Hitler’. The teacher called me the next day to confirm it.”

But Hitler has not got around to changing his name yet because his mother was reluctant. “I have to consider my parents’ opinion because they have kept the name, not me. But she’s agreed now and I’ll do it soon,” he says. His new name will begin with H and have six letters.

Being Hitler has its advantages though. It somehow endears him to people. Recently he had been called for an interview for the junior KG admission of his younger son Balaji. “The madam looked at the form, reached my name and then showed it to the teacher next to her and they both started to laugh. Usually, an interview lasts two to three minutes. In my case, we talked for 10 minutes. The madam told me to change my name. I said you suggest a good name and I’ll take it.” Also, because of the unusual name, his clients don’t forget him. Sometimes he even gets unexpected visitors. “I had sold books to one Bengali, whose wife is a German. He told his daughter in Germany about me. When the girl came to India, she came and met me.”

Among other ordinary people with extraordinary names Hitler remembers one boy named Amavas (moonless night) in his village. In Mumbai, he once went to a hotel and was introduced to a Communist. “He had named his two sons Mao Tse Tung and Chou En Lai.” Hitler says he has read up a lot on Hitler. Being a bookseller helped. But there is someone he has studied even more: Kamraj, the legendary Tamil Congress leader. “My father worshipped him. He’s also like a god to me. Once Kamraj came to our village. It was raining heavily. I was two years old and my father showed me to him. My cousins tell me that he lifted me and asked for my name. My father said, ‘His name is Hitler.’ And Kamraj said, ‘Huh’.”

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