For as long as memory serves me — and it serves me well — I have always known myself as Tripti.
There is something quietly sacred about the beginning of a new school year. The smell of fresh paper. The satisfying weight of untouched notebooks. Every June, I would gather my books and set about the ritual of covering them in smooth brown paper, pressing the creases flat with the edge of my palm, then carefully smoothing a white label onto the front. And then — the best part — I would uncap my pen and write, in my most careful hand: Tripti Bholay.
My mother would then lean over and, with a few delicate strokes, wind a vine of leaves and flowers around my name. A small act of love that transformed a label into something that felt like a crest, a declaration, a small portrait of identity. Those books were mine. I was Tripti Bholay.
I wore my name like a badge through elocution competitions, where it rang out across hushed school halls. I heard it called at athletic meets, announced with the crackling authority of a loudspeaker. Each time, I stood a little straighter. The name meant something.
The name itself had a story — and what a story it was.
My uncle, my father's elder brother, was the family astrologer. It was his great honour and privilege to bestow names upon the children of our family, each one chosen with care, guided by the stars and the particular architecture of each child's birth chart. When my turn came, he looked to the heavens — and then, apparently, to the silver screen. He was a devoted admirer of Tripti Mitra, the luminous Bengali actress whose talent had captivated audiences across India. And so, from the confluence of the cosmos and cinema, I was given my name.
I loved this. I loved that my name carried within it a story of admiration, of artistry, of a man who saw something worth honouring in a remarkable woman's name. Tripti — it felt like mine in every possible way.
Then came the final year of school, and with it, the board exams.
I filled in the forms with the quiet confidence of a student who knew exactly who she was. Name: Tripti Bholay. School: Mahatma School of Academics and Sports. City: Panvel. Everything was correct. Everything was in order.
A few weeks later, my hall ticket arrived.
I opened it. I read it. I read it again.
There, in cold, official ink, was a name I did not recognise as my own: Trupti Bholay.
Someone — somewhere between my careful handwriting and the printing press — had decided, without consultation, without ceremony, without so much as a second thought, to rename me. A single vowel, swapped in the dark. Tripti had become Trupti. And just like that, a lifetime of identity had been quietly, bureaucratically, unceremoniously overwritten.
I was one of the top students in my school. My mind in those weeks was a tightly wound instrument, tuned entirely to the frequency of examinations — revision schedules, past papers, the relentless preparation that top grades demand. The injustice of the misspelling nagged at me, yes. But the exams loomed larger, and so I made a fateful, understandable, and ultimately consequential decision: I would deal with it later.
Later never quite came.
In India, your board exam certificate is not merely a piece of paper. It is a portkey — a master key that unlocks every official door that follows. It is the foundation upon which an entire paper identity is built, stone by stone, document by document. And so Trupti — this interloper, this administrative ghost — migrated. She spread, quietly and efficiently, into my college admission forms. Into my national identity documents. Into my bank accounts. Into my passport.
She followed me when I left India. She followed me across borders, through visa applications, through the careful scrutiny of immigration officers who looked from document to face and back again. She was there when I became a British citizen and held, for the first time, a burgundy passport in my hands. I turned to the photograph page, hoping, perhaps irrationally, that somehow the truth had found its way through.
It read: Trupti Bholay.
Even now — even today — that name travels with me.
Every time I am asked for my name, a small, weary negotiation begins. My name is Tripti, I say, and then brace myself for the inevitable glance downward at whatever form or document lies between us, followed by the slight furrow of a brow. But it says here… Yes. I know. It has always said that. And so I explain, for what feels like the thousandth time, the story of a hall ticket, a vowel, a moment of bureaucratic carelessness that has followed me across decades and continents.
As for correcting it — the sheer mountainous administration of it is enough to make the heart sink. Every document linked to every other document, a chain of official records stretching back thirty-odd years. And underneath the paperwork, a more immediate fear: the prospect of surrendering my passport — my freedom to move, to travel, to exist in the world without complication — while it is amended, leaving me grounded, document-less, waiting.
And so Trupti persists. A clerical error wearing my face, carrying my life.
But here — in the telling of this story, in the vine my mother drew around my name on those brown-covered books — I am, and have always been, Tripti.