I wonder why

1. At my daughter’s wedding reception several days ago, out of the blue my friend’s wife asked me if my surname was spelt ‘Merican’. I told her it was ‘Marikan’. They were just leaving then, so the dialogue ended there. I wonder why the casual query.

2. Apparently to some people ‘Merican’ signifies lineage and status. Members of the Merican clan of 18th and 19th century Penang were wealthy merchants and respected community leaders. The surname ‘Merican’ are used by their descendants up to the present time. Most of them are people of status and wealth.

3. Before I touch on ‘Marikan’, I would like to share a little secret concerning my surname. It was during my early schooldays that I came to realize that my grandfather was actually of Indian descent. In my birth certificate his name was written ‘Vappoo Marikan Nordin’. Vappoo! How strange and foreign it sounded then. I kept it a secret from friends to avoid being ridiculed.

4. Suffice it to say that ‘Marikan’ seemed silly enough inasmuch as it was omitted whenever I had to write down my name during my entire schooldays. Moreover, my full name was quite a long one: Mohd. Sharif Marikan bin Mohd. Ismail Marikan. So I used to write my name Mohd. Sharif bin Mohd. Ismail or simply Mohd. Sharif Ismail. But that was a thing of the past.

5. I would like to believe that ‘Marikan’ in my birth certificate was purely accidental. My father might have entrusted someone to report my birth. In those days penghulus took care of the registration in their mukims. They were usually Malay-educated. The report might have been verbally communicated; hence the Malay spelling of my surname ‘Marikan’.

6. I am quite certain that it was not what my father had wished for. My birth announcement in a local paper had my name printed ‘Mohamed Sheriff Merican’. The person entrusted by my father might have dictated it differently. It was quite unlikely that my father had not given any vital information to him for the registration of my birth.

7. So what actually went wrong? It would be idle to speculate on what had happened so long ago, but as I have mentioned earlier my children and one of my nieces have far-fetched thoughts that I was a victim of bad intentions right from the start. They claimed that as it stands, my present identity has obscured my lineage to the Noordin clan.