After resting for a little while at the birth center, my husband and I gathered up our new baby and our stuff and bid good-bye to everyone. Sarah promised to come for several postpartum visits and help me out with household chores and watching my little girl in order to better earn the money we'd paid her, since she had missed the labor and birth. (She kept that promise, and was soooo helpful; I was really grateful. Sarah is wonderful!!!!) Then we bundled into our van and drove home.
As soon as we brought the baby inside, his older siblings, who were awake now, made a beeline for him and were enthralled and fascinated to check him out. My husband supervised and made sure they (especially our daughter, Lalita, who was just 19 months old going on 20 at the time) were gentle with the newborn.
The tradition we follow in our family with regard to naming our babies is that we wait until after they're born, then consult astrologer friends of ours to find out what's indicated in the babies' horoscopes regarding what syllables their names should start with, and then we search for names we like that start with those syllables. When my older son Bhadrasena was born, this process was much less stressful, because he was born at home and, except for the Medicaid caseworker who kept calling to see if I'd named him yet because she wanted to register him with Medicaid, nobody put pressure on us to pick out a name by any particular time. We took six weeks to choose his name, then invited a bunch of friends over for a home ceremony at which his name was finally announced, which took place when he was seven weeks old. But with my two younger children, since they weren't born at home but rather at a birth center, which legally had to file birth certificates for them within a certain number of days after they were born, the stress level was way higher. With Lalita, the time limit that we had in which to get back to them with a name for her was one week. I was expecting the same time limit for my third baby, but no! The policy had changed by then, and we had only three days! Ahhhh!!!!
Luckily, we have one astrologer friend who's super great about getting back to us promptly when we contact her in times like these. She quickly let us know that our third baby's name(s) should be connected with the star Swati (Arcturus), whose sounds are Ru (pronounced Roo), Re (Ray), Ro (Roe), and Ta (pronounced either Tah or Tuh). Although most Vedic astrologers just stick with the standard recommendation of naming the child according to which nakshatra (star or group of stars) the Moon is located in at the time of his or her birth, our friend is more open-minded and thorough in exploring all the options, and as it happened, based on her recommendations, we named my older son according to his Sun placement, my daughter according to her Moon placement, and my second son according to his Jupiter placement.
Each nakshatra that the planets can be located in (of which there are a total of 27, spanning the sky all the way around the Earth along the path that we call the zodiac) is divided into four equal sections, called padas, and each pada has its own syllable. Some astrologers are more particular that the child should be given a name starting with the syllable corresponding to the exact pada that a planet is located in, while others say there's no need to get so specific, and any of the four syllables connected with the nakshatra will do equally well. Our astrologer friend whom I mentioned belongs to the second school, and with my older two kids, we chose names that were connected with the indicated nakshatras, but not the specific padas where the planets were located. With my second son, though, we ended up deciding to get more specific and give him a name based on the actual pada that Jupiter was in at the moment of his birth, which was Ro.
There wasn't a plethora of "Ro" names to choose from (we give all our kids Sanskrit first names, so we were looking for a Sanskrit "Ro" name for him), but there were a few, and when we hit upon the name Rohan, my husband and I both loved it immediately. We're both fans of Tolkien, and the fact that Rohan is a name that appears in The Lord of the Rings was super cool to us; plus, it's not only a Sanskrit name, but also an (Anglicized) Gaelic name (I found out subsequently that the original Gaelic is Ruadhan, meaning redhead -- a meaning that doesn't apply to our son, but oh well; I'm still happy that there's a Gaelic version of his name, because my husband and I both have some Gaelic [Scotch/Irish] heritage and feel that that culture is really cool). Additionally, Rohan is apparently used as another version of the name Rowan in some parts of the world, meaning a tree in the rose family with reddish-orange berries, and I adore trees and love the rose family (and Tolkien's Ent character named Quickbeam really loves rowans, and Tolkien made up a lovely tragic song for Quickbeam to sing about his rowan-tree friends that got cut down by Orcs, so there's yet another Tolkien tie-in with this name!), so that's awesome as well. My husband and I loved that Rohan was not just a Sanskrit name, but was actually multicultural. As far as the Sanskrit meanings, though, my own understanding is that Rohan means "growth" or "growing," but in my husband's research he came across the meaning "ascending" (which I guess makes sense as a synonym -- growing [up] = rising = ascending), as well as "healing," which can also make sense as a synonym because new growth (of whatever -- skin on human / animal bodies, or greenery in forests) can cover, replace, and heal damaged areas. The Sanskrit word roha (clearly related), appearing in the Shrimad-Bhagavatam verse 10.63.26, is translated as "sprout."
So the name has many nice meanings. But of course, as Hare Krishnas, we want everything in our lives to be connected with Krishna. So how is the name Rohan connected with Krishna?
Well, I have a friend who tells me that it's actually a name of Lord Vishnu (an expansion of Lord Krishna). We didn't know that when we chose it as our son's name, though. What I had found out, through VedaBase (a database of Shrila Prabhupada's words and writings, plus those of some of his disciples and previous saints in our line), is that there is a holy place in Vraja (Lord Krishna's homeland) called Shakata Rohana. It's located in the Kumudavana forest. Here's what Shri Narahari Chakravarti wrote about it in his book Bhakti-ratnakara:
“ 'See here Shrinivasa, the place called Shakata Rohana. It is a beautiful pleasant place and very dear to Krishna. Bumblebees are always humming in the forest of flowers. By bathing in this kunda [pond or pool] one will get supreme bliss.'
“Shakata Rohana is described in the Adi-varaha Purana thus: 'One half yojana [four miles] on the west side of Mathura is My supreme abode named Shakata Rohana. Many thousands of bumblebees live there. Whoever fasts for one night and then takes bath there is certain to attain the happiness of Vidyadharaloka.' ”
So the exact word Rohan (the "a" on the end of Shakata Rohana is a short a, which means pronouncing it at the end of a word is optional, which means Rohana and Rohan are exactly the same Sanskrit word) is present in the name of a holy place that is very dear to Krishna, even being described by Him as His supreme abode. There are plenty of Hare Krishna devotees who have been given the names of holy places, like Vrindavana, Vraja, Mathura, Mayapura, et cetera, so those are most definitely authorized holy names. To me, based on the above quote, the name Rohan can also be placed in this category.
However, what my husband and I decided to do, just to make absolutely sure we were giving our precious son a holy name of the Lord that he could give as his name while in the company of devotees (or anytime!), was to name our son Rohini-tanaya dasa -- "servant of Rohini's son," i.e., Lord Balarama. Just as the word mohini, "enchantress," has as its masculine counterpart the word mohan(a), "enchanter," I thought the feminine name Rohini might have Rohan as its masculine counterpart. I know of a male devotee named Radhika-Ramana dasa ("servant of Radhika's lover," i.e., Krishna) who goes by the nickname of Radhika (which is a feminine name), but to my husband and me, it felt weird to call our son, Rohini-tanaya dasa, "Rohini" for short. But we wanted the syllable Ro to be there on the beginning of his name, so changing "Rohini" to "Rohan" -- more appropriate for a boy -- seemed like a suitable way to shorten the name Rohini-tanaya to a more manageable length for practical, everyday use.
So in this way, we settled on Rohini-tanaya dasa as his "full first name" and Rohan as his nickname. For his middle name, thanks to my husband's inspiration to celebrate his Nordic heritage in the middle names of his children, we did the same thing we'd done with our daughter and chose a Nordic name. We selected Raeifr for our son, which means "friendly and happy" in Old Norse.
We barely got all the above figured out in time, but somehow or other, by Krishna's grace, we made it by the three-day deadline. Phew!
And all of his names turned out to fit him very well! ^_^
to be continued...
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