No, yeah, “Rashid” is not a typical Armenian name, but then, playing with names is a deep-rooted tradition within the Armenian ethos. The parents feel at liberty to use any name as long as it sounds lovely (by their ear estimation) or would be correct politically, or both. Hence these slews of Arthurs, Hamlets, Ophelias, Jameses, Johnics (diminutive-affectionate from Johnny), Lolitas and so on, and so forth among otherwise Armenian people.

A teacher of Geography from School 7 was named Argentina (which is not a household-between-us-kids moniker but her legitimate ID-verified handle). Or how about “Chapaev”? Who cares it’s the Civil War and innumerable jokes’ personage’s name, Daddy just liked the sound.

And admire please the ingenuity at constructing the following, rather wide-spread in Armenia name from V. I. Len(in) – eliminating dots and brackets you get "Vilen".

A woman named “Electrification” all her life had to respond to the shortened form: “Ele”. A lucky strike if you consider the base, right?

Or take, for instance, the story behind the name of my sister-in-law? Her mother’s mother-in-law (the mother-in-law of my mother-in-law), while on a visit to her relatives in Moscow, was impressed by something she heard in a radio-play about Jean D’Ark from Orleans. (Radio-play is an audio soap-opera broadcast over the radio because it was in 50’s when the USSR hadn’t got television yet, and the fact of TV’s entering the Americans’ life in 30’s serves another proof that the West started to rot before us.)

Now, she asked her Moscow relatives to scribble something she had heard and liked from the radio on a paper slip, my mother’s-in-law mother-in-law did.

And who are you or am I to deny the beauty in “Orlee-Anna” name?

There happens a certain admixture of prejudice too, and if a family is beset with stillbirths or babies lacking real stamina, they would use a Muslim (more often than not some Turkish) name for a newborn, which quick-fix usually helps because they believe it should work.

All that renders pretty common the presence of a watchman whose given name was Rashid with his always at ready smile full of square teeth. Besides, I once met a small kid Elchibey (his parents had used the name of the belligerent president of Azerbaijan from 90’s for that quite quick and able mischief))…

In the morning our family were getting together in the one-room apartment or, if it was shelling outdoors, I took a kettle of water boiled on the gas stove to the underground basement, before starting off to visit the families of two more daughters of my mother-in-law to pass them, in the basements of the respective five-story blocks, the bread baked by her the previous night in the gas-oven of our one-(but-wide)-room flat.

They answered with a jar of cream or mittens for Ashot that had become too small for his cousin already – the hand-me-downs were not quite our son’s size but of a manly cut and hue…

The usual in-extended-family circulation understandable to them who lived thru the realities of the USSR era of deficits…

And then, alleviated and full of feeling of my duty done, issuing tiny starch-creaks off my immaculate integrity, I opened the massive padlock on the entrance door to the editorial office building to latch it from inside because the House Manager (not present) had uneasy misgivings about the Russian and Armenian typewriters in the typists’ pool on the second floor, you know.

The translators’ was on the first floor and when they knocked or pulled at the entrance door from outside (about once a week), it was not a long wait till I came along the corridor to check what’s up.