What’s Not In A Name?

Episode 1 - Her name is Denise. Denise!

Welcome to episode 1: “Her name is Denise. Denise!” of my first short story. And who else to better begin with than in the name of Phoebe! This is a scene where she introduces us to her virtual roommate, and this is also the place where you will be meeting my imaginary friend, Denise. Hope you all enjoy this four part short-story (a feghoot rather) — “What’s not in a name?”.

“Woah, 6 authors in this journal on fish economics. Phew!”, she sighed as she sifted through the pile of papers on her stationery-clad office desk. It was 1 AM and it was just another day for Denise. Conducting research on the geographical and environmental agents influencing sustainable public-policy making, long days, short sleep was a norm. She donned workaholic-ism with much pride. She was preparing to put-forth her recent work across a jury who were to approve her team to carry out field research along the national border of El Paso, Texas. The objective of the case-study/project named Damns Of Dams (abbreviated DoD) was to get more unbiased user data, historical trends and perform experiments to evaluate the long-term social and economic consequence of erecting five close-by dams and weigh the rationale in retrospect. It had been a usual busy fall for Denise at the University of Colorado — Boulder, but unlike the last couple of years, 1998 had been rather rewarding. She had made good strides in her PhD journey - presented her research at multiple conferences, TA’d two of her professor's classes with supreme devotion and upped her data analysis skills significantly to draw pivotal inferences for her adviser Prof. Joel Fisher, who had been battling hard to get her more research grants sanctioned.

Hailing from Goa, Denise’s parents often hosted tourist guests at their home. Homestays were a popular culture in Calangute and Goa, a premature Airbnb. Rather than a means of income, it was just a warming experience for them, something in which her family saw “purpose”. She had gotten comfortable, or better say more empathetic, interacting with diverse travellers of different cultures, backgrounds and this had vested as her predisposition in ethnography, which evidently played a role in her career progression as well. Growing up in the party slash vacation-province of India, Denise made many mistakes she is not proud of. But every-time, she was prompt to learn, amend her ways and adapt to decrease the prospects of repeating them. She was smart enough to internalize and pursue her proclivities and excel in them than just sheep-herd, even though it meant a much harder relentless pursuit and not a cushioned couch in an air-conditioned room.

Diligent, although she was at her work, Denise had(still has) an absurd quirk. She often cannot remember names! She has good recall when it comes to events, descriptions and even dates. But if it is a name she will not encounter again (or often) she would most likely forget. Sometimes even though she had a memorable incident associated, if the name is not recurring in her life, it was gone. Be it a guy (whom she dated) who had an eerie habit of practising to smile for 30 minutes every day, or the name of the restaurant in Japan where she had the best sushi (even the name of the sushi) or the familial wine which her dad gifted when she moved to the US. These events and characters were recent and unforgettable enough for her to recollect but still, she needs an aid - friends, notes of some sort.

Denise had put herself in numerous embarrassing situations due to this oddity. Like, she used to suck at general knowledge quizzes in school. She once forgot what “diagenesis” meant in an interview for her dream job, even though, empirically it was a concept she routinely practised. While answering an inquiry about her professor, she forgot his name, only because he was on a sabbatical for a few weeks. Her cache gets invalidated very soon if it is not warmed frequently enough. She cannot remember the name of the place where she met her boyfriend without looking it up. In her first internship experience during the beginning days of her career, she went on a pivotal field trip to a village in Rajasthan. Her reports were disregarded as unsound because during the user interviews, she was in such a hurry that she did not jot-down names of the people she spoke to. A couple of days later when she sat down to document and file the interviews, she hardly remembered 2–3 names. Without reference, the user study was discredited because the topic was sensitive enough. And there were many to this list.

True, in retrospect, maybe a bunch of school quizzes now seem minuscule, but at the moment it was a loss. And when it comes down to making mistakes in your dream job interview, or in the reports of research you are banking your future on, or something very personal, the loss could be non-trivial. But the wise persona she is, she acclimated many means to cope with this idiosyncrasy. Some of them worked, some worked fractionally, and some absolutely did not. She deployed associative memory, note-taking, bookmarking, five-second-view technique, etc. and they had served her just ok. Nothing had been a comprehensive solution and the fear arising from the awareness of the occurrence of the consequence of her forgetting had got Denise anxious and nervous at key moments. This anxiety often leads to Denise attacking such situations by bombarding attributes of people (whose names she forgot) without any thinking or filtering. It was an attempt to maximize recall and hope the listener will fill the gap in precision.

As a funny bright side to this, when Denise went through these circumstances aided with those voluntary coping mechanisms, she found herself develop an instinctive reaction to capture things in a little more detail involuntarily. She presumed even if she cannot remember a name, she can remember numerous attributes of the person or place to eventually describe them accurately and rather obviously. Her senses had started inclining towards spotting discerning qualities, attributes which helped her isolate and describe what she is referring to. No, she was not even close to having a photographic memory, it was just a little more awareness, being a little more in the moment, paying little more attention to detail.

An embarrassing situation occurred when Denise took her family to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh, during the commencement ceremony of her graduate program. She wanted to avail the same tour-guide she went with earlier because he knew his stuff the best and was a great orator. She had hired him multiple times on her previous couple visits too. When she walked up to the desk to ask for a guided tour, no surprises, she could not remember his name! “He normally wears blue-framed spectacles”, “southern accent, around 30 years old”, she kept adding details when she could not spot him. In those rush of few tens of seconds, amidst all the cringing embarrassment, fleeting hints and hazily audible sounds of the name, without thinking she went on and on: “He snorts when he laughs hard, kind of like a pig, and he has a really pretty jawline!”. She had never discussed these with anyone before, just somehow it had registered in her brain. Well, that did not help either and she finally could identify him only after he walked out of the restroom. All this while her mom stared at her with all shapes of eyebrow one could imagine.

It does not end there, there was a huge list of such events. As a gesture of gratitude, Denise wanted to take her internship mentor — Dr Vahab, a professor in ethnography in the Santa Clara University out on dinner. She had never loved the domain so much and had sought fresh perspectives, not just on paper but also practical experience during her stint and wanted to express gratitude. She loved the Italian food at this eatery on Castro Street, Mountain View. She sat down to write an invitation and then bam! “I do not remember the name of the place!”. And this was not the age of smartphones, that one could just look up the internet or search old photos and identify, nor was the GPS vertical of Google as refined, yet. She had been there a couple of times and fancied their pesto sauce chicken pasta. As usual, she started her routine of attribute-shooting until they hit the target along with her intern colleagues at the university cafeteria. None of her hints worked. She recollected that on both occasions there was a huge line at a gelato store, right in front of the cosy Italian diner. As soon, as she mentioned this, her friend questioned, “Are you talking about Doppio Zero?”. “Doppio Zerooooooo”, she exhaled and hugged her friend.

In one of the conferences on World Climate Pact at New York City, while answering questions about her poster at the booth, the professor whose papers she had cited stood in-front of her. And unlike everybody else in the conference, the professor did not have a named-badge glued to his shirt. And soon Denise’s lips turned upside down. Although she had read his papers, firstly she had not paid much attention to his name, and secondly, she had forgotten it. She kept trying hard to recollect his name. She badly wanted to. Of course, she could have just addressed him as “Professor”, but suffixing it with the name adds a lot more personal touch, at least in the western world. She went over her poster, explained her research, with the thread-of-recollection, running continuously in the background making many lookup queries to her memory. All of which were misses. There was no one or no time to play the 20 hints game this time. As she excerpted a theory, she remembered that the paper from which it was borrowed. It occurred to her that this paper had an unusually large number of authors — 8 of them, one among which was the professor in front of her. As it had 8 different authors, enlisting it had to take significant space in the reference section. She picked up the hard copy of the paper she was elucidating in the poster, turned over to the last page, filtered the longest entry and went through the 8 names. “Professor Chidi Your research on B-horizon was pivotal to many of my case studies at school”, she remarked and eventually the professors smile of greeting turned into laughter of contentment. She felt mighty proud of herself, for getting out of such a situation. There were ways she had voluntarily, involuntarily learned to aid her or evade situations. In an age without a supreme search engine, or a smartphone or fancy bookmarking extensions/apps, human instincts were her only bet, and she was gradually adapting to them.

3 am she finally locks her tiny cabin and walks back to her house. She needs to get some rest before the big day. Nervous thoughts, and with an awareness of recollection-phobia she puts herself to a hesitant sleep.

40 minutes, 4 snoozes and she finally has to wake up. She picks up her regular 1$ subsidized cold brew, which was trash but essential enough to get her started. She has to present the background work, premise and user-study proposal for her hypothesis on how the construction of close-by dams in El Paso, in the early 19th-century might have manifested as a decline in the county’s economy and culture in many suburbs by the end of the 19th century. Fishing in the Rio Grande was not just an occupation, it governed the economics of the region. The waters of Rio Grande housed plenty species of exquisite fishes like the Rainbow Trouts, Largemouth Bass and Blue Gill which had now become a rarity. More importantly, the fishery was a part of the culture of El Paso, an element ingrained in the society for centuries, a sustainable platform of existence, a practice being passed along generations. Denise’s primary goal was to juxtapose if the price paid for the quantum of job opportunities created by the resulting industries made justice to the economic and cultural setback dams had inadvertently imposed in El Paso in the 19th century. And accounting for the amount of electricity harnessed, water conserved, could the decision have been any different in retrospect. The early 19th century had major incidents like economic setbacks, world war, food scarcity, unemployment, etc and construction of dams made sense. Even otherwise, people did not pay much attention to environmental concerns while making public policies back then, simply because they were not aware and it was a way less pressing concern. Nor did someone had futuristic insights, that a dam would bode such an outcome. A study like this would provide intriguing perspectives to be considered in policymaking. She comprehended the gravity of this opportunity and the avenues it would create for her career-aspirations in political science. To back her hypothesis, she had covered solid ground churning pounds of documentation over cold brew assisted long nights at her office space for the past few months.

She presented her notion reinforced with inferences from census data, excerpts from newspaper articles, records pulled over the internet and cited expert financial reports. She had a strong conviction that — to deeply comprehend correlations among policymaking, societal and environmental constraints, there is a ton of latent information in this case study. And this confidence was evident in all her slides. Through compelling narratives, she proved that this was a hard problem to solve given the bi-directional nature of dependencies and a necessary one given the consequences witnessed. When she elucidated the budget plan of the experiments she would like to effectuate on the river waters, the interviews she would conduct, locations she would target, and private businesses she had established connections with before-hand, the jury was mighty charmed by the thoroughness. One of the DoD juries had served in the governor's office of El Paso County. In a casual QnA session, he questioned out of curiosity: “Do you know where these migratory trouts originate from?” on her slide about Rainbow Trouts. Unfortunate as she had been, she did not remember the name. But smart that she was, she ardently retorted: “What is more interesting is where they are ending up - Death!” The presentation ended on that waggish note. And she waited until next week to know the result.

Episode 2 - You know nothing, Denise!

Hope you liked the first part of this short story — “What’s not in a name?” We met Denise and her name remembering quandary which had put Denise through challenges and continues to haunt her as she navigates in her project on unfamiliar lands in this second part. What all does she discover? What all does she forget?

“Aaaah, The name of the street is something Avenue”, hesitantly informed the-name forgetting-Denise with the cab driver, as she tried to find the address in her documents. She and a few colleagues from her research division in Boulder checked in to one of the dorms in University of Texas at El Paso, where they are going to camp for the next 1 month, during the course of their study — DoD (Damns of Dams). More trainees from universities in Texas and Mexico would be joining them soon in El Paso. El Paso - a name shared by the city and its host county in the state of Texas, stands on the banks of the river Rio Grande. It houses many trading companies, medical research centres and of course the University of Texas at El Paso, where Denise is headed to. People in El Paso are passionate about the super bowl, hyped by the student population. The city also has a strong military presence with Fort Bliss, one of the largest training base camps of the US Army set up in El Paso. The township shares a long border with the city of Ciudad Juarez in Mexico along the Rio Grande. The two cities in union form the worlds second-largest bi-national metropolitan area also know as the Borderplex.

A feeling of jubilation and pride complemented the bright and sunny day while she breathed through the open windows, gazing at the university campus from her dorm room. Denise along with Prof Fisher had hypothesized the problem statement; she had laid the seeds for acquiring this project and had eventually landed there after hardships, failed attempts and months of grind. The domain in which Denise wants to thrive is no piece of cake. The opportunities being so less, she had to be better at what she did. And like any other supply-demand equation, the ones who make the cut, work as advisers to political bodies and land a purposeful life along with being able to pay rent. As some wise man once said, “Passion does not pay rent!”.

Even before getting to El Paso, the team had pre-drafted an arduous plan for the one month to earn the most of this opportunity. They had split the problem domain into three categories — fishery, health, and standard of living. Their objective was to look at these categories through the lenses of environment, society, and culture to draw relations if any. Relations which would raise awareness and highlight the unpredictable consequences of a decision among policymakers. Denise’s objective was to collect multitudinous anecdotes/testimonies, click photographs, take back samples of water, soil and aquatic flora and copious statistics on business progressions, hospital records to further her hypotheses keeping her name-recollection-lag at bay.

The first day of fieldwork, the team met at one corner of the university football ground, sat on the stands for a briefing before they dispersed to accomplish their assigned duties. Denise set out to visit the Riverside dam on the Rio Grande for site exploration. El Paso was heavily dominated by Mexican and Hispanic immigrants and English was not a norm especially in the suburbs. She tagged along with a local guide, dearly called Uncle Joey, to help her navigate, communicate and mainly tour the power plant there. Uncle Joey was a prominent guide to the town of El Paso. A dearly loved wise figure who had spent more than five decades in the city, seeing it shift from a fishery dominant prosperous civilization to a labour-driven industrial arena. They met at the Sun Metro station, exchanged greetings and started out. On their train ride, Denise inquisitively asked Joey questions about the dam, its origin, about how the vegetation, landscape, and demographics have structurally changed over the years in the surrounding areas. Uncle Joey, the 57-year-old native, did justice by elucidating in detail with utmost zest as Denise made notes. “First there were forests, then came basins and farmlands, and now there are factories,” was a riveting aphorism in Joey's narrative which got Denise intrigued the most about the metamorphic landscape. As they reached the dam, Joey walked up to an official to get permission to visit the inside of the rusty power plant. Introducing Denise, he went: “This is …., ah a curious young girl from Boulder studying about hydropower generation”: he forgot her name. A gleeful smile and wide eyes decorated Denise’s face. He was apologetic but Denise was all empathetic while Joey made arrangements. She did not mind at all, instead had laughter of regalement within, which vanished soon when Joey justified “Forgive me, it is my age and I find it hard to remember new things.” “Let’s just go inside,” she continued walking. Curating pictures of salt sedimentation on the dam, silt deposits along the banks, the dilapidated powerhouse and soil samples from marshy land spans which were once agricultural fields, Denise was all about energy on the first day. She ended the long day in her dorm unwinding with her guitar, her de-stress-er friend.

The second week into the project and Denise continued to converse vigorously with the locals. She had summoned all her ethnographic skills and experiences to become mettlesome and more cognizant of people and their biases in that region. Pisciculture merchants, restaurant owners, and fishermen were here prime interviewees. “I will try the Rainbow Gill”, she ordered at a fancy local restaurant wanting to treat herself on her birthday. “Great choice, you know the names of our delicacies without even looking at the menu. You must have done your homework!” appreciated the restaurant owner Gustavo, who sat across as they stipulated the price surge in fish dishes over the past four years. “Someone appreciated my memory of names! Hmmm, ought to be a happy day indeed!”, Denise patted herself. Her order arrived (orders actually) while they kept the conversation ticking with absorbing tales of migratory fish becoming rare, unemployed fishermen smuggling drugs as an easier/alternate way of livelihood, the cultural shifts in the food preferences at El Paso and rampantly declining freshwater-fish export businesses. “Woah! I ordered only the Rainbow Gill”, she exclaimed in awe when she saw two appetizing dishes placed in front. “This Rainbow Trout and this the Blue Gill, Joven Mujer”, the waiter explained in a broken Spanish-English accent. A facepalm moment hit Denise, she was very happy that she remembered names, but she went an extra mile. She remembered two partial ones and mixed them implying that she wanted both dishes. “Turning 27 is proving to be an expensive endeavour”, she gestured compunction with hands raised in submission and cleared her check. She dictaphoned all corroborations, addresses and potential data references from Gustavo’s interview before she left the restaurant.

Denise spent the next few days taking pictures of dead fish owing to the receded water levels downstream of the bank. She scraped samples of algae grown on rock surfaces which were hogging dissolved oxygen making the river less habitable for aquatic fauna. She gleaned samples of water and soil from multiple upstream and downstream locations to get specific tests done and compare differences in salt content, dissolved oxygen levels and life-replenishing sediments. She snapped pictures of lowly downstream riverbeds to delineate massively soil eroded estuaries. Over the weekend Denise spent all her time in the lab, chugging many ozs of cold brew, fetching and curating data from registered references, annotating photographs and perusing experiment reports. She had a lot on her plate to analyze from just halfway into the stint, which made her feel positive about the pace of DoD, especially when she discovered a notably declining pattern in nutrients and oxygen percentages in upstream and downstream water samples. She prepared herself for the remaining weeks to conduct surveys mostly on dwindle(ed|ing) businesses and visit hospitals in the neighbourhood as the final branch of her problem statement. Dusk dawned and she clunked the pieces of leftover ice from her cold brew peeking out of the laboratory window to watch DEA troops marshal the streets of El Paso in an attempt to investigate another case of narcotics trafficking.

“Anybody home?”, Denise knocked on the door of what looked like an under-maintained country-house with a name-board which read “Camposa Casa”. “Please come in”, she heard a tired, panting voice come from inside. “My name is Denise, I am a PhD student at Boulder studying about sustainable public policymaking. I am here to study about the ebbing fishing market as part of the project DoD.” she established identity and motive in one long breath. “Felix Camposa here. Nice to meet you,” greeted the voice bearer. “Sorry I’d shake your hand but it is so hot outside and I am all sweaty. Funny it is that my wife drives a cab and I never get to ride on it, makes me walk all day.”, Felix sighed.

Denise gradually started her round of questions asking Felix about their past business and their prevailing lifestyle. Felix and his wife were fish merchants and specialized in the trade of a rare migratory fish called “crappie”, which wasn’t so crappy after all. They had inherited the trade as a cultural element of their ancestry who had been practising it for years. Felix mentioned how crappies are almost gone now: “Crappies are migratory fish which travel to El Paso from the south and go all along the Rio Grande up north. But after the dam was built, their migration was hindered at multiple places and this created an imbalance in the availability of favourable weather conditions. The fishes we find now are only in the southern streams as migration is not an option anymore for these creatures. We first sighted the problem when we started capturing more and more dead crappies. Eventually fewer crappies, and now with crappies becoming so rare, we catch other types of fish too to sustain sales. I still enjoy fishing and want to carry forward our tradition. We had an annual turn over of $100,000 (which was a lot at El Paso in the mid 19th century) till a decade back which has now almost halved.” He continued lamenting “It has been five years now, we had to shut our godowns, sell many of our boats and machinery, give up our properties. I teach English part-time at the community school and my wife drives the cab. We make just enough to give ourselves 3 meals and hold on to this familial house. Once in a while, we venture out on the river to hone our hereditary skills and get some business. But in the past months that has been fading away too.” Denise empathized with him and jotted down all details meticulously.

“The restaurant owner Mr Damn what was his name… had told me about migratory fish”: Denise tried to recall and eventually resorted to her usual factual-bombardment. “They are famous for their Rainbow trouts”, “It has many French style glass windows”, “The owner stays at the restaurant most of the time with his family”… “He wore a bright white Calvin Klein under his jeans”, she blurted anxiously exploding with unfiltered attributes. “Shit! Did I just say that?”, she felt super shy and ashamed. Felix burst out in laughter and pulled his shirt down retort-fully to mock her.

Denise gazed around the house, the archaic but newly polished furniture while Felix was loading up his laundry, separating algae out of his pant pockets. “Can I see your ferry and maybe the garage which you mentioned is your temporary warehouse now?”, solicited Denise. Felix obliged after mentioning that both the ferry and garage have been unused for over a month and not in really good shape. The ferry looked functional but mostly decrepit. Rusty interiors and smelly deck, it wasn’t at all welcoming and they deplaned rather quickly. Finally, they skimmed the garage wading through creaky appliances, leaky cold-storage drums, and discarded fishnets. Come evening, Denise was exiting their place as Veronica pulled over her car/pickup-van. They exchanged brief pleasantries and Denise left. Veronica glared at Felix watching the still dirty laundry.

With three days remaining Denis spent a lot of time in the TREAI medical centre to gather historical records on waterborne diseases, contagious through microbes originating in floods and coagulation. Loco anecdotes never left haunting her or featuring in Denise’s life story! At the severely pipelined administrative block of the medical centre, Denise took a lot of time to memorize the names of people she had to traverse in order to get documents approved for examination. “Brenda”, “Uzziel”, “Salvador” and then “Yolanda,” she wrote and wrote in her memory, the names of people in charge in the pipeline-order as “BUSY” (abbreviation from first letters) to make life easier.

Later in the evening, supervisor Murphy came up to Denise and adjured: “Hey, can you please get these signed as well from Waldo, Tortuga and Fiestero’s office since you will be going there anyway”? At first, Denise thought these must be names she has somewhere missed or forgotten, but soon she realized that she had never heard them. “I am sorry, I do not know these people”, clarified Denise. “Sorry, my bad, I have a thing for nicknames. I like addressing my folks with newer nicknames and it connects me better with them”, Murphy justified. “Waldo is Salvador”, “Tortuga is Brenda” and “Fiestero is Uzziel” he corrected himself. “So WTF?”, Denise perplexedly wrote as her feeling towards Murphy’s habit resonated the new abbreviation. “I wonder how that strategy to connect with people would go with me?” she wondered.

Last weekend at the place, she was sipping her brew at the same terrace-cafe, “Kinara” she lounged most often and admired the moonlit city. Kinara was pet-friendly and Denise loved pampering dogs. She even made a special bond with “Zorro”, the owner’s pet. “You should see this in the winter, the snow on the mountain glows with the moon!”, interjected a familiar voice. “Oh, Hey! Did not expect to run into you here. Have never seen you here before. Hola!”, wondered Denise and greeted Veronica. “Do you drive this often. Or you have another car? This truck does not look like it can carry more than 2 passengers?”, curiously asked Denise pointing at her parked pickup van. “This truck is what we have left from our delivery fleet. Although I use it to distribute whatever meagre fish we get, I also use it as a cab to make a little extra money,” explained Veronica. Nibbling onto their snacks, the ladies went into a session of bantering. Veronica, the manager of Camposa Fishery, was a curious person and threw a million questions to Denise about to know about DoD and more about the people she had met during the last one month. Denise was very pleased to meet someone as interested in the domain and explained with fervour. Veronica quickly got a briefing of what Felix had made Denise aware of and added more details to their story. Veronica rectified a few intricacies which Felix had missed and corrected some old numerical figures. After over an hour of dialogue, Veronica wished Denise the very best with her project and drove back. Denise walked to her dorm and put herself to an exhausted-but-satiate sleep on her last night in El Paso.

Veronica reached her house, grabbed the corner of her room and pulled Felix in. She picked up her phone, made a call, put it on speaker and commanded in a flummoxed voice: “Creo que deberíamos matar a la chica?”. Felix’ jaw dropped as goosebumps crept on his forearm.

Episode 3 - Plata o Plomo

“Silver or Lead”, was a casually fired intimidation during the late 19th century by drug lords. The likes of Pablo Escobar had forced money on people and established an impregnable network of satellites along the borders of US-Mexico to smuggle narcotics. And guess who is at the border, our friend Denise, pursuing project DoD. Hope you like the third episode of “What is not in a name”.

The late 19th century saw a fanfare of many drug magnates in the Americas. Escobar, Pacho, Gacha were some key names who bartered billions of dollars beyond countries and continents. To give you an estimate of the scale, it was discovered that Escobar bought hundreds of thousand dollars worth of rubber bands to tie money which he buried at numerous hideouts. Even after his death, people kept finding bundles of cash while digging random places around their refuges like river beds, tree trunks and beneath rocks. Columbia was the epicentre, Mexico the launch pad and the United States a giant market for narcotic-trade. Administrators and armed bodies of the three nations were heavily invested in mitigating the situation for many many years. The phrase “Plata o Plomo” (translated as silver or lead), had made people either dead or rich. A profoundly connected network, always kept drug lords well informed and ever elusive. Land, sea, air — all channels of transportation; plane, gliders, ships, cargoes, trucks, cars — all means of commute were leveraged at full scale to transport drugs in huge capacities. At its peak, 20000 kilograms of narcotics — cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroine (note: it does not include marijuana) were in flux along the US border in the 1970–80s. Given the high scale, unreasonable stakes and the number of people involved the impact of this mafia could never be short lived. You show people the taste of extra money and a peek at its potential, there will always be somebody willing to drive any mile of risk until the mile just turns into a milestone.

However, the story past 1990 was rather different. Although it saw a major downfall of the cocaine empire set up by Escobar (with his Colombian mafia), following his death in 1993, the trafficking took a serious plunge. Temporarily. As Escobar’s era neared an end, rival cartels learned from his mistakes. They revived older channels to carry out and continue the trade. But, not by keeping people at gunpoint or by securing their mouths with money, but by comrading with the federal government and officials of the special forces. They employed economist savants to launder money for them, hired lawyers to bury all trails of evidence and policymakers to plant loopholes in regulations aside from a fleet of spies and informers. These cartels functioned and produced drugs under the banner of pharmaceutical industries, which was then illicitly sneaked out. The money they profited, made them elite white collars in the Southern Americas. The Carlito cartel reigned in Juarez, the sibling city in the bi-national metropolitan (along with El Paso). Juarez was the most populous city in the Chihuahua state of Mexico and a rampantly burgeoning avenue for industries. Today it has more industrial area than any North American City! Some experts even call it “The City of the Future”. Lead by three lords, the Carlito cartel was known to be non-violent. Instead, they heavily capitalized and fueled higher authority corruption, on both sides of the border. Their ascendancy was so deep that they made higher earnings when their lords were in prison! They were astute than aggressive in their strategy, rational than rash in communication. Despite charged transgressions, they legally lived in a mansion, under police protection. The Rio Grande was their camel in the desert, an agent expansively used by the Carlitos. The Rio Grande flowed along the whole border of Mexico and El Paso, Texas. Fishermen, boats, passengers, goods were heavily loaded with narcotics and shipped through less guarded banks until 1995–96, when the DEA took down most of the production sites, killed and then declared missing many drug lords and curbed all transactions. Two of the three Carlito lords had been dead for a few months now and both the quantity and frequency of transaction had massively declined. Small private merchants and owners of properties where production happened, who still had access involved in small scale trade.

Veronica was a very small node in the US side of the remnant minuscule network. When their business of crappies flourished, she had established some deep-rooted connections with transport agencies on both sides of the border, as she had to intermittently navigate across water-borders to grab fish. This gave her access to people with power and a couple of policy drivers, some of whom had now become big nodes of this drug network. Veronica and Felix were very attached to Camposa Fishery and could not see it plummet. She could not digest the slump in her ancestral business. It was definitely not her fault that the fish went extinct, she was a victim of the circumstance. A circumstance caused by an unforeseen (rather un-foresee-able) event, which she did not take well. She saw a few of her peers getting involved with drug trafficking and could not say no to a potential source of a lot higher income than she earned by driving a cab. The last remaining don of the Carlito Cartel managed to get access to a discarded prototype of a submarine from the Mexican Naval Forces. He stripped the model further down to a bare minimum functionality of simply remaining afloat underwater and added a lever-based system to vend out packets on manoeuvring it from the outside. He would stuff the large cylindrical structure with air-tight sealed packets of powders, about a quarter tonne, and attach it underwater to his ferry’s base. On reaching the desired coordinates on the Rio Grande, they would detach and position it as required.

Veronica wanted to exploit the equipment she owned, her ferries, and the skills she acquired in her ancestral business to facilitate drug trade. Like before, her ferry used to flow downstream in search of crappies. On every trip to the river, they (Felix as well) would capture one (at most two) large fish, along with the rare fish and then navigate towards a specific coordinate, which would already be communicated to them before the expedition. Yes, the submarine coordinates! On the way, she (or Felix) would slit open the larger fish and get rid of its gills, and some more internal organs to make room. Veronica had instilled a miniature work station on her ferry which she extensively employed for operating on fish. At the target location, either of them would dive into the water with a rope tied to their leg, locate the submarine, engage with its lever and vend out a pre-determined manageable quantity of packets from it. They would execute multiple diving endeavours depending on the amount of fish they had, to stuff just enough material. On their way back, one of them anchored the ferry and stood on the lookout for danger, while the other toiled inside with knives, scalpel and forceps to shove packets inside the fish body and preserve those fish in ice drums after sealing them. They took turns and managed to get around a kilo of powder on every visit. Once they got to their docks, even if there was checking, the packing was thorough enough to escape a human cop. The smell of the fish and the reduced temperature deceived the sniffer dogs. Of course, given the contacts Veronica had, she always thought there was a way around even if they were caught. After off-loading, they would carry the shipment into their garage, remove the packets out and safely secure them and thoroughly clean the fish to get rid of any trace of narcotics. The rare fish was sold to vendors and local businesses along with the remains of the large fish. If there was any collateral damage on the large fish (often a leaked packet), it was discarded as diseased. They did this 18-hour venture once every month and spent the remaining days distributing the acquisitions, which Veronica did completely by herself... Veronica single-handedly conveyed all the material via her cab/pickup-van to known customers and some rare passengers. They had this going for a few months, until recently when they had to stop because of deficit drug production.

Veronica was a smart businesswoman. For one, she was not covetous. She drew her risk boundaries and logistic limits very precisely with enough margin and always executed within them. She maintained a very regulated inflow of money by capping it to a reasonable percentage of her turnover before and documented only a plausible fraction to show that her business had taken a severe hit because of the declining fish. Even though she had her hands stained with blood (of fish), and she was dealing narcotics and smuggling over borders and laundering money, she never got greedy. To ensure sustenance, the quantity was always in restraint. She was sensible enough to not kill people or involve in an aggressive frenzy which would attract attention, mistakes which people like Pablo did. Her key credo was to have limited capital, minimal points of vulnerabilities which made her team the smallest possible (only 2–3 people), even though it meant everyone working twice as hard. She even did not let Felix get involved with distribution, which he was clearly upset about having to walk drenched in sweat most of the time.

In this whole setting Denise, like Jon Snow, absolutely knew nothing!

Last morning of project DoD, she makes a final pass on her room to check if she had left anything. She drags her stroller down the stairs with her guitar wrapped around one shoulder and a backpack hanging from another. She had a few minutes before her colleagues finished formalities. Her habitual urge for early morning cold brew incites a visit to “Kinara”, her pet cafe. She leaves her luggage at the checkout counter and starts walking towards Kinara. Ogling at the university atmosphere, she is lost in her thoughts about how the month had passed and was reckoning the moments she spent at the respective places on the campus as she walked. Even though it seemed like a blink of an eye, she had created hundreds of opportunities, months of follow up work, established many worthwhile connections, made friends (even dealt with drug lords apparently), and more importantly served justice to project DoD. With a satisfied smile on her face and thought of recompense, she stepped on the road which had the cafe across. Just then a car zipped past her at high speed and missed Denise. “Wow, I am awake now, I think I do not need my coffee,” she gasped to herself clenching her chest. Later she lifted her head only to see it was one of her colleague messing around with her. After placing her order, Denise wanted to say goodbye to Zorro. The dear friend he was, she never addressed Zorro as a dog. “I want to meet …grhhhh…, my buddy!”, Denise cringed and gestured with her hand to imply Zorro. “He is so pricey that he needs three pillows to sleep!”, she started her attribute game but immediately spotted a picture of him on the wall and remarked “Him!”. The owner Praharsh was used to it and he just patiently waited, got Zorro to meet her and they all bid adieus. She grabbed her cold brew and some banana bread to chomp on her way to the airport.

There was a long line of security check at the El Paso airport, as there is at any other place in this country. “That would take an hour”, she sniffled. She plugged in her earphones and tuned into some cherished old Bollywood instrumentals, while in line. “Lag jaaa gale..…” she was humming when someone tapped her from behind. A guy with a stout belly in the TSA uniform stood in front of her. She hurriedly unplugged her earphones and ended up dropping them on the ground. “Could you please come with me, We have a couple of questions to ask, I am Officer Darcy from the TSA,” the person respectfully ordered. Like any other immigrant in the country, Veronica was taken aback. She was very hesitant and asked politely “Sir, is there a problem”. “No miss, just a couple of questions, mostly routine. It is a part of the random checking process. Kindly start walking”, he firmly restated. She grabbed her backpack, “This way place” he ushered her to a place in the waiting area. She got some respite when she saw a couple of her colleagues stranded as well, outside the inquiry room. Just humanly things, if you are in trouble, seeing someone you know in a similar situation gives you relief of some sort. “Please come in Miss Denise,” came an authoritative voice from inside. “Why me?”, she worriedly murmured and hesitantly strode to the room.

Episode 4 - Say My Name

The final part of this short story- What’s not in a name? awaits you. Ignorant Denise fell subject to accidental interaction with the drug network of Mexico and is now being interrogated. Does she say their names or the fleeting names haunt her more? Does she make her way back to Boulder? How long does she end up staying in El Paso?

Panting breath, flustered look, sweaty forehead, Denise was worried. “Take a seat. You do not have to worry, this is just a protocol. Kuba Lacki, DEA”, Darcy’s boss introduced. She realized it is a graver predicament than a customary TSA inquiry. She looked around the minimalistic room to only notice some files, a bottle of water, a dicta-phone on the table and took a seat while clinging on to her backpack with one hand and her file of documents and ID cards in the other. “This is an obligatory inquiry we do on randomly chosen travellers. Given the drug crime rate in El Paso, it is mandated we keep a close eye on groups of people, especially the ones which include commuters from the source countries.” the DEA officer affirmed. Denise hesitantly moved her lips and uttered: “We were here only for an academic project”. “That is what your documents say,” the officer remarked scanning her documents. “It will not take a long time, just some questions and you will be done soon,” paused the officer for a few seconds and sniggered with a wry smile: “if you are honest with us”. Denise was freaking out. Somehow she garnered courage and proposed, “Can I do it with my friends?”. The office thought it was a joke and smirked: “Do you do that in the exam?” The officer made her a tad comfortable and started his round of interrogation.

After the formal verification of name, identity, college and address the officer took a slightly lighter tone which gave Denise some repose. “Tell me more about your project, your tasks, and their goals. Take your time,” reclined Kuba on the creaking chair. Denise started off: “The project is called DoD short form for Damns of Dams. We aspired to assess the decision of constructing close-by dams in El Paso by incorporating its latent outgrowths on fishing which is the prime source of economy and an inherent culture of El Paso. We intend to verify if there is a correlation between the two and given there is, how can we be aware to subsume such data points in making future public policies which are more sustainable and less menacing to society, its culture, and livelihood.” “Interesting!” nodded Kuba, and entreated her to explain more. “We visited dams and power plants, investigated local businesses and restaurants, interviewed vendors and fishermen, collected samples of water, flora, and fauna, gathered historical medical data and took many many pictures to bolster our hypotheses.” Denise gave an overview. Kuba rocking on his chair interjected: “We would like to take a look at this data, We want to ensure there is no breach of sensitive information”. “Well...” began Denise, her disoriented reply: “All the material is in the checked baggage.” “On it!”, exclaimed a subordinate, and hurried out of the room to fetch it.

“It has been recently brought to our radar by the intelligence that the rivulets of Rio Grande are being used by the Carlito Cartel in Juarez to export drugs across the border. Fishermen have been the primary bearers,” elucidated Darcy as Kuba paced in the room. “Our sniffer dogs have been able to seize many attempts in the recent months,” he declared with assurance. Kuba took a seat on the table, faced Denise and disapprovingly complained: “But these are only the small fish. High-end cartels in Columbia have submarines loaded with tonnes of narcotics. They are used to transport material underwater without leaving any trail. Built using fibreglass, it travels barely under the surface. Their exhaust along the bottom of the hull to cool it before venting it, making the boat even less susceptible to infrared detection. They are most easily spotted visually from the air, though even that is difficult as they are camouflaged with paint and produce almost no wake. We were able to capture one of these methamphetamine tanks in the waters of Columbian Mangroves. Our intelligence suggests that such automobiles could be lurking on the waters of Rio Grande too, and we would not take any half measures. With the number of hidden docks lurking on the border, and with some mafia lords remaining escaped, it is certainly not off the cards.” Denise’s jaw dropped listening to all this. Still, she smiled inside, actually thanking God that she did not get into larger trouble during the stint, given these magnitudes. Before arriving at El Paso, she had researched the drug activities and the university had approved the place safe for the case study because the trafficking was reportedly in control. And it was true, these were only remanent agents who continued to indulge in small scale sneaking from whatever leftover they had access to. Denise unwittingly had become an endpoint of interaction with one such agent. “I would like to see the documents/notes on your conversations with all these people, and maybe even the pictures to see if they have anything for us”, directed Kuba. “So you would make a copy and then I can go?”, requested a puppy face. “We can tell only after looking at the reports” thwarted a poker face. “Till your bags arrive, continue your story. Tell us about some personages you remember.” remarked the information-hungry officer.

“First I met Joey, at this station called ….aah. He was a mega sleeper and once napped while standing in a moving bus.”: Denise did not forget the person but the place. “Sun Metro” Darcy completed. “Everybody knows Joey!” Kuba said in some awe. “And he knows everybody!” Darcy completed Kuba’s sentence and asked her to move on to the next person. “Sorry I have to tell you, I am bad at remembering names, but I will try my best”, gave-in Denise. Kuba and Darcy just looked at each other expressionless. “I spent a lot of time looking at the ferries on the Rio Grande from the terrace of Kinara. Made good friends with the owner and pet Zorro too. The owner did not speak much, but he was kind enough to let me always have the terrace seat, sometimes without even ordering. He was from Karnal, India and always kept quelling his kids saying: ‘Francis ji ke laundo ko dekho!’”. Denise instinctively attributed when she could not remember Praharsh’s name. “This is going to be hard,” Kuba helplessly groaned.

After mooting about Gustavo and his restaurant, Denise spoke about the Camposas. “I spent a lot of time with Veronica and aah…. her husband, more with Veronica. They had an ancestral pursuit of crappies and because of the depleting fish, their company was not in good shape,” Denise communicated with modest pride when she remembered Veronica’s name. “Veronica drove a cab, a pickup van rather, which she also used for supplying fish. Her husband was an English teacher at the community school. They were warm people, maintained a jolly aura around them. They strived to make a decent enough living even though they were victimized by unbridled fish depletion” she recollected images of their house. “They had a steam ferry mainly used for fishing and some visiting vendors whom they transacted with. Their major revenue was from crappies and bluegills”. “Aren’t they delicious?”, yearned Darcy when Kuba shot him with a despised look and opined: “You know a good deal about our people from just a handful interactions. Commendable,” while he took notes.

“I spent almost an entire day of time, net total, with them. I even saw their boat, their drum-stacked back yard, their paraphernalia, which were very cool, although rusted. I met them on the noon of …” Denise was explaining when Kuba interrupted “You still have not mentioned Veronica’s husband’s name?” Attribute game on! thought Denise to herself and began her uncensored streaming of attributes. “He was very keen to persist in his ancestral business. He remembered a lot of numbers and history of the company. He was complaining about walking in the sun. We laughed about how I noticed Mr Gustavo’s white Calvin Klein shining out of waistline,” she thoughtlessly stated.“It's a pity I cannot put you in jail for that”, laughed Kuba and urged her to ignore the name and continue. The anxiety of a fleeting name and the fear in the situation was driving Denise crazy. “He was mostly laundry-ing as I spoke to him. Many of his pant pockets had algae accumulated inside them. He was clearing it before loading them into the machine. He showed me their ferry and their work station.”, she gabbled in one breath.

Meanwhile, Darcy looked up some information about the local piers on his laptop, showed Denise some pictures and questioned, “Which of these is a good estimate of their ferry’s size? Was there a provision to carry automobiles on-board? Was there any alga on their ferry too?” This was a kind of attribute-based reverse lookup for Denise, and she had it all indexed. Maybe she could not remember names, but doing the opposite, at identifying and classifying attributes she had upped her game. “This size. And yes I got a skimpy tour of the ferry.” She approved in contentment. “The boat was mostly off-white, and not very clean. Putrid wood, fetid interiors, dried algae crumble on the floor towards its stern end and rusty tools were not very appetizing to spend more time with anyway. It had tool boxes, a relatively clean apron hung inside a small room. There was no fish on the boat when I visited, but a lot of nets. They mentioned to me they had de-commissioned it for a few months of maintenance.” Denise clarified as she remembered her shoe getting stuck in one of the nets during that express visit. She went on to explain about the evening meeting with Veronica and elaborated on their discussion about the trends in the quantum of migratory fish production over the years, the number of fishermen who went out of jobs and the effects of households getting ravished in the process.

Meanwhile, her luggage arrived. Three more hours of rapid-fire where Denise expounded on the pictures, interview journals, notes, experiment reports and medical records in the order she visited them. She shared identities of people she communicated with, locations she had visited, details for her colleagues and a rough scheme of her eventual plan with DoD. The DEA took all the notes and recorded her on the dictaphone. They probed some samples she collected for her tests, data sheets and made copies of all the reports she had. Once convinced there was nothing fishy about the girl who only spoke about fish they let a weary Denise go, who trudged out in frustration. “I do not feel proud that committed students have to go through this, but I guess it comes with the responsibility of being a serving citizen,” shrouded Kuba to Darcy. “Just when I thought the trip had kicked some serious ass, I did not think it would end up being my ass.” Denise exasperated out loud when she desperately booked the over-priced next flight tickets on the counter.

Kuba and Darcy sat down and mapped inferences based on Denise’s interview and her reports. During the course of their deliberation, Darcy remarked at Felix’ pockets: “We do not have such algae in any of the upstream, this is a downstream alga” and noted that down. In a different context - “Why would someone clean their fish on the boat itself?” wondered Kuba, citing the sticky which had “Apron” penned on it. They were just a little sceptical about both Veronica and Gustavo because they were able to thrive even in the gravitating market. After hours of perusal, debate and uninhibited cogitation, with some theoretical suspicion and intent of gathering more potential evidence, they decided it would be worth investigating Veronica’s ferries first and then interrogating her with warranted evidence if any. Under-cover, they reached the dock, trespassed the chains and anchors to enter the ferry. It had been completely disengaged. They found many knives and tools in the garage left as is. They knocked the doors of the Camposa Casa only to find it already open. The house was in a mess, things were out of place, and most of it missing. They figured Veronica and Felix had fled from El Paso!

Veronica had intentionally run into Denise at the cafe. Earlier, she was not mad at Felix for the undone laundry but for letting Denise know details about their business and also show her the garage. When her apprehension that Denise might know a lot about them, turned into panic, she decided to personally interrogate her. During their meeting, Veronica realized even though the pictures and notes Denise took do not have anything which can raise suspicion, Denise had a lot of data about their revenue and production quantum which if someone scrutinizes could lead to an audit, causing Veronica huge problems. After their meeting, worried Veronica had spoken to her bosses and proposed her desire to kill Denise. The new cartels who played safer, wiser and longer had advised against killing her to avoid unwanted attention. They instead to ask the two to just leave the town soon because they believed a temporary hiatus would reap eventual benefits. Both Veronica and Felix just followed orders and fled to Juarez the previous night. Darcy and Kuba raided their house, foraged through the garage, backyard and then dismantled the ferry. They mustered multiple traces of samples from the ferry to further investigate and support their theories. They found algae-ridden ropes but no algae on fishing nets. One of the local fisherman working for them was arrested and he just knew one thing that he knew nothing. Although they returned with the sad news of escaped smugglers from the Camposa residence, they were able to obtain drawings of maps, coordinates in the garage which later turned out to be instrumental in cracking down thousands of dollars worth of drug network epi-centred around the submarine. Nevertheless, two, not-too-many details from a name-forgetting-grad-student, an inspired suspicion, and the DEA had leads to work with.

A tired Denise had reached Boulder now. She felt safe, and warm alongside her guitar friend and some clean sheets, completely ignorant of what had unfolded, the latent impact she had had, otherwise from her credulous stint at the project. She had either got listed as a “wanted, because vulnerable” among the mafia community, or become a major asset to the intelligence in busting down thousands of dollars worth of network or actually both. The best part being, she was aware of neither! Both these events transpired rooting from her inability to remember names and thus capture more random information for eventual relevance. The great Shakespeare had put-forth — “What is in a name?” Maybe we do not know. But “What is Not in a name?”, Denise has certainly exemplified.

“Aaaah, Monday again,” she said to herself, restraining from watching one more episode of FRIENDS and went to bed.