Before my book came out, I debated writing under the pen name Nikki Sarin. She sounded more like an author than Nikkitha Bakshani, with its glut of K and silent H. (The H is actually not silent; I just said it was because Nikki-da is easier on the American tongue than Nikki-tha, and I did that for so long that the actual pronunciation of my name now sounds too alien to me.)

Before Ghost Chilli, a Google of my name showed all the embarrassing content I had to pump out as a ‘writer’ and ‘editor’ in the 2010s. Some of my bylines include ‘Hot Dog! 12 Franks That Will Make You Want to Hop on a Plane’ and ‘The San Antonio Cocktail That Helped Me See Myself Clearly’ – the full spectrum of cringe cringe cringe, from desperate plea for clicks to Thought Catalog-ism.

Before my novel was published I thought: Wouldn’t it be nice to start fresh with a new, easy-to-pronounce name and be seen as a serious fiction writer? Nikkitha Bakshani writes about hot dogs; Nikki Sarin writes.

But then I thought: What if people think I white-washed my name to sell more books, and I am seen as a traitor to my race?

So I stuck with Nikkitha Bakshani, and I regret it. Not because I think having a more ‘approachable’ name would have sold more books – well, that too – but also, a persona offers a neat separation from your real life. It announces the presence of a boundary, which indicates a person who is in more control. (Also, any controversy about me trying to pass as white would be a very savvy marketing move – such is the attention economy.) I had no choice but to write all those articles under my real name. But I had a golden opportunity to start fresh with Ghost Chilli and did not take it.

Now, ‘Nikkitha Bakshani’ has imbued my book with the same awkwardness it has imbued my life with. Is that a Russian boy or an Indian girl’s name? Is she Indian or American? Is this book literary fiction or chick lit? Is it funny or sad? ‘Nikki Sarin’, on the other hand, would have lulled more readers in with its familiarity – it is just Western enough.

Would my guilt about white-passing haunt me my entire life? Probably. But is there anything more seductive than an opportunity to start fresh and do everything correctly this time?

I wonder if it is part and parcel of the human condition to be enchanted by the lives we could have lived. Doing that feels like a fantasy that’s just out of reach, if only we’d made X decision instead of Y. In the essay ‘On Being Left Out’, Adam Phillips quotes Hugh Trevor-Roper: ‘History… is not merely what happened; it is what happened in the context of what might have happened.’1

I am constantly thinking about roads I did not take. Two weeks ago I was in New York, sitting at a bar in the neighbourhood where I used to live at the age of 25. I was drafting an itemised list in my head of all the things I should have done differently. I remembered a time I went on a really good first date in that same bar, and how I walked home giddy with excitement. I told my roommate and we looked him up: engaged. The photo had been posted the week before. You’re lucky, she said – you found out before you invested.

And yet I spent the next year avoiding dates, afraid of a naiveté I wasn’t aware I possessed. Instead of being irritated at him, I got irritated at myself because of course he’s shitty, everyone is shitty, it’s up to me to outsmart them. I had always thought of myself as a Human Lie Detector, took pride in my track record of sensing something was off and being right. Sitting at that same table ten years later, I thought: What if I had gotten over myself quicker and met the love of my life that year, back when I had the energy to go on at least one date a month? Twelve opportunities, gone.

That night I walked around the East Village, and saw this window:

And then I looked up:

Venus was shining so ridiculously bright, a diamond in the sky. And it made me think a lot about desire, which is in Venus’s wheelhouse. Here is Adam Phillips, again2:

‘We are so disturbed by the proliferation and variety and diversity and unpredictability of our desire that we are always tempted to actively narrow our minds by claiming to know what we want, and sticking to it…. Knowing what you want can be fear of the future. Knowing what you want can be fear of unpredictable circumstances. Knowing what you want can mean that your knowledge has trumped your desire. Knowing what you want can be more about reassurance than wanting.’

Regretting not using a pseudonym, or not not dating that year, is a form of knowing – I know I could have made a better decision and did not. But it’s the worst kind of knowing because there is nothing I can do about it now, except learn the lesson and apply it to my current decision-making. Which is easy to do in theory, but in practice, what if what I want now is different from what I wanted then and what I will want in the future?

According to Phillips/ Freud, we don’t ever desire new things – we always just want the same things we wanted as children, and that is, essentially, ‘to be included’ (inside the mother’s womb). Life, he argues, is a series of exclusions that begin the moment we are born, and our desires mutate but can always be traced back to that root desire for the ultimate safety – being inside someone else. He says: ‘Wanting is recovery, not discovery.’3 And it reminds me of something I keep reading as I get more into esoterica: The most traumatic moment of our lives is being born.

Now that Venus has gone into retrograde – transitioning from being an evening star to a morning one, as Alice Sparkly Kat emphasises – I wonder if this the ideal time to let our desires breathe, outside of our ‘knowledge’. Reframe, not regret. Or don’t frame at all – just let them be, and make sense of them later. No judgment, no action, no investments, no micro-dosing – no management, period. If all our desires stem from being born, then maybe there is nothing we need to fix or course-correct. For six weeks, at least.

The reason my first name has exactly eight letters, just like my last name, is because my father used to employ an astrologer who advised him on business and family. (This is not unusual in India.) Vedic astrology is intrinsically tied with numerology, and I don’t know the specifics of why eight was important, nor do I think it was as simple as having just eight letters.

When I was in India a couple of months ago, my parents and I were drinking tea from a roadside shop in the car. The biscuits they’d given with the tea were warm, an extra touch I wouldn’t even think to ask for in the UK. We spent a long time staring at this sign:

Surely they meant French Express? We wondered aloud. Then my father told me how, a long time ago, he had a friend who wanted to start a business. My father connected him with our family astrologer, to advise on names. The friend had a verbal tic where he said ‘you see…’ after every few sentences. Months later, my father’s friend handed him a business card emblazoned with the words ‘You See Textiles, Ltd.’

I asked my parents what that astrologer was up to these days, and they reminded me that he’d died several years ago. (‘Stop asking – you always forget!’) I like to think that’s a testament to his staying power (and not my poor, internet-addled memory). He certainly left his imprint on the name Nikkitha Bakshani, and my fondness for this man has helped me put Nikki Sarin to bed (for now).

When I was young, I rebelled against all this spirituality, just because my parents believed in it and it was such an intrinsic part of Indian culture. I tried to iron it out of my name. I used ‘my family astrologer’ as a punchline and imitated the sleepy drawl of Eckhart Tolle, whose audiobooks were a mainstay in car journeys long and short, no matter how much my siblings and I begged my parents put Z100 on instead.

Now I’m here, twenty years later, listening to The Power of Now on Spotify and texting my siblings: We really do become our parents. And as I write this I’m wondering if that family astrologer is why all this esoteric stuff felt so right when I decided to pick it up more seriously, after a health experience that pulled the rug out from under my life and forced me to re-orient, quite literally. Birthright is too strong a word – it was more like integration, or homecoming. I had no idea how much I’d desired that.