When she was first given the name "Cynthia" by the headmistress, Santha Rama Rau said in her memoir, By Any Other Name, that, "At that age, if one's name is changed, one develops a curious form of dual personality." She further explained, saying, "I remember having a certain detached and disbelieving concern in the actions of "Cynthia," but certainly no responsibility." She did not feel necessarily emotionally connected to her "British" counterpart, and felt as if they were two different beings altogether. In fact, throughout the story, she seemed to be very proud of her identity as an Indian. For example, instead of wearing cotton dresses like the other students, even the Indians, were wearing, Santha continued to wear Indian clothes to school.
At the end of her memoir she said, "But I put it happily away, because it had all happened to a girl called Cynthia, and I was never really particularly interested in her." By saying this, she wanted to portray that even to the end she still felt like she was not connected to Cynthia, and therefore felt like the whole issue of being treated differently for her ethnicity did not bother her much.
However, I am not very convinced of this sentence about how she had put the memory away. The reality of the statement is that although it may not have affected her much at the time, it had stayed in her memory until now. This is proven by the fact that she wrote the memoir about this event. The memoir as a whole was centered around this occurrence that was seemingly insignificant at the time. But it can be seen from the fact that she wrote an entire memoir on this one little issue from her early childhood that it actually did have a big impact on her life afterwards. If it had been something that she put "happily away", then she probably would have remembered it and would not have written a memoir about it.
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