Prabaker names Lin Linbaba in a small exchange that the narrator later recognizes as a turning point in his life. The name starts as a practical shortening of Prabaker’s own short name, Prabu, but quickly acquires a public form and a larger meaning. Lin accepts it almost casually; in retrospect, he sees that this act helped shape the person he became.

From Prabu to Lin

The naming conversation begins as the two men are walking together. After declining, for the moment, an invitation to go somewhere, Lin asks what Prabaker’s friends call him for short. Prabaker answers that his short name is Prabu. Lin tries it aloud, then asks whether Prabaker knows Lin’s own short name. The exchange turns an ordinary question about familiarity into an offer of a new identity.

Prabaker proposes Lin, explaining that a short name would suit him and checking that Lin has no objection. Lin agrees. The choice is not presented as a formal renunciation of his earlier identity, but its context gives it weight: since escaping, he has assumed numerous other names in different places, and other people have given him names as well. Those names have been part of living under concealment and movement. Lin has also been sentenced under the secret name he was born with, a name bound to his former life and its twenty-year prison term.

A name that feels ordained

Lin’s acceptance is immediate, but his later account distinguishes this name from the aliases that preceded it. He could not have invented Lin for himself; nevertheless, it sounds right to him. The name seems to carry an echo of something ordained, as though it belongs to him as surely as the lost name under which he was sentenced. His response combines practical acquiescence with a fatalistic sense of recognition: he accepts a name chosen by someone else because it feels as if it has already found him.

That contrast gives the scene its central reversal. Lin has repeatedly been compelled to take on new names, yet Prabaker’s suggestion does not register as merely another imposed disguise. At the moment, Lin cannot know the scale of the name’s eventual reach. Looking back, he describes the decision as an apparently insignificant yes-or-no choice that became pivotal. The smallness of the gesture is essential to its force: a life-shaping identity enters through a casual question between companions, not through a public ceremony or a deliberate plan.

From private name to public address

Prabaker soon extends Lin into Linbaba. He introduces his companion to Mr. Sanjay Deshpande as Lin, then, when asked to repeat the name, identifies him as Linbaba. The repetition makes the naming social: it is no longer only a suggestion exchanged between the two men but an address Prabaker offers to another person.

Prabaker explains that baba is an honorific used to show respect, including toward a teacher, a holy person, or someone very old. Lin remains uncomfortable with the added form, despite understanding its respectful intent. Prabaker, by contrast, is delighted by the name and treats Mr. Deshpande’s response as evidence that it has landed well. He then calls out Linbaba to strangers passing on the street, turning a private naming into a small public announcement. Lin tugs at Prabaker’s sleeve and urges him to calm down and keep moving, an amused resistance that does not undo his acceptance of Lin.

The identity Lin grows into

The narrator’s hindsight expands the scene far beyond its immediate participants. He says that thousands of people would come to know him by the name, from Colaba to Kandahar and from Kinshasa to Berlin. Prabaker, whom Lin identifies retrospectively as a little Bombay street guide, could not have known that reach when he made the suggestion. The narrative therefore holds together two scales: the ordinary intimacy of one person naming another, and the long movement through which that name becomes widely recognized.

Lin’s later judgment is stronger than the claim that the name simply became familiar. He says that the role he played under it, and the character he became as Linbaba, were more real and truer to his nature than anyone or anything he had been before. The name does not erase the past identities or the sentence attached to his birth name; instead, it comes to organize a more authentic version of the self that emerges after escape. In that sense, Prabaker’s casual suggestion acts as an accomplice to fate: the name is given without foreknowledge, accepted without ceremony, and understood only later as the beginning of a consequential identity.