The little alien inside me is starting to become real. For starters, it kicks. For someone who’s never been pregnant, it’s just plain weird to have a living, breathing creature growing inside you, that kicks and twists and turns and spins around (and to that I say lelo mazey! spin while you can lil one, soon there won’t be any room!) Oh and it’s a boy. So ‘it’ becomes ‘him’.

I was the last scan of this doctor’s shift, who had announced girls all day long to a total of 14 parents. We were number 15 and while the discovery of a boy broke her monotony, it swept away all my husband’s wishes of a stereotypically gentle, fragrant daughter, who’d come into this world all wise and intelligent and achieve many great things in her life. Now he thinks we’ll have a wild, smelly son who’ll forever be having accidents and going to the hospital to get stitched up.

I keep telling him to get over himself – I mean who knows, we could have a gentle boy who’ll come into the world reading Thomas Piketty, inventing a new app and playing the piano with his toes*, all at the same time!

The naming game had begun long ago but with the gender firmly fixed, it’s taken on a life of its own. And serious business, this, given the current affairs today. Just think of those parents who named their daughter Isis after the Greek goddess, and those girls seeing their name splashed all over the media for all the wrong reasons!

Luckily, my office and friends’ group is quite multicultural and a considerable time is being spent, first on suggestions and then on ‘stress-testing’ the same. For example, a name like Shauryajeet got shot down because it’d get shortened to ‘shariya’ before you can say boo and that certainly won’t do. Fateh would become Fatty, Sumel would become Snail and so on.

My Brazilian BFF suggested Raul. My favourite Greek wants to name him after her brother Andreas. The younger Greek wants to name him after himself – Adonis! The pseudo-Indian from Gujarat has for some reason already christened him …Pritpal and doesn’t miss an opportunity to try and convince me of its merits. The English, who is keen on foreign politics, wants to name him Gulbuddin, in honour of an Afghani warlord. Someone else called him Alejandro the other day in pursuit of an ‘international’ name. No, I didn’t get the connection either.

My Punjabi family, quite unsurprisingly, are playing at a whole different level. We’ve created a WhatsApp group where they are all p***ing themselves, laughing while suggesting Balwinderpal, Devinderpal, Satwinderpal… and then trying to imagine what these names will sound like when a gora tries to say them. My Shahrukh Khan mad cousin can’t understand why I won’t consider Aryan (over my dead body, Komal!)

My father’s suggestion beats all, though. He said, “Why don’t you be a good girl and let your husband’s parents come up with a name? We’ll simply add ‘preet’ or ‘pal’ after it. Problem solved, everyone happy!”

His best idea so far has been Gurwilliam. Or Williampreet. Or Leopreet. The jury is out.

*The prospect of squeezing out a 700-page book and a piano along with the baby is not an enticing one!

(Simrat Ghuman is Head of Communications and Marketing at Anthemis Group in London. A former TV journo, she has just taken her first step into motherhood and will be serialising her quirky take on motherhood in the ‘Leopreet Ki Ma’ blogposts. You can read her (hilarious) journey through pregnancy in the Preggers blog below.)