I Read the Dictionary the Summer We Had Nothing
No trips, no toys, just twenty-six chapters of everything.
The mill closed in April, and by the middle of May the only book left in our house was a dictionary nobody had ever opened.
I should explain how a house loses its books. It is not dramatic. The textbooks went back to the secondhand shop because next year's fees mattered more than last year's chapters. The two Champak comics were mine and I traded them for exactly six marbles, a deal I have regretted for thirty years. The rest, magazines mostly, went with the newspapers to the raddiwala, weighed on his rusty scale like vegetables, because that summer everything in our lane had exactly two prices: what it meant, and what it weighed.
The dictionary survived because of my father's one superstition. He had bought it years earlier from a pavement sale, also by weight, and told me it was “for your studies” in the voice men use when they are really saying something else. Selling a book bought for your child's future felt, to him, like a curse you invite. So it stayed. Twelve hundred onion-paper pages, a blue cover gone grey at the spine, sitting on the shelf like a relative nobody talks to.
People romanticize growing up with only books. I need to correct the record... We had only book. Singular. There is no cozy montage for that.
That summer there was no trip to my nani's village because bus tickets were suddenly a discussion. There was no new cricket ball. The TV had gone to the repair shop in March and stayed there, hostage to a bill of eighty rupees, until the shop owner mercifully stopped mentioning it when my father passed. And the electricity board, sensing weakness, scheduled its power cuts for exactly the hours a ten-year-old is most alive.
So the arithmetic of my boredom was simple.
Candle, floor, dictionary.
I started with A the way you start eating something you do not want: out of pure spite. Aardvark. A nocturnal African mammal that eats ants. I remember reading it twice by candlelight and thinking, with real outrage, that nobody at school had told me such an animal was walking around this whole time.
By the third night I had a system. By the second week I had a habit... By June I had a fever no doctor was consulted about, because it was only words.
One word at dinner
The game began by accident. My mother was rolling rotis in the dark kitchen, the candle throwing her shadow up the wall like a giant, and to fill the silence I told her the day's best word. Petrichor. The smell of the first rain on dry ground.
She stopped rolling... “There is a word for that?”
“There is a word for everything,” I said, with the arrogance of a boy who was seven hundred pages away from knowing better.
After that it was ritual. One word every night, delivered at dinner like news. My mother liked the soft ones: susurrus, the whispering of leaves. My little sister liked anything that sounded like an insult, and I fed her a steady diet: nincompoop, popinjay, lickspittle. She terrorized the entire lane with lickspittle for a month. Nobody knew what it meant, including her, which only increased its power.
My father listened but did not play. He came home late those months, from standing in lines that led nowhere, from meeting men who used to work beside him, and he ate quietly while we flung words over his head like sparrows. I thought the game embarrassed him. I was wrong, but I would not find out how wrong until August.
We had nothing that summer except every word for it.
Here is the part I have never written down before.
One night in August the power cut ran long, and I went deep past S, working by a candle so short it was basically a coin of wax. And on page nine hundred and something, next to the word “scrivener,” I found a small pencil dot in the margin.
I thought I had made it.
I had not.
I flipped back with my heart doing something I did not yet have the word for, and found more.
Dozens of them... faint as insect footprints, scattered through the whole book. Somebody had been through it before me. Somebody had marked emigrate. Somebody had marked apprentice, and diligence, and matriculate, and, on a page so worn it had gone soft, the word scholarship.
The dictionary was secondhand, but the dots were not a stranger's. I knew because next to “perseverance” was a tiny note in a handwriting I saw every month on the ration book. One word, in my father's small, careful letters, the letters of a man who left school at fourteen when his own father's shop failed.
The note said: “imp.” Important.
I sat on the floor of that dark room and understood that I was not the first boy in my family to sit in a bad summer collecting words by weight. He had gone through this same book, or one like it before it was lost and this one bought to replace what he remembered, hunting the vocabulary of a way out.
Emigrate. Apprentice. Scholarship.
It was a map, dotted in pencil, of everywhere he had wanted to go.
The mill had closed on him twice, is what I am saying. Once in April, and once thirty years earlier, before it was even built.
I never told him what I found. Some discoveries are load-bearing; you do not go tapping on them.
But the next night at dinner I said, “Papa, today's word is perseverance,” and looked at my plate, and he was quiet for a longer time than the word deserved... Then he said, “Good word,” and asked my mother for one more roti, and that was the entire conversation, and it was also the biggest conversation we ever had.
What the summer weighed
The mill never reopened, but a warehouse did, and by October my father had work and the TV came home from its long imprisonment. My sister went back to fighting with real insults. The dictionary went back on the shelf.
But something had shifted in me and stayed shifted. I kept a notebook of the best words, and the notebook slowly grew sentences of its own, and the sentences, years later, tipped over into poems. The first one I ever showed anyone was about that candle, that floor, that book. Much later I rewrote it properly and sent it to a monthly poetry contest, and when it was published on the site my mother asked me to read it aloud at dinner, one word at a time.
I write a lot about childhood now, and people sometimes ask if mine was hard, and I never know how to answer honestly in one line. It was hard the way that summer was dark: with a candle in it.
Because that is the other thing I took from those months, the thing I only later learned to call hope. Hope is not the belief that things will improve. Hope is a man who left school at fourteen buying a dictionary by weight, on a pavement, for a child who could not read yet. It is a dot next to scholarship that never came true, waiting forty years for a boy with a candle to find it.
The dictionary is on my shelf now, spine held together by tape older than my daughter. She asked me once why I keep a book I can search on my phone.
I told her I do not keep it to look up words I do not know.
I keep it to visit the ones somebody dotted.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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