What is a prized possession that you have that has little monetary value in the real world?
For me, it is a small blue hardcover edition of the Westminster dictionary, wrapped in two layers of brown paper, decorated by a faint trace of sandalwood paste mark on the front cover. I almost never use the dictionary now, like everyone else, looking up meanings of words online when I do so. However, its use had diminished even before the advent of online search.
To describe what the book means to me, I have to start at the very beginning.
—
When I was nine, I was frequently getting into trouble, influenced by some older teenagers in my ‘locality’. It all looks a bit harmless in retrospect, but I was picking up street lingo at a rapid pace. Amma (my mother) who had loftier dreams for me, was worried. She was driven to despair when she learned when I had engaged in the process of crushing a fluorescent tubelight glass and mixing it into a sticky paste to make sharp strings for kite fights, thus piercing my palm with glass pieces. You can see more about the dangerous sport here.
Hence, it was decided that in the evenings after school, I would visit the home of a couple (S & D) who lived on the next street and stay there for an hour or two reading English newspapers and return home before dinner.
Amma had met S at the temple where she volunteered (making garlands, etc) and they had struck up a rapport as they both spoke fluent Telugu. Amma poured out all her troubles to her. S perhaps took pity and offered to watch over me for a couple of days in the week.
S & D were an old couple without any children. Childlessness is almost never by choice in India, where having children is considered a divine blessing regardless of the religious faith. Their lives had already reached a point of childless stability, bordered by bored quietness, which contrasted with the financial vicissitudes of families that played out loudly in the neighborhood streets.
They were a lower middle-class Telugu couple who lived within their humble means, in a neatly kept, tiny rental on the ground floor. The main reception room also doubled up as their bedroom. The hallway led to a poorly lit Indian kitchen. The furnishing was sparse: No TV, a few bamboo chairs, and a wide sitting bench.
D worked as a foreman at Southern Railway and had a rudimentary knowledge of English. He subscribed to The Hindu which was an 8-column broadsheet then. He would have neatly stacked the daily editions in their concrete built-in shelf, which also housed framed pictures of Gods, and carefully folded dhotis, shirts, saris, and rolled-up straw mats. She did not read English, like almost all women in our neighborhood.
—
Under compulsion, I reluctantly started showing up at their house every two days. I would retrieve the unread editions of the Hindu from the shelf and browse them. I sat cross-legged on the floor of the east-facing porch outside their door, leaning my back against the wall. I spent hours idly staring at the long shadows on empty lots and buildings — overhearing conversations in the air, and watching dragonflies against the dusk. They would share their tea in a steel “tumbler”. Occasionally, on Fridays and festivals, they shared homemade snacks. She made delicious sweet pancakes (bobbatlu) and savory snacks (punugulu) — the likes of which I never had since.
First, I read only the sports and film sections, mostly tracking Madras movie theaters. Somewhere along, I slowly started reading. When The Hindu started the Young World supplement geared towards children, they introduced a crossword section for kids. I learned the British style cryptic crossword by starting with those mini-crosswords designed for children — and then also taught myself the rules for Bridge. I spent an inordinate amount of time, poring over the crosswords and struggling with the clues. Whenever I got stuck solving a crossword, I would borrow D’s dictionary. He would often look up words in the dictionary he had at hand whenever he read The Hindu. The dictionary was a handy help for our limited vocabulary.
—
I went to their place a few days a week, all through my school years. The conversations were minimal, and they let me engage in my solitude, lost in the sips of tea and ships of thought. After graduating from high school, I left for Bombay to go to college. When I went home for my semester breaks, I resumed my visits to their home. Before I departed for the United States for graduate studies, I went to bid them bye. D presented me with his dictionary. He mentioned his eyesight was getting worse, and the book would be more useful for me. He passed away before I visited India again.
Every time I visited India, I made it a point to visit S, who had by now grown frailer, had moved to another part of the city, and living by herself in a small studio apartment. She no longer subscribed to The Hindu, but she still made those great delicacies. When I last visited India in 2019, I did not go see her, as my travel schedule became hectic.
Amidst the grave covid tsunami of 2021, I learned that S passed away, cared for by her niece during her last days.
—
I had always thought that it was a part of my life in which nothing much happened, for all I did was spend many evening hours just reading newspapers. In fact, every day was the same from my end. I now realize that I was an interlude in their quiet lives. I came into their life as a young nine-year-old, but as we repeated the sameness of our days, they must have seen a sea change: they watched me grow, heard my voice break, and saw me become an awkward teenager who went off into the world.
I called them Kovil Perimma and Kovil Perippa — sobriquets with deeper working-class kinship than the educated “auntie” and “uncle”. Kovil Perimma meant “elder sister of my mother, from the temple”. Kovil — literally, temple — not only signified where it all started but the numinous grace of the temple tower, under which a wayfarer rests and seeks temporary solace.
I remember them fondly as I recently opened the dictionary and saw his name scribbled on the front page of the book. Their lives are gone, but they made the future better, gently and gracefully, for another person. I was a boy in kite fights on the streets, instead, I am here writing this note, in English.
Thank you, S & D.