Her worded talisman!

Asafoetida!! She said!

What? I asked.

Asafoetida.... that is what heeng is called in english!

God knows, why she kept reading such strange words all the time. I never asked her, and she never told willingly. One such day she came up with some word "aglet", which means "the tip of a shoe lace". I wondered, who needs to know such words at all? But, her passion for them was unmatched. Everyday she found something as useless as "defenestrate" which literally means "to throw someone out of the window". 

Have you ever noticed that you use really difficult words while talking? I asked her one day. 

Ludicrous! she declared.

Her one word answer left my one hand scratching my head, and the other looking for a dictionary. My mind was already lost in finding out, if there was a faintest tryst with the word ever, that she forced it into me with such an ease. My all fights, requests and "inaniloquous murmur" made no sense to her, and she remained lost in her world of synonyms and words. She read like, me eating food. Fast!. Finishing books after books, and all kinds of them from love stories to biographies. Her bag always remained filled with two or three books and it seemed as if she was going on a long holiday, with all clothes packed. I always thought, books in a bag and such words in her mind, this lady is surely going to turn insane one day. Still, for that time she was surely called as "Eloquent". 

One fine day, she was in a great mood. I noticed that the words she was using were a lot easier than before (or probably my vocabulary improved!). There was surely a change in her mood.

You know? When does one uses difficult words? She asked out of the blue. 

No! I said, startled at the sudden inquiry.

When there is sheer lack of content and an urge to create an awe. In such instances, when you read between the lines, words are actually as hollow as an empty earthen pot. 

and when is the second? I asked with curiosity.

She paused a little and said. We use difficult words, when we have a lot in our hearts, which we do not want to share, but still want to speak a lot. Simple words take out deepest of the secrets. Difficult ones give you a pause to think before speaking.  

Confused by a sudden change in the topic of conversation, I was not very sure that why she brought that topic up? She confirmed after a slight pause, Is it clear to you? I nodded, and then she went back to reading her strange looking book. That was the last day we ever met. She left the town the next month. She called once or twice in a year, but then those phone calls also slowly vanished. The smell of the fresh pages of  her books stayed in my memory. 

These days, I am into research and  read a lot of research papers on a daily basis. I always doubt writing which uses unnecessarily heavy words.  Her advice of reading between the lines of the papers which use the most difficult written language actually yields her projected results. Such writing mostly contains very little content, but many a times is also the most lauded. On the other hand, I have developed a liking for people, who use simple language, because I know that they are surely not hiding anything serious from me.

And regarding her, I will always wonder what secrets she had in her heart. But for now, I live with her worded talisman, which she gave me one fine evening near that calm lake, an imagery which I could never forget.

Tsomgo Lake, Sikkim. Photograph: Abhijit Datey