Words To The Wise

by NINAD JOG

"It gets dark at night," said Jen as she started writing the sentence containing the word 'night' that she had come up with.

I asked her if she knew the spelling of night. She gave me an uncertain look, so I spelled it out for her.

"The 'g' is silent!" she said brightly, beaming at me. I wondered if she knew the spelling or had seen the similarity with other words such as bright or light. In any case, I was pleasantly surprised that she knew about silent letters. I asked her if she knew why there was a 'g' in the spelling if it was silent. She shook her head.

"When people first wrote the word two hundred years ago, they probably pronounced the 'g'," I told her. "It's similar to the modern German pronunciations of night and light," I added for good measure. It didn't strike me at the time that the English spelling of 'night' must have been around for far more than two hundred years.

Jen thought about it for a few moments. "Is anyone from two hundred years ago still alive?" she asked pensively.

I was taken aback. I shook my head, albeit reluctantly.

"Are they lying under large stones?" she pressed on.

I nodded. I knew that my sister had told her about people being buried in cemeteries after they died. But it hit me that at some level, my niece thought the people were still alive but were forced into graves against their will.

I regretted mentioning the historical aspect of the spelling. At six years old, my niece was too young to brood about such dark a matter as death. I made a note to mention it to my brother-in-law when he and my nephew woke up from their afternoon naps. "Jen, let's play a different game," I suggested hastily.

My niece readily agreed. She took three sheets of paper and assigned me three different exercises. One involved choosing an appropriate word from a list of three words—finish, mad and sad—and filling it in the blank in the sentence "Is that boy ___?"  "Pick sad," she wrote on the paper by way of a hint, lest I go mad and finish it differently. Needless to say, I was only too happy to choose sad. Jen was pleased that I had dutifully followed her instructions. She gave me a big C for correct when she graded my work.

The second assignment involved choosing all words rhyming with 'fat' from a list of six words. She was visibly surprised when I correctly chose hat, sat, mat and cat, but didn't choose man and win. Clearly, I had done well even though no one had taught me how to do it. I hadn't been in her class when her teacher taught it, at any rate. I must have learned somewhere else. Jen gave me an X mark, indicating that she had graded my work, and yet another big C.

The third assignment had a surprise in store. I had to place the following letters in alphabetical order: a, k, m, t, u, v, x, s. I noticed that all of them were in the correct order, except for the trailing 's'. In attempting to mimic her teacher, Jen hadn't yet mastered the art of scrambling the letters out of order. I did the assignment and was about to give it to her when I noticed that I had somehow overlooked the 's'. I managed to tuck it between the 'm' and the 't' in the nick of time.

But I got two large X marks for my efforts—one indicating that she had graded it, the other saying I was wrong! I pointed out that I had in fact done it correctly. But Jen shook her head. "That's not an S," she charged. "It's a Z!"

I told her she had drawn a mirror image of S. But Jen was adamant. If she had written it incorrectly, it was incumbent upon me to correct it. The X mark stayed in place; it didn't get replaced by a C. Wrongs cannot be converted into rights just by making appeals. My overall score was two out of three.

"You can do better next time!" she assured me. With that, she taped the three sheets together with scotch tape and handed them back. "You can take them home to Virginia," she told me.

And that is exactly what I did. I brandished the assignments to my roommate and two of my colleagues in the following week. "So cute! So innocent!" they exclaimed. "Your niece is so smart!"

To this day, the three taped sheets lie in the Family bin of the plastic drawers in my closet. You can rest assured that they will remain there for a long, long time.

***

As the afternoon wore on, Jen devised another game. She wrote the word 'mother' and drew a vertical line through the center of a fresh sheet. "You write words that have the letters from 'mother' on the left side, and I'll write them on the right," she told me.

I agreed. I covered the first three letters of the word and asked her what remained. She was thrilled to discover 'her'. I wrote it down on my side of the sheet. I then covered the last two letters and told her what remained was a moth. She was pleased, but looked crestfallen when I wrote it down. The score was an unnerving 2-0. She was falling behind. Something had to be done.

"What's the spelling of 'home'?" I asked.

Jen proudly recited the correct spelling. I asked her if each of the letters from 'home' appeared in 'mother'. One by one, she pointed them out. Her face lit up with sheer joy. It's as if a miracle had taken place. Who would have thought 'home' could hide so unobtrusively in 'mother'? I was reminded of a similar joy that I felt when I first came across mathematical structures in abstract algebra called Normal Groups. I was no babe in the woods—I must have been in my twenties or thirties by then—but I was mesmerized by their beauty, amazed by how well they fit in. Sometimes I think it's the ability to experience the sheer sense of wonder that keeps us young at heart.

Jen proudly wrote 'home' on her side of the sheet. "What's the spelling of hot?" I asked her. "And what's the spelling of other?" And so on it went. If she didn't know the spelling, I would spell it out for her. If she didn't know the word, I would explain what it meant and spell it out. In either case, she would identify the letters among those of 'mother' and write the word with a flourish. Bit by bit, her score rose, while mine remained stuck at two.

When it reached a point where I could conjure up no more words, the score was a heavily lopsided 2-19. Jen was ecstatic. "I won!" she cried. "I wrote nineteen words; you wrote only two!"

I feigned disillusionment. But I smiled wanly nonetheless, for I didn't want to overdo the dismay. I didn't want her to feel unduly sorry for me. It is in battles such as these that the joy of losing far outstrips the pain of winning. I look forward to losing many such battles in the future.

Jen's mother wasn't around that weekend, for she lived and worked in a different state. But the spelling of my sister's relationship to her daughter had sure come in handy. Intentionally or not, it had laid the groundwork for playing the game of Scrabble.

***

Come to think of it, my niece's thinking was anything but irrational. Since she was the one who had written down the words, it was only fair that she was racking up the points. Coming up with a word wasn't the same as writing it down. Who cares who first thought of the word?

My mind went back to my years in post-graduate school when a fellow student was upset that his name was relegated to the third author in a research paper, although he had written the overwhelming majority of it. "That's not fair!" I had exclaimed indignantly when he told me about it. "You should be the first author because you've written the paper. The staff researcher should be the third author, not you. You should complain to our professor!"

And that's exactly what he did. I don't quite recollect how the matter was resolved, but my chagrin—and my friend's—seem misplaced in retrospect. We didn't realize that the staff researcher was justified in her insistence on being the first author, for she was the one who had come up with the ideas for the research. My friend and I were mere minions carrying out the orders of the higher-ups.

***

Twenty years later, fast forwarding to the present, it was on a cold, cloudy afternoon that Jen suggested we come up with words ending with 'ick.' She thought of three or four words, and I came up with more than a dozen. She excitedly wrote down each one of them down and counted them. "We came up with eighteen words!" she announced triumphantly.

That night, I read her a book before going to bed, as I often do during my weekend visits to her home every month. But this time, she too read a similar book after I was done. I was impressed by how good she was at reading. I can remember that my reading skills were no match for hers when I was her age. The American practice of pronouncing a word phonetically one syllable at a time had gone a long way toward making her a good reader.

I could also tell that like all adults, she settled upon the shape of a word's spelling to read it, once she had crossed the barrier of detecting what the word was. Mistaking 'the' for 'that' was an unfortunate consequence of this practice. But in a story where the main character was Mr. Miserable, Jen kept referring to him as Mr. Misery. I corrected her two or three times, but then gave up. Clearly, she preferred to think of him as Mr. Misery, and I was loath to rob her of what I saw as her reader's poetic license.

***

The next day, I presented her a book containing several short stories and essays, and opened it to a particular page. "Read this sentence," I urged her, pointing to a particular paragraph. Her face lit up when she read it. "That's my name!" she cried. "Yes," I replied. "Because it's you who I have written about, when you were almost three years old."

I pointed to a few other sentences that had her name in them, and she gleefully read all of them. She asked me if she could circle all the occurrences of her name. I said Yes, but by pencil, not pen. Ultimately she didn't circle them. I should have let her circle them with a sketch pen, right then and there. Maybe I'll let her do that on my next visit.

"How did my name appear in the book?" she asked me. I reiterated that I had written those sentences, in fact the entire book. I showed her the cover with my name on it.

But Jen was mystified. "How did you write it in such nice letters?" she said. I could see the source of her confusion. She had seen people write with pens and pencils and sketch pens and crayons, but never had she come across anyone writing the printed word. She also asked me how I had printed the book. I explained to her I had typed the book on my computer and given it to a company to turn it into a book. She asked me if I had made the cover. I told her Yes, I had taken the cover picture and given it to the company to make the cover.

My niece was finally satisfied. "I too want to write a book!" she cried. I told her she would when she grows up. "I want to write it right away," she insisted. "I have already written one in school!"

I remembered that she wasn't kidding. She had indeed written one in school a couple of months earlier as part of an assignment. It came complete with a cover page, a title page, a table of contents and individual chapters. It was no more than five pages long, but it was a start. I marveled at the education system that encourages kids to write their own books from a young age.

***

When my brother-in-law dropped me off to the airport that evening, the kids were sad, as they always are when I leave. We stopped at a Subway restaurant, and my brother-in-law went inside to buy a sub for dinner and chips for the kids, while the rest of us waited in the van.

"How long have I been alive?" Jen asked me from the back seat. "How long has Rohit been alive?"

I was surprised by the question, for it came out of the blue. "You've been alive for six years," I told her, turning around in my seat to look at her. "Because you are six years old. Rohit has been around for over three years, because he's three."

"Was I dead before I was born?" she asked.

"No, you weren't dead," I assured her. "You simply weren't around. Neither was I before I was born. None of us were."

Jen nodded. It struck me that I wasn't as aware of death—or of being alive—when I was her age. When I learned of the death of the mother of my friend Rommel, I thought it was an exception. I never imagined any of my loved ones could die, let alone me. And I had no idea that death awaits every single person. But my niece shows every sign of possessing that understanding. On each of my visits, the topic raises its head, and it's because Jen brings it up. For whatever reason, the specter of death always hangs in the background.

One day, it will come to each one of us, for it is a sentence that we cannot escape. But for now, it's time to revel in my niece's seemingly precocious grasp of words—the ones that are wise as well as those that are otherwise. It's an assignment that I have tasked myself with, one in which I hope to get all C's rather than two X marks.

For when it's time to turn the page, it's best to leave no stone unturned.