Vivien, a young girl from the hills of the Himalayan ranges always wanted a huge Dictionary. A thick Dictionary which will endow her with all the meanings of the words she has always wanted to know. She did possess two or three in her life but was never contended. They were often gifted. One was a hand-down from her aunt who got it from her elder brother when he was done with college. When it came to her the cover had been tattered and certain pages dog eared. It was three inches in width and six inches in breadth and eight inches in length. Oxford English Dictionary in navy blue. Another came into her kitty for the best student award at school. The only difference with what she already has was the fact that the former was ancient and the latter novel. It hardly brought any additional excitement like getting a new sartorial in one’s granny fashion. What she wanted was the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, 7th Edition in royal blue. Her thirst for it was like pouring water into a mouse’s hole. There were times when she wanted to ask her rich relatives to buy her one but somehow it never crawled beyond the nest of her longing.
Vivien worked industriously, cut-down her expenses and bought one in a book fair in 2006. It cost her precious little 500 bucks. Many of her friends complimented it an excellent one and they accessed it whenever they necessitated. She never felt it was hers solely like an aboriginal’s attitude towards land. A paperback Dictionary it was therefore she swathed it with crystal polythene.
Three odd years went by and her stance for the Dictionary stayed put like a rock undeterred by the falling rain. One fateful evening she left it on the window sill and overlooked all about it like a person suffering from dementia. In the early hours of the first day of the ninth month of the two thousand and ninth year she abruptly got up from her sleep like a mother who has heard the cries of her baby in deep sleep and charged towards the aperture terribly petrified that the Dictionary would have been drenched for it was a sodden night. To her relief only few drops of precipitation were resting on the coat glistening against the illumination of the tube-light like a dragonfly’s wing in the sunshine. Vivien took the Dictionary with the feeling of a mother rocking her baby from a nightmare and placed it dotingly on the bed and snugly resumed her sleep.
Vivien then entered the land of dreams. She dreamt that Mike, her boyfriend of three years was married and was blatantly and flagrantly enticing her to carry on their relationship sans interruption. Getting up from her sleep in haste she phoned Mike. To her bolt from the blue and spine chilling revelation he has turned off his cell phone. She turned around and witnessed the Dictionary laying by her side like a lover waiting to be embraced. The primary thought that came rushing to her mine was that she has never written her name on the Dictionary. And for the first time she took her pen and sealed her name on the front foliage of her Dictionary in a beautiful calligraphy, Always Vivien’s.
