The Sari Shop by Rupa Bajwa Page A

true meaning of life,’ seemed impressive, though he wasn’t sure what ‘express’ meant.
    Then she walked in and he glanced at her warily. She didn’t even look at him. Her mother followed her in and they were soon engrossed in choosing more saris, working their way through the huge bundle as avidly and quickly as they had done the day before.
    *
    Charged by Rina’s converstion about writing and about ‘expressing’, Ramchand resolved to start on the
Radiant Essays
the same evening. This book, unlike the
Complete Letter Writer
, had been written by an Indian woman (Shalini, MA English, B.Ed.), especially for Secondary, Senior Secondary, C.B.S.E., Undergraduate students and Competitive Examinations. And Ramchand was delighted to find that though it was called an essay book, at the end it also had a few letters.
    Ramchand began to read an essay for schoolchildren called ‘An Indian Beggar’.
    A beggar is a common sight in our country. You can find him outside a place of worship, at a bus stop, in the market, in the street, etc.
    There are hundreds of varieties of beggars in India. Some are blind beggars. As they are unable to see or work so they start begging. Such types of beggars do deserve our pity. Also there are beggars who are cripples or lepers. They are unable to earn their livelihood. At the same time, there are beggars, young and stout, but have opted begging as their profession. Then there are beggars who look like sadhus, but actually they are not. Most of such type of beggars are drunkards, sinners and thieves.
     
    This tired Ramchand out. He began to revise the paragraph slowly. He read the complete paragraph without halting even once. It filled him with immense pride. He had read a whole paragraph in
English
, and understood everything too. Thelanguage was much easier than that of the
Complete Letter Writer
, and he was pleased. However, the paragraph had also made him uneasy.
    He didn’t think that he would like Shalini (MA English, B.Ed) much if he met her. That night in bed, before putting on his blue woollen night socks with holes in the toes, Ramchand looked up ‘express’ in the dictionary. It had about ten different meanings, apart from an outbreak of
express trains
and
express ways
.
    It took Ramchand about half an hour to figure what Rina had meant. ‘Reveal, betoken, put (thought) into words’.
    And then he spotted ‘express oneself’. It meant ‘to say what one means’.
    This made it all clear to Ramchand.
    He knew how difficult
that
was.

8
    A few days passed. Ramchand was told that he needn’t go to the Kapoors for a while now. If they needed more saris, he’d be told. He was distracted most of the time in the shop and spent his spare time reading the essay book. After the Phyllis-Peggy-motor tour confusion, he had become a little wary of the letter-writing book. Yet he assiduously, though suspiciously, went through it, making notes in his notebook and looking up meanings in the dictionary.
    He had hit upon a new idea, and he thought it was the most brilliant idea he had ever had. If he started at the beginning of the dictionary, and learnt the meanings of each and every word, working his way from A to Z, one day he would know all English, completely and irrevocably. The thought was so mind boggling that it took his breath away. He wondered if scholars had ever thought of that. It would take a long time, of course, but nothing was impossible.
    So it
could
be done. So Ramchand devoted half an hour every evening – after he was done with the essays and had been wading through the letters, perplexed – to learning words and their meanings. In starting with ‘a’, he hadn’t bargained for the single lettered word ‘a’ that was the first one in the dictionary. It seemed to have a million meanings, so Ramchand skipped it. In six days’ time, he had worked his way from Aback to Altitude, spending every single spare moment he had on the dictionary. He would even mutter the