6 A Tiny Triumph

2:55 AM

He had so many questions about grammar that he couldn't bring himself to calm down. His brows furrowed as his eyes went back and forth on the contents of the page. His concentration had gone out the window moments after he had read the first few lines of the first page of the book. He had only the first four chapters to revise for the test, but the words had refused to enter his mind. The lantern in his room was still burning brightly, but Devdutt was emotionally spent.

Mr. Anderson had been a good tutor, but Devdutt had been rather casual about learning the language, specifically its rules about grammar and composition. He had spent four months with Mr. Anderson and was still struggling to form a proper sentence in English. He was not good enough to be enrolled even as a primary (first to fourth grade) school student. Mr. Anderson's Hindi though, had improved significantly.

Devdutt, being 14 years of age, couldn't be admitted to a lower class to meet his educational requirements. The school headmaster had mulled over the matter of his admission for days, before deciding against admitting him into any of the grades at the primary section of the school. "It would humiliate the boy, sitting beside and reciting lessons with students nearly half his age," he'd thought to himself. And so, he had added his name to the high school register and had judiciously informed all the teachers about the extent of his knowledge of all subjects, especially the English language.

Devdutt was squinting over the first line of his high school English grammar book. He sight was perfect, but his mind was struggling to put the letters together quickly enough. He didn't understand why the letters sounded one way and the words did another. He couldn't read the text at a pace that his teacher had expected him to. His eyes tracked back to the same word on the first line for several minutes. "What am I doing, giving my sleep up for this?" He wondered as he looked away from the book for a few minutes.

3:05 AM

He placed his finger on the bottom of the line that he was reading, to help him pick up the pace and move along to the end of the sentence. It worked. He breathed a sigh of relief as he placed his finger on the full stop. It was a welcome pause for him, the punctuation mark. Devdutt read another line and then another. He had found a way to maintain his concentration by performing a meager action of tracing the text with his index finger. But a bigger problem persisted. He hadn't understood a word of what he had read.

Devdutt had learnt enough to identify individual letters, the sounds they made and the way to pronounce them when put together as a word, but he was far from getting the gist of the sentence. He decided to read it out loud; that way he could at least comfort himself for having attempted to revise his lessons.

Question: What is a sentence? He read out loud. He looked at each word and tried to understand the question. "The word WHAT is a question in itself. It is referring to a thing here and that thing is SENTENCE, I guess. I think they are asking us to define a sentence." He thought for a moment.

Answer: A group of words which makes complete sense, is called a sentence.

He read out loud again and spent a considerable amount of time on the words of the answer. " A GROUP means a 'collection of something'. Here, it means a collection of WORDS." He felt a wave of calmness sweep through his body as the meanings of those words began to sink in. He was finally on the right path and had pushed through a question and half its answer. His eyes relaxed and so did the rest of his face.

He looked at the answer again and tried to make meaningful connections with the rest of the words. "The word WHICH means 'pointing to a thing'. MAKES means 'to do'. COMPLETE means 'to finish or to make whole'. SENSE means 'to feel'." His singular understanding of the word 'sense' had thrust him into a state of confusion, yet again. "I am not able to understand these set of words," he thought to himself. "What do I do now?"

He sat back in his chair and tried to relax his neck and shoulders by wiggling them for a few seconds, but his mind was still fixated on that word. "SENSE. Does it mean something else?" he thought as his eyes looked at the stack of books on the left-hand corner of the table. To his delight, he spotted the English dictionary - a book that Mr. Anderson had gifted him on the first day of his English tuition at the palace. He smiled as he thought of his teacher - the down-to-earth Englishman, who had quite the ear for native languages.

Devdutt pulled the book out of the stack and started looking for the word SENSE like the way Mr. Anderson had taught him. He flipped through the pages slowly, combing through the combinations of letters for S. "SA...., SC....., aah! SE." He was excited to have found the first two letters of the word that had stopped his progress. His eyes began to dart past the words beginning with SE, till they had landed on the right combination.

SENSE (noun) 1. any of bodily faculties transmitting sensation. 2. sensitiveness of any of these. 3. ability to perceive.... and so, it went till he found the exact meaning to match the context. "Here it is!" he gasped as he traced the meaning of SENSE with his finger.

7. meaning of word etc.

Further, there was a phrase that read - 'make sense of' - to show or find meaning of.

He breathed out slowly as he put his dictionary aside and picked up the grammar book. " A group of words, which makes complete sense, is called a sentence." He read out loud, positively grinning at his tiny triumph.

_ _ _ _ M _ H

Hint: to be victorious or successful; win.