My maternal grandfather’s Oxford English Dictionary sits on my shelf like an inherited conscience–hardbound, ageing, and full of opinions. I know! It’s a dictionary. Its margins are scrawled with notes in two handwritings. His precise, serif script, and my mother’s more impatient cursive. He translated definitions into Kannada, and she wrote edits that read like correlations. Where he underlined 

‘obedience’, noun
compliance with an order, request, or law, or submission to another’s authority.
→ See also: discipline, duty, sacrifice

She circled 

‘autonomy’, noun
the ability to act and make decisions without being controlled by anyone else.
→ See also: independence

I used to flip through the dictionary for school essays, searching for big words to sound clever. Now, when I leaf through it, I try to locate myself. It’s strange how something meant to clarify language can make you feel uncertain about what words to trust, whose meanings to accept, and whether your own voice has space between their definitions. But maybe that’s the legacy I’ve inherited: not clarity, but the compulsion to rewrite.

My maternal grandfather, a Police Patil in the 1940s, kept the dictionary in the corner of his desk, next to a ledger and a pocket watch. In a village that lacked written codes, this dictionary lent weight to his judgements, making a bridge between his British superiors and his people. To the world, he was an interpreter of disputes and a staunch officer. At home, however, he was a man of few words, a patriarch who believed that order was best kept in silence.

In the village, a Police Patil was both figurehead and fixer, the state’s appointed liaison who mediated conflicts, enforced law, and kept public peace. My grandfather wore this role like a definition that needed no footnote. The uniform gave him purpose; the dictionary gave him language. Yet, within his own home, he used neither. He remained distant, almost unreadable, preferring clarity in public over connection in private. His children learnt early that silence was safety and that duty was an inheritance.

My mother, the eldest daughter, was not an exception. A Type-A child with perfect grades and gold medals, she made learning her refuge. When emotional fluency was out of reach, she built a vocabulary of accomplishment instead. Her academic certificates and gold medal were framed and flaunted, my grandfather’s proof that he’d raised her right. But when suitors came for her hand, he sent them away. Not yet, he said. Not before the PhD. Not before the dissertation was done. She accepted the terms because that’s what dutiful daughters did. She waited, watching her younger siblings marry, settle, and begin their lives while she accumulated degrees and deferments. Her silence was praised as discipline; her loneliness went unnamed. 

She cleared several state public service exams, each a doorway to her independence, but was told not to step through. Her father and PhD guide made the terms clear: no job, no marriage, no distraction. Her father, raised on ideals of scholarship over selfhood, believed ambition was a noble pursuit, but only in theory. He encouraged her intellect, ignoring her independence, shaping a strange patriarchy that celebrated her mind as long as it remained in service to his control. She complied, not understanding and not resisting. Her father said marriage would end her research. Her guide said a job would dilute her brilliance. They meant well, perhaps. Or maybe they meant to keep her brilliant and contained, a candle burning in a sealed jar.

The dictionary remained on the shelf, promising clarity, order, and unquestionable rules, much like the life she lived: footnoted by expectation and edited by others. But buried between the pages were her private rebellions: underlined words like suffragette, agency, and stipulation. She never shouted, no. But she underlined each time a posting letter arrived and was filed away, unopened. After weddings, when others planned futures and she smiled, present and absent all at once. Her resolve didn’t shatter, but it did soften under the weight of years spent being the good daughter, the quiet scholar, the almost bureaucrat, and the never wife. 

Until one winter morning, while dusting the drawer where old letters went to fade, she found another unopened appointment letter from a year ago. It was for a modest teaching post 400 kilometres away. She didn’t open it. Almost without thinking, she reached for the Oxford Dictionary instead. She turned to the part no one really reads: the “How to Use This Dictionary” section. Ran her fingers along the mechanics of speaking, of how to say what must be said. That evening, she packed one small suitcase, stole a few of her mother’s saris, and left a note for her father: “Teaching (n.): The occupation, profession, or work of a teacher. I begin Monday.”

She took the job, teaching in a sleepy town where no one knew whose daughter she was. Months turned to years. She married a man who asked her what she thought. She finished her PhD with a new guide who encouraged her to rest during pregnancy. She was no longer the almost bureaucrat or the never wife; she had rewritten the script.

Years later, when I was about to begin 5th grade, where fountain pens, cursive writing, and dictionaries were prerequisites, she handed me the Oxford Dictionary. Just said, “Use it well.” I remember the way her hand lingered on the cover before letting go. It was the only inheritance she could pass down that hadn’t been silenced or denied. Its pages carried the weight of two generations. My grandfather’s ideals are bound into its spine, my mother’s concessions caught in its folds. 

I started ghostwriting in 2017 as an engineering student, writing essays, statements, and speeches for people I barely knew. I have built a life on this vanishing. It began in college as a way to earn a little extra. It lingered through engineering classes, a corporate job, and an abandoned UPSC dream. I told myself I was simply arranging words, articulating thoughts for those who struggled to do it themselves. In a way, I was making other people’s stories whole while leaving mine unwritten. From admission essays to corporate content, author manuscripts to travel pages, I crafted narratives that were never mine in the end. Here’s the truth: the more I wrote for others, the less I heard my own voice. 

Every word I ghostwrote was a little death. It made me angry, sometimes at the world, sometimes at myself for letting it happen. One night, I was helping a student write her admissions essay as she wrestled with self-doubt. I stopped and shared the story of Jambavat, the bear king from Hindu mythology, who reminded Lord Hanuman of a power he’d forgotten he had. Lord Hanuman, mighty but lost, was blind to his own strength until Jambavat’s words struck like a sudden thunderclap.

I stopped mid-sentence, the weight of that myth like a heavy fog. In Lord Hanuman’s forgotten power, I saw the voice I’d buried beneath years of silence and invisibility. My usefulness, once a shield, had become a cage.

I, like my mother many years before me, went back to the dictionary. This time, I discovered the spaces between words, the commas and pauses where meaning breathes. In those gaps, I found something I hadn’t allowed myself before: room to be imperfect, to stumble, and to reclaim a fractured voice. But it was necessary. Because if I didn’t speak for myself, who would?

As I flip through the dictionary’s pages now, I spot words I denied myself for as long as I ghostwrote. Voice, Presence, Enough. Words my mother never used to describe herself. Words my grandfather might have dismissed as indulgent. But the words I need to claim authorship under my own name. 

The dictionary will remain on my desk as a set of unchangeable meanings and unbreakable rules. But like the margins where notes sneak in, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is write your own definition.

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Ritu Koppad is a freelance writer. A 2018 Telecommunication Engineering graduate, she began her career as a Network Analyst in an MNC before transitioning full-time into writing in 2021. Her work spans technical, academic, and content ghostwriting, shaping stories for clients across industries like tech, infrastructure, marketing, and policy. When not writing, she takes long walks with her furbaby, Rio.