Man is mandir: ‘My friend Sancho’ by Amit Varma and ‘Arzee the dwarf’ by Chandrahas Choudhary

Like most words that mean little but pretend to say a lot, secular was one that I did not encounter by accident. Its meaning, and the shadows of its connotations, had to be taught, along with other words that signified adult boredom to my bored-of-childhood eyes – success, democracy, corruption, among others. And like many of these words that lived on the margins of my consciousness before they actually came to reside there, wafting in the breeze of overheard conversations – a father's debate with a colleague, a mother's complaint to a friend, and often in the accent of a television newsreader – secular was a word I continued to mishear all my childhood. How could I have thought of this word as just another variety of the air cooler, a brand called Say Cooler? But that is another story.

Like most 15-year-olds whose only expectation from a word such as this was the reciprocity of a few marks as acknowledgement for recognition on a question paper, I too surrendered to its mild ennui. I memorised its genesis and the incantatory phrase with which it had been welcomed into the Indian Constitution – which was then, for me, an imagined obese book with solutions for all the world's problems, including my mother's constipation (because it sounded very close to 'constitution'). Almost two decades have passed since I first wrote the word in a notebook – and how worldly-wise it seems to have become since then!