Before any other post, I want to introduce you to Halos, my closest learner-buddy.

The stories of Halos and her little anecdotes have always brought great delight to me. From the onset, they never failed to leave me literally wide-eyed with amazement, either because of her apparent angelic innocence or just by the mere fact of her very often and, as I now understand it, quite unexpected ontological meanderings. Those unusual experiences she described opened up new vistas and perspectives of reality in my own awareness. She painted many odd worlds governed by strange and laughable existential conditions. I used to think that those worlds were real.

Her funny but rich adventures in quaint places and the unusual language she used to describe them made us inseparable, at least in my simple mind. For me, they sealed eternal bonds of friendship. You ese, I always believed everything Halos said and lapped up all her stories: every enthusiastic word and unclear detail in them. Most times I didn’t even have a clue about what she was talking. Except she would tell me that she has a cinema in her mind and it shows her films of anything she wants to know: pretty stories about the trees, and the earth, and the sea, and angels, and clouds, and the stars way above the moon. And that just like her ‘ everybody has their own cinema’.

‘ … everybody has their own cinema.’

Literally, in those days, I would feel blown away by her ecstatic sounding worldview and invariably, fell silent in amazement. I began to feel that maybe I was also a Halos, one who secretly danced in the mirror of our living room.
Why so? Because just about then, our class was being taught about Noun – words by the teacher. I was, then, a student in the First Primer Class of the Infants Department at the Primary School chosen by my parents for me.

As my teacher explained it, ‘Halos’ which was my friend’s name, was not a name at all. It was a Noun – word. As a matter of fact all our names were Noun-words, she added. Even more shockingly, I learnt that Halos was a Plural -word. I can still hear our ‘Miss’ emphasizing that a Plural – word is telling us that it is ‘more dan one of ah whole set of de same things’. And immediately the image of a bunch of mangos on a tree came to my mind.
It gave me the idea that being as I was just one person, maybe I could also be like one Halo. But then I thought : what if Halos has another friend like me? And what if that other girl is also a Halo? If, as my teacher said, Halos is a whole set, then maybe there could be many more like me – a ‘one Halo’ – around. Halo1, Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo 4, ad infinitum, whatever the meaning of that word Halos always laughingly spoke when she ended any list.

So, I did some heavy wondering and deep pondering, simply because Halos only ever talked about her beloved parents. Her description of them was exactly the same as my own beloved Mama and Papa. She spoke often with strange, and long ruler-measurable words. That’s why I always remained glued to whatever she said. We were so alike, I thought, my friend Halos and I.
For, didn’t I hear myself sometimes using the identical sounding words she used? Even before she said them, wouldn’t some of them play in my mind, leaping and frolicking as it were? Words or what were, up till then, just unusual combinations of sounds which I had never heard spoken by anyone, anywhere.
Well, that is until much later growing up, when our First Standard teacher had exposed us, for the first time, to ‘the huge Globe where all people live’, and especially to the wonderful world of ‘the English Dictionary, where all words live’.

“the huge Globe where all people live”

Meanwhile, Halos was becoming sacrosanct to me, and it suddenly felt like sacrilege to think that maybe I was a Halo, belonging to the set of Halos. For gradually it was dawning to my simple mind, that there was truly only one Halos, unique and undifferentiated, and this Halos was my best friend, eternal in so far as I internalized then, what the meaning of that word was.
For my ears hadn’t heard my teacher nor anyone else ever speak those specific sounds. Such were and still are the effects of the stories and fascinating tidbits that Halos shared with me.

So much so that now, I feel obliged to share one of her stories with you. So you also could understand the meaning of her answer whenever I asked her where she lived.

– And where is your house, Halos?
She would say in a rush, and with great flair too:
– ’InTheArcaneOntologyThat CannotBeSeenByThePopulistEpistemology’ .

I had asked that question so many times and always she gave the same answer. Naturally, I learnt it by heart, each time marveling at the long name of the mysterious place where she lived.