Our Words' Worth

One morning five years ago, I woke up, grabbed the first sheet of paper I could find, and jotted down whatever I could recall of a half-remembered dream. It was a warehouse of living words I’d dreamt of, the only one of its kind, in a world where you had to buy your words to use them.

Woebegone’s Warehouse of Words—I knew what my book was called long before I knew why the eponymous hero Woebegone was lost, or what he needed to find.

In life, as in fiction, there is a Before and an After. Our stories spark where one yields to the other. Macbeth meets three witches and ends up murdering the king. Oliver Twist musters up the courage to ask for another bowl of gruel. Harry Potter ditches the Dursleys for a life at Hogwarts. Something found is lost. Something lost is found.

Maybe it was my own yearning for something lost that made its way into my dreams. We used to talk—even if all we could manage was short snatches of conversation on a train to work, on a shared park bench. We used to write in cramped cursive—on onion-skin paper to some far-flung friend, or in a secret journal to be discovered one day by astonished descendants. We read voraciously—newspapers smelling of printing ink, or books that demanded our commitment for as many pages as they took to tell their stories.

A warehouse was an unlikely setting for a fantasy, I knew. This was no enchanted wood, no ancient city in the mists of time. There’s nothing beautiful, or besotting, about a factory of flesh-and-ink Words trapped by a tyranny of numbers; an ever-moving ticker tape tracking how many words have been shipped out daily; the diktats of an ever-ticking clock.

But stories begin where they will. A writer’s mind responds to her world. It was only several months into writing that I realized how unnervingly close my imagined world was to the real world we live in.

We don’t buy our words, not yet at least, but we use them cunningly to sell products, ideas, ideologies. We jostle for room in a boundless online marketplace where you can acquire almost anything … but to exist, you must first be found. 

In the imaginary city of my book, Words have been rounded out of the wild and locked up in a warehouse. Farmed, caged like zoo animals, trapped by an impossible choice between freedom and survival. If the Words are to stay alive, they must be spoken—and to be spoken, they must be bought and used like everything else. They must be sought and then found.

In our own world, an entire industry is built around being found. Search-engine experts routinely help sellers use the right key words so that their products might show up on page one. Our ‘stories’ come to us on Instagram, cluttered by hashtags designed to get more followers. Followers, not readers. Doesn’t the word say it all?

The Internet, when it arrived, was hailed as a great force of democracy. It still holds out this incredible promise by making information available to anyone anywhere—and what a blitzkrieg of information it is!

But when the answers to all our questions are filtered through Google’s dominant search engine, and most of what we buy and sell is negotiated on Amazon, how much control do we really have on what we’re sold, on what we’re told?

Under this steady bombardment, we are hardly aware of what we consume. The same messages are reinforced in an infinite loop. Advertisers know this well: Something repeated begins to look like fact. Words can be weaponized, news faked, search results manipulated—to push ideologies, to peddle power. What happens, then, to that strange, abiding thing that every story seeks—the truth? Is it even owed to us if we’re content to be passive consumers? Hypnotized by the swinging pendulums of our social feed, ever scrolling; cut off from the hidden cost of living; in a world where the buy button meets our every want, even if it sidesteps our real needs.

In my book, ‘findability’ comes at a price. Words like ‘wonderful’ are promoted at half-price. (They can be used to describe rulers in a flattering way.) Other words are unaffordable, even as the party slogan declares,

“A Word for every Speaker and a Speaker for every Word!” But when two young Speakers protest without the words to do it, the iron-handed regime descends upon them.

There is a price for speaking, even in our own world. There are words we can’t use, things we can’t say. Sometimes, the fear of being trolled holds us back; of being shamed by strangers who don’t know us enough to spare our feelings. The penalties are heavier in parts of the world where freedom of speech is curtailed by censorship. Where to speak is to risk being imprisoned, or killed.

The Warehouse of Words. The World Wide Web. Both promise us more. Both often end up giving us only that which can be found with minimal effort. The truth, in stories and in life, must be sought to be found, and a lie persists because it has believers.

Woebegone, the divided hero of my book, must choose between two stories. The one the regime feeds him—that the Warehouse exists for “the greater good”—or the one he believes in his heart to be true.

The Words in Woebegone’s Warehouse look like us. They yearn for freedom, but will also do anything to survive, to be found and bought. Like Woebegone, they, too, must make a heartbreaking choice between being lulled by the lie or awoken by the truth—that Speakers need their Words. In defending our words from being twisted and misused, we defend ourselves. From the seductive pull of our social media feed, from the pervasive buy button. We begin to negotiate for real choices to meet our real needs: to speak and to connect.

We care about Woebegone and his Words because they could be us.

Payal Kapadia is an author and recipient of the 2013 Crossword Book Award. Her latest release, Woebegone’s Warehouse of Words (Hachette), is a book for all ages. She lives in Mumbai.