Amir watched the ripple of ordinary acts: a nurse in Lagos teaching fellow workers medical terms in their mother tongue; a fisherman learning the word for “insurance” so he could understand a contract; refugees translating bureaucratic language into the idioms that soothed their children. The dictionary—once a tool for definitions—had been converted into a vessel for personhood. Words that had been locked behind paywalls now held recipes, birth dates, condolences, and plans. They were maps and lifelines.