It means bookworm

My father, JB D'Souza, grew up in a quiet lane off busy Girgaum Road in Bombay. The lane was the "village" of Khotachiwadi, today gaining a degree of fame as a "heritage" precinct. Going back to my youngest days, I heard stories from him and his family about the quirky characters of Khotachiwadi (him and his family no exception). Something about that quiet lane with its closely-spaced houses and neighbours sticking their noses into others' affairs seemed to stimulate quirkiness.

In his own words, taken from a memoir he began writing a few years before he died, here's one of those stories.

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Joe F got into the Provincial Secretariat as a Junior Assistant on a modest salary starting at Rs. 100, yet higher than the rest of the village boys. Joe had had a visibly successful academic career (first class B.A. and B.Sc.) Two years behind him in academia, I tried hard to emulate him. In my early years (Standards I to V) in St. Theresa’s School, there was very little competition. There was that prize-distribution day, when I proudly returned home under a pile of prize books I could hardly carry. At the top of the village lane I heartily greeted Rocky, an appropriately named older boy who regularly flunked his exams. He stood there, brooding about his condition. My greeting evoked a single contemptuous retort. "Worm", he said, and turned away.

I hurried home to ask what that might have meant. The family uneasily translated "worm" into "bookworm."

Which was what Joe F and I really were, then and later, with our total immersion in studies, to the exclusion of everything else – sports, girls, socializing, whatever – except that Joe was too strait-laced in comparison with some of my slightly wayward instincts. He carried to extremes his devotion to studies. Characteristically, in later years, already a staid, rule-bound civil servant, he even chose to marry by the book of rules. He bought Courtship and Marriage, a guide-book written by Daniel Lord, S.J., who, as a celibate Jesuit, must have known all about the mysteries of the subject.

During his study of the book Joe used to tell me about the joys of chaste kissing. He and his fiancee M went steadily through the book together. Letting impulse run ahead of restraint one day, she leaned over affectionately to kiss him. "No, no, my dear", said her ardent lover. "That's in the next chapter. We'll come to that next week."

Father Lord's wisdom led them very properly to the altar. Still a bachelor, I was their best man, who didn’t let Lord's laws inhibit my attentions to M's numerous bridesmaids.