The Poem My Daughter Wrote About Me
Eleven lines in pencil taught me how I look from below.
My daughter's teacher emailed me with the subject line "Something you should see," which is how all modern horror begins. Attached was a photograph of a ruled page from a Class 4 notebook: eleven lines, in pencil, with two eraser smudges and my whole life in them.
The assignment, Ms. D'Souza explained, was to write a poem about someone you see every day. Some kids picked the dog. One boy, magnificently, picked the watchman. My daughter Anaya, nine years old, gap in her front teeth, picked me.
I read it standing in my office parking lot at 6:40 in the evening, briefcase still in my hand.
It started gently. "My dad is tall like the fridge." Fine. Flattering, even, in its way. "My dad makes Sunday eggs with a crispy skirt." That one I showed three colleagues before I finished reading the rest, which is exactly the kind of thing the rest of the poem was about.
Line four: "My dad's phone is his window. He looks out of it all day."
Line six: "My dad says in a minute. A minute is very long."
Line eight, and I had to lean against the car for this one... "When he laughs at his screen at night, I laugh in my room too, so we are laughing together."
I want to be honest about my first reaction, because the first reaction is the true one and everything after is public relations.
My first reaction was defense.
I built the case in about nine seconds: I work hard, the phone is work, the deadlines are real, she has no idea what EMIs are, nine-year-olds are unreliable narrators. I had the whole closing argument ready by the time I got home.
Then I walked in, and Anaya was at the dining table drawing, and she said "Hi Papa" without looking up, with the fully settled calm of a child who has learned the exact market rate of a greeting, and my case collapsed without opposing counsel saying a word.
My wife read the poem that night in bed. She read it twice and said nothing... which in fourteen years of marriage I have learned is her loudest register.
"It's a school assignment," I said. "They exaggerate."
"She counted," my wife said, and pointed at line six, and went to sleep... or pretended to.
But it was the last line that finished me, and I have to give it to you the way it was given to me, in pencil, slightly smudged, with a full stop like a held breath:
My dad is a door that is mostly shut, but the light under it is warm.
A door that is mostly shut. But the light under it is warm. She was not complaining. That was the thing I could not get past. There was no accusation anywhere in those eleven lines. It was pure field observation, a naturalist writing up the habits of a large animal she lived with and loved. Children do not write poems to hurt you. They write down what is there, which is so much worse.
Here is the part I have only told two people. A few nights later, when everyone was asleep, I took the actual notebook out of her school bag like a thief and held that page up close to the lamp, because I had noticed the eraser smudge sat right under the last line, and I am a man who reads the tracked changes. You can see erased pencil against light... if the writer pressed hard enough.
She had pressed hard.
The line she erased said: "I knock very softly so I do not disturb him."
She had written the truth first, and then, at nine years old, decided it might hurt me, and softened it into a door with warm light. My daughter was already doing the thing we teach every child in every house like ours: to edit her honesty for the comfort of adults, to sand the corner off a fact so her father could walk past it without limping.
That was the moment. Not the poem. The revision.
I sat on the kitchen floor with her notebook for a long time.
I am suspicious of stories where the father reads one poem and becomes a new man by Thursday, so I will not tell you that story. I will tell you what actually happened, which is smaller and slower. The phone went into a drawer near the shoe rack, six to nine, most days... Not all days. I missed a call from my boss during Snakes and Ladders and my heart rate did things I am not proud of.
The first week, sitting across from my daughter with empty hands, I discovered I had genuinely forgotten how to be bored with another person, which is, I think now, most of what love is made of.
And I started asking about the poems. It turned out there were more. A whole tail section of the school notebook, going back a year: a poem about her grandmother's steel almirah, one about the rain smell that comes before the rain, one about her friend Zoya moving to Dubai. My daughter had been publishing all along in a magazine with a circulation of zero. One evening I sat with her and we read poems by other people about childhood, and then a few about family, and she pointed at one and said, "This uncle also notices things," which is the finest review I have ever heard given.
With her permission, and after a negotiation involving considerable chocolate, we posted the fridge poem on a wall where poets share their work. Strangers left comments. A woman in Nagpur wrote, "I was this child. Thank you for listening to yours." Anaya read that comment eleven times and then asked if we could frame it, and we did, because in this house we now frame the important correspondence.
The original poem lives in my wallet. I photocopied it first, because pencil fades and I am not willing to negotiate with graphite about this. On bad days, in lifts and cab queues, I take it out and read line eight and put it back. It works faster than anything my doctor has prescribed.
Last month, Ms. D'Souza set the same assignment for the new term, and Anaya, now ten, wrote about me again. She left it on my pillow this time, which tells you something about how the distribution channels have improved. It is shorter, seven lines. I will only give you the ending, because it is hers, but she said I could share it, and a writer's permissions must be respected.
"My dad is a door that is mostly open now. We lose a lot of heat. We don't mind."
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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