My Friend Reads My Rejections So I Don't Have To
She filters my inbox and delivers bad news with samosas.
Sana changed my email password on a Tuesday in March and has refused to tell me what it is for three years. This is not a hostage situation.
This is the best thing anyone has ever done for me.
To understand why a grown woman controls another grown woman's inbox, you need to see me at 2:14 a.m. on the night that caused all this. Picture a dark bedroom, one phone glowing like a small interrogation lamp, and me, refreshing my email for the eleventh time because a literary magazine had promised decisions by end of month and the month had forty minutes left in it. The rejection arrived at 2:14. Form letter... “Despite its evident merits.” I read it nine times.
Then I opened my poetry folder, selected forty-two files, and stood at the edge of the delete button the way you stand at the edge of a diving board you have no business being on.
I called Sana instead. Not because I was wise, but because she once made me promise to call before doing anything dramatic to a folder.
She listened to me cry about strangers in another country not wanting my poem about my grandmother's sewing machine. Then she said, in the voice she uses on junior colleagues who have formatted a spreadsheet wrong, “Okay. New system. You are no longer allowed to receive your own news.”
I thought she was joking...
On Tuesday she arrived at my flat with her laptop, changed my submissions email password in front of me, ate the last of my biscuits, and announced the protocol.
The protocol is this. All my submissions go out from that account. She checks it once a day, at a civilized hour, with her tea. Nothing reaches me by screen. News is delivered in person, on weekends, with food, and the food is the message. One samosa means a form rejection. Two samosas means a personalized rejection, the kind with actual feedback, the kind that means an editor paused.
And jalebi means yes.
“Why food?” I asked.
“Because you cannot fully despair while chewing,” she said. “It is a physiological fact. I read it somewhere, or I made it up. Either way it is true.”
She takes the job seriously in a way that still undoes me a little. She reads every rejection fully so that I never have to see the wording; she knows that “despite its evident merits” had lodged in me like a splinter, so she translates. A splendid Saturday: she once arrived, placed one samosa on the plate, and said, “Standard no from the Bombay one. Intern-grade. The editor did not even sign it. We do not respect this rejection. Eat.”
And I ate, and we watched a cooking show, and the poem went out again on Monday to two other magazines, because the other half of her protocol is that nothing comes home to stay. A rejected poem sleeps one night in the drawer, then goes back out. She calls it keeping the pigeons flying.
Two-samosa days are almost festive now. “Personalized,” she announced last winter, sliding the plate across like a customs officer approving a passport. “They said the ending arrives too early. They said, and I quote, send us more.” She would not show me the email itself until I had finished eating, because she knows I would have speed-read past the compliment to find the sting. When you read your own rejections, you read them for the wound. When someone who loves you reads them, they read them for the door left open. Same letter. Different letter entirely.
A rejection at 2 a.m., alone, is a verdict on your soul. The same rejection at 4 p.m., with a samosa across the table, is just weather.
For two years the system ran like this, through maybe sixty samosas and exactly four jalebis, each jalebi commemorated with a photograph of the plate. Then came the fifth jalebi, and with it the part of this story I did not see coming.
She turned up on a Sunday, unannounced, holding the box with two hands like it contained a verdict. Jalebi. I started running through my pending submissions out loud... and she shook her head at every title. “It's the sewing machine poem,” she said.
The sewing machine poem was dead.
The 2:14 a.m. poem, the one that started everything. I had deleted it from my sending list years ago, told her to retire the pigeon.
“I never retired it,” she said, not even slightly ashamed. “I have been sending it out twice a year on your behalf. Forgery, technically. Anyway, it placed in a monthly poetry contest. Also they want a short profile. Also I already wrote the profile. Also eat your jalebi.”
I would like to report that I responded with grace. What I actually did was cry onto a sweet in my own doorway while my friend explained, patiently, that she had believed in a poem for three years on my behalf, carrying the hope for me the way you might carry a friend's bag while she catches her breath. The profile ran in a corner of the site given to writers nobody had heard yet, and my grandmother's sewing machine, nineteen years silent, got more readers in a week than I had gotten in a decade.
Here is the turn I owe you, though. It is not the jalebi.
A month later, at her flat to return a casserole dish, I saw her phone light up on the table. An email notification, from a magazine I recognized, addressed to her. I knew that subject line format the way soldiers know a siren. I also knew, in the same instant, a thing I had somehow never once asked in three years...
Sana writes.
Essays, quietly, under a name that is almost hers. And she had been receiving her own rejections the whole time, alone, at whatever hour they landed, with no protocol, no plate, no translator. The woman who built a fire station for me had been letting her own kitchen burn on the schedule of strangers.
“Give me your password,” I said.
She laughed. I did not.
It took me forty minutes and two cups of tea to win... and I only won because I used her own line back at her: you are no longer allowed to receive your own news. She surrendered the password with the expression of a cat being given a bath, and I now check her inbox every morning with my coffee, and I have my own code. Fruit means a form no. Chocolate means a personalized no. And flowers, actual flowers at her actual door, mean yes.
I have bought flowers twice this year. Both times she cried onto the stems and pretended it was pollen.
These days when we meet, both our phones lie face down on the table between the cups, dark and harmless, two small switched-off interrogation lamps. Whatever is in them can wait for daylight, and a plate, and a person.
The pigeons keep flying. Somebody I trust reads the sky for me.
I read it for her.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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