The Poem War on Our Hostel Notice Board
Anonymous verses, escalating weekly, until the warden demanded authorship.
The first poem appeared on a Tuesday, pinned between the mess menu and a warning about water timings, and it rhymed “biryani” with “agony.” It was unsigned, typed on half a torn sheet, and it was, I am sorry to report... better than anything I had written that entire semester.
I was nineteen, second year, room 214 of a boys' hostel in Pune where the corridor walls were the color of old turmeric and the geyser ran on alternating current and faith. I kept a notebook of poems under my mattress the way other boys kept cigarettes. Nobody knew. In an engineering hostel, admitting you wrote poetry was roughly like admitting you ironed your socks. You would survive it, but you would never fully live it down.
So when an anonymous poem showed up mocking the mess dal in flawless rhythm, something in me turned competitive in a way I still cannot defend.
I wrote a reply that night. Eight lines defending the dal's honor with maximum sarcasm, ending with a line I thought was devastating: “At least the dal shows up with its name on the pot.” I crept downstairs at two in the morning in my bathroom slippers and pinned it under the original with a stolen thumbtack. My heart was doing things it usually reserved for viva exams.
By Friday there was a response.
It corrected my meter. It corrected my meter in verse, which remains the most elegant way anyone has ever been rude to me.
The last line said, “Count your feet before you march, dear poet.”
I stood in front of that notice board with my breakfast tray going cold and felt something I had never felt about poetry before... a blood feud.
What followed took over the hostel like a fever. Every week, a new poem from the stranger. Every week, my reply. He wrote a villanelle about the washing machine that had been broken since before any current resident was admitted. I answered with an acrostic that spelled SURRENDER down the side. He produced a sonnet, an actual structured sonnet, on the subject of the third floor bathroom, and I will say only that it was moving. Boys who had never voluntarily read a paragraph began crowding the board on Monday mornings with their toothbrushes still in their mouths.
Somebody named it the Board War.
There was a betting pool on our identities. The mess workers demanded translations into Marathi, and got them.
The only person not enjoying himself was the warden, Mr. Kulkarni.
Kulkarni was a compact, ferociously moustached man who wore his keys on a chain like a jailer in a period film. He tore the poems down.
They reappeared.
He laminated a notice that said THIS BOARD IS FOR OFFICIAL COMMUNICATION ONLY, and by evening someone had taped a haiku to the lamination. Finally he called a full assembly, a hundred and forty of us packed into the common room, and demanded that the two poets identify themselves or the entire hostel would lose weekend late passes.
“Poetry,” he announced, pronouncing the word like a diagnosis, “is not a punishable offense. Anonymous misuse of the notice board is.”
Nobody stood up. Obviously nobody stood up.
But that week, for the first time, my rival went quiet. Monday came and the board held nothing but the menu.
Then another Monday... nothing.
The betting pool collapsed. I felt strangely bereaved, which is a ridiculous thing to feel about a stranger whose main contribution to my life was scansion insults.
And then, because boredom makes detectives of us all, I noticed the letter e.
My rival's poems were typed, and every e sat a fraction above the line, like a note sung slightly sharp. I had assumed some department office typewriter. But one afternoon I stood reading the official water timings notice, the dullest document ever produced by man, and there it was. The same raised e. The same tired ribbon leaving the same ghost at the top of every loop.
The official notices were typed on the warden's personal typewriter.
I stood there so long a junior asked if I was feeling well.
I would love to describe my courage here... except it took me nine days to act. In the end I typed nothing and wrote nothing. I walked into his office during visiting hours, laid his last poem on the desk between us, and said, “Sir. Your e sticks.”
Kulkarni looked at the sheet for a long time. The ceiling fan ticked. Somewhere down the corridor two boys argued about cricket with the specific fury of people who have exams in the morning.
Then he took a small key from his jailer's chain, opened the lowest drawer of his desk, and handed me a college magazine from 1978, opened to a page gone soft as cloth from handling. On it was a poem about his mother's hands. The byline read V. S. Kulkarni.
“I stopped in 1981,” he said. “Job. Family. You know how it goes.” He looked at me as if daring me to claim that I, at nineteen, knew how anything goes. “Then some fool writes eight sarcastic lines about dal on my notice board, and I could not sleep until I had answered them.”
The assembly, he admitted, had been panic. Students were investigating. A warden caught writing anonymous verse about the sanitation situation in his own hostel would not survive the staff room, let alone the trustees.
So we signed a treaty. The Board War ended publicly and was mourned by all. Privately, every Monday, a poem arrived under my door in an envelope marked LATE PASS APPLICATION, and every Thursday my reply went into the suggestion box that only he had the key to. He critiqued me the way the board had, without mercy. He circled my lazy rhymes. He wrote GREETING CARD in the margin whenever I got sentimental, which was often.
Once I asked him why he bothered with me at all, and he said the thing I have carried ever since.
“Some people stop writing poems. Nobody stops needing to. The lucky ones just get caught.”
People ask why my hostel memories are mostly in rhyme, and I never know where to begin. With the dal? With the sonnet about the bathroom? The night before my final semester ended, the power failed, as it always did, and I typed my farewell poem to him by candlelight on a borrowed machine, one candle stub on a steel plate throwing long shadows up the turmeric walls. I still think of that as the truest writing desk I have ever owned.
Years later, long after I stopped hiding notebooks under mattresses, I finally entered my work into a monthly poetry contest under my own name, which felt like standing up at that assembly a decade too late. I posted the old board poems, the ones I could still recite, on a community wall for poets, where strangers argued about the meter, which would have delighted him. Most of what I write now is pulled from memory anyway, and that hostel supplies more of it than anywhere else I have lived.
Last year an envelope arrived, forwarded twice, my old board alias written on it in a shaky hand. Inside were typed lines... and every e sat a fraction above the line, like a note sung slightly sharp. He is eighty one now. The poem was about his mother's hands again, he explained, because at his age the material comes back around.
At the bottom, beneath the poem, sat one typed line: “Count your feet before you march, dear poet.”
I pinned it to the corkboard above my desk, between the electricity bill and a takeaway menu, where all important notices belong.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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