We Wrote Under One Pen Name for a Decade
Half the poems were mine, half hers, and the byline was our secret.
For ten years, a poet named Ismat Noor published forty-six poems, answered exactly two interviews by email, and declined every request for a photograph. There was a practical reason for the mystery.
Ismat Noor was two people, and one of us giggles under pressure.
Ira and I invented her at 1 a.m. on a hostel bed in our final year of college, both of us flat on our stomachs over one diary, both of us freshly rejected by the same magazine in the same week. My rejection was polite. Hers was a form letter with her name spelled wrong. We had been trading poems since second year the way other roommates traded clothes, and we knew each other's weaknesses better than our own. Ira wrote endings that could stop your heart and openings that could stop a clock. I opened like a door thrown wide and then trailed off apologizing.
“Together,” Ira said, chewing the pen, “we are one competent poet.”
It began as a dare. We took her name from a misheard lyric and a road sign. We agreed on rules the way children agree on the rules of a game they are inventing mid-play, solemnly and in whispers. Rule one: strict alternation, one poem hers, one poem mine. Rule two: the other one edits, and the edit is law. Rule three: we never, ever tell anyone which poem belongs to whom. Not editors. Not husbands. Not even each other's mothers, which turned out to be the hardest clause in the contract.
The first acceptance came in four months. Ira called me at work and said nothing... just breathed like a landed fish until I understood. That evening we lay across her bed with the diary between us and read the acceptance email seventeen times off a phone passed back and forth, and I remember thinking that no purely private happiness had ever felt this loud.
Here is what nobody tells you about a shared pen name: the secrecy is not a burden.
The secrecy is the joy.
Every reader who praised Ismat was unknowingly praising a friendship. Every criticism landed on nobody, glancing off the space between us. When an editor wrote that he admired “her unmistakable voice, consistent across the years,” we laughed until the neighbors knocked, because the poems he cited were split precisely down the middle.
And Ismat could do things neither of us dared under our own names. I hid behind her to write about my mother, poem after poem I could never have signed while my mother lived three streets away. Ira wrote her divorce through Ismat, the whole slow shipwreck of it, and published it in plain sight while telling her family she had given up poetry. Ismat had no relatives to wound, no colleagues to face at lunch. We used to say she was braver than both of us, and we said it as a joke, and it was not one.
The diary lived six months at my flat, six months at hers, ferried across the city in a cloth bag like a relic. Poems were drafted in it, argued over in it, occasionally divorced from their titles in it. In its margins we kept a running log of Ismat's invented life: her fictional insomnia, her fictional cat, the fictional sea-facing town we had decided she lived in. A graduate student once emailed four pages of questions for a thesis chapter on Ismat's “coherent poetics of longing.” We answered jointly on the bed, wiping our eyes, taking turns typing whenever the other became incapable.
Ten years is a long time to be a third person.
The trouble arrived, as trouble does, wearing good news. A journal we loved shortlisted Ismat for a prize. The prize required attendance. A reading, in person, name badge and all. For the first time in a decade the question could not be laughed off: who, physically, standing at a microphone in Bangalore, was Ismat Noor?
We had our first real fight over it, and I want to be honest about what the fight was.
It was not over credit... It was two people each insisting the other take the stage, at increasing volume, until Ira threw a cushion at me and I said something about her endings that I had been saving up, apparently, for ten years, and she went home without the diary even though it was her half of the year.
She came back two days later with a plan and a packet of biscuits. Before deciding anything, she said, we should reread the whole notebook, all forty-six, beginning to end. An audit of Ismat.
We sat on my bed the way we had sat on that hostel bed, older now in the knees, and read our decade aloud. And somewhere around poem nineteen we made the discovery that ended the argument for good.
I attributed a poem confidently to Ira, line by line, citing her rhythms as evidence.
It was mine.
She claimed one about the fictional cat as her own... It was mine too, and two poems later I claimed her divorce elegy, which is not a thing I could ever have written, except that apparently the boundary had dissolved so completely that neither of us could find it. We misfiled a third of the notebook. Our styles had grown together like two trees planted too close, sharing root and bark, and the strict alternation of rule one had quietly become a fiction we told ourselves.
“We never shared a byline. We invented a third person, and she turned out to be braver than both of us put together.”
Ira said that on the last night of the audit, and we both knew it was the eulogy.
We declined the prize.
We wrote to the journal, told them the whole truth, and expected, I think... anger. The editor replied that it was the best email she had received in her career, and asked, gently, whether Ismat might say goodbye properly. So the final Ismat Noor poem was written one line each, strict alternation restored for the farewell, drafted in the diary across two beds and one long phone call. It is the only poem in existence that both of us can honestly claim and neither of us can honestly claim, and it ends with her leaving her fictional sea-facing town at dawn.
Afterward came the strange, bright terror of our own names. I entered my first solo poem into a monthly poetry contest and felt more exposed than I had felt in ten years of secrets, a debut at thirty-four. Ira published under her own name, correctly spelled at last, and cried about it in a stairwell. We were, both of us, brand new: two writers nobody had heard yet, arriving a decade late to our own voices, the exact kind of story I now go looking for among profiles of writers nobody had heard yet. When people ask why my recent work keeps circling new beginnings, I tell them I got a late start. Then I tell them I got an early one too, under another name, and let them wonder.
The diary still travels. Six months at my flat, six at hers, the same cloth bag, a pen clipped to the cover out of habit, though Ismat has not written in years. All the pages are full except the last one. We have discussed it exactly once, at her kitchen table, without ever quite finishing the sentence...
The last page is for whichever of us is someday left holding the bag.
One line each, we agreed. Even then.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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