The Poem I Wrote Instead of Running Away
The bag was packed; the notebook talked me down.
The bag was a blue Wildcraft knockoff with one broken zip, and I packed it in eleven minutes.
Two t-shirts. One pair of jeans. My board exam admit card, because some stubborn, practical part of me still believed in a future that had exams in it. Four hundred and sixty rupees rolled inside a sock, saved from two birthdays and one Diwali when my uncle was feeling generous.
I was fifteen, and I was leaving.
The fight had been about marks, officially. Sixty-eight percent in the half-yearlies, and my father holding the report card the way lawyers hold evidence, at arm's length, with disgust and triumph mixed in equal parts. He said, “You are wasting my money and your mother's health.” My mother said nothing... which was its own complete sentence. I went to my room and closed the door with the exaggerated softness that is the teenage version of slamming it.
The plan was the 9:40 night bus to Chandigarh. My cousin Monty worked at a mobile repair shop there and had once told me, in the loose way older cousins say things they never expect to be held to, that I could always come stay with him. The plan had holes in it the size of Chandigarh itself. But fifteen-year-olds do not check plans for holes. They check them for exits.
I needed socks.
That is the whole reason any of this happened. I was digging through the bottom drawer of the steel almirah, the one that shrieks if you open it past halfway, and under the socks was my old geometry notebook. Classmate brand, brown paper cover gone soft at the corners, my name on the label in my mother's handwriting because mine was too ugly for labels.
The back pages were full of poems I had written at thirteen. Terrible ones. One about a cricket match. One about rain that rhymed “sky” with “why” four separate times. One comparing my maths teacher's voice to a pressure cooker, which I still maintain was accurate.
I decided the runaway needed a goodbye note. Every runaway in every film has one. So I tore out a middle page, sat on the edge of the bed with the packed bag watching me like a dog waiting for its walk, and started writing.
First draft: “I am going. Don't look for me.” Too filmy. Even at fifteen I could hear the background violins and I was embarrassed for myself.
Second draft: “You will be happier without me.” My hand stopped halfway through “happier”... Some part of me knew it was a lie designed to be argued with, and there would be nobody in Chandigarh to argue.
Then something strange started happening, and I have spent years trying to describe it honestly. I tried to write “I hate this house.” The pen wrote “the kitchen smells of cardamom at six in the morning.” I tried to write “you never listen to me.” The pen wrote “you carried me up three floors when I had typhoid and told the doctor to check everything twice.”
The pen was not cooperating with the plan.
I kept going for over an hour. Next door, someone's radio was playing old Kishore Kumar songs, the sad ones they save for after eleven. A dog was barking at nothing in the lane. And the note stopped being a note. It broke into short lines on its own, the sentences arranging themselves like people finding their seats, and somewhere in that hour it became a poem without asking my permission.
Near the bottom of the page, my hand wrote the only honest thing I produced that entire night.
I did not want to leave. I wanted to be found.
Nobody teaches you writing through hard times as a teen. There is no chapter for it in any syllabus, wedged between trigonometry and the freedom struggle. You find it the way I found it: by accident, at night, with one bag packed and one page left in an old notebook.
I read the poem three times. Then I understood something that took no talent to write but has taken me twenty years to fully absorb. The note was addressed to my father, but it was written for me. Every angry line was a knock on the door from the inside.
I did not want a bus. I wanted him to knock first.
I did not unpack... I want to be truthful about that. Pride requires a fire escape, so I pushed the bag under the bed and told myself I could still leave on Thursday.
Thursday came and went... So did three more Thursdays.
The next morning there was nothing cinematic. My father sat at the table with his tea and his newspaper, and when I sat down he pushed the biscuit tin two inches toward me without looking up. In our house, that was a peace treaty with full signatures and a witness.
I kept writing in the back of that notebook. By June it was full. I did not know the word for what I was doing, but I was writing about family the way you press a bruise to check whether it still hurts, gently, repeatedly, half hoping it does.
The bag stayed under my bed for three weeks, packed, like a threat neither of us mentioned. Then one Sunday my father took it to the market, and it came back full of mangoes, and the broken zip had been fixed somewhere along the way. We never discussed it. That was the apology. That was also the acceptance of my apology. In some families, both fit inside one bag of mangoes.
The page I owed that night
Years later, long after Chandigarh had stopped being a threat and become just a place with good winters, I came across a page of writing prompts and one of them said: write about the night you almost left. I laughed out loud at my desk. Somebody out there knew there was a night like that in almost everyone.
So I wrote it properly at twenty-four. Ten drafts. I cut the violins out of every one of them. Then I entered it into a monthly poetry contest, mostly to force myself to stop editing. It did not win anything. It did something better. It made me call my father.
I told him, for the first time, that I had packed a bag that night. There was a silence on the line... long enough that I checked whether the call had dropped.
“I know,” he said. “Your mother checked your room every night for a month.”
He said it the way he says everything important: quickly, sideways, while pretending the real subject is something else. Then he asked if I was eating properly, which is his language for everything he cannot say in his language.
They knew.
The whole time, they knew, and they let me keep my fire escape, and they fixed the zip quietly so that if I ever did carry that bag somewhere, at least it would close properly. I do not have a word for that kind of love... I have looked.
People talk about healing like it is a door you walk through once. Mine was slower and stupider than that. It was a boy sitting on the edge of a bed, trying to write a cruel note and failing, because his own pen kept telling on him.
I still have the notebook. The poem is still bad. The rhymes limp, the metaphors apologize for themselves. I have written better lines since, hundreds of them, but none that ever saved anyone's life.
That one saved mine, eleven minutes after I packed, and exactly one page before I would have left.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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