My Handwriting Won Prizes Before My Words Did
For years my loops mattered more than my lines.
I have won seven prizes for writing, and six of them had nothing to do with what the words said.
They were handwriting prizes. Cursive competitions. The strange, vanished Olympics of my school years, where forty children sat in a hall copying the same paragraph about discipline or trees or the importance of punctuality, and the winner was whoever made the word “punctuality” look most like lace.
My handwriting competition memories smell very specific: Camlin ink, chalk dust, and the metallic tang of a nib pen sucked absentmindedly during a hard flourish. If you grew up with four-lined pages, you know the smell. If you did not, imagine a library and a chemistry lab having a quiet argument.
I was good. I want to be honest about how good, because false modesty is also a kind of lying. My lowercase g had a descender loop that Mrs. D'Souza once held up to the entire class and called “a chandelier.” My capital W looked like two swans agreeing on something. Between the ages of eight and thirteen, I collected certificates the way other boys collected cricket cards, and my father laminated every single one, because in our house lamination was the highest form of love.
There was just one problem, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to see it.
Nobody ever read what I wrote.
They looked at it.
In the essay competitions, the ones where the words were supposed to matter, I never placed... Not once.
My compositions came back with the same comment in red ink, teacher after teacher, year after year: “Beautiful presentation.” Full stop. Nothing about the ideas, because there were no ideas. I had spent so many hundreds of hours perfecting the costume that I had never asked who was inside it.
I found out the hard way, obviously. There is no other way at seventeen.
Her name does not matter now, though at the time it was the only word in any language. I wrote her a letter. Two full pages, my finest cursive, the chandelier g deployed at every opportunity, margins so straight they looked machine-ruled. I slipped it into her physics textbook with the confidence of a boy who had seven laminated reasons to believe in his pen.
She found me near the water cooler two days later. She was holding the letter, and I remember my heart doing something medically inadvisable.
“Your handwriting is so beautiful,” she said.
That was it... That was the whole review. She smiled the way you smile at a well-decorated shop window when you have no intention of going inside, and walked away, and I stood by the water cooler receiving an education no school had thought to schedule.
Beautiful handwriting is a beautiful envelope. Someone still has to be home at the address.
I would love to tell you I transformed overnight, that I went home and wrote something raw and true by morning. I did not... I sulked for a month and blamed the physics textbook. Real lessons soak in slowly, like ink into blotting paper, and this one took years to reach the other side of the page.
The trunk
Here is where the story turns, and it turns in my grandmother's steel trunk.
She died the winter I turned twenty-two. She was the only person who had displayed my certificates without laminating them, propped against her Ganesh idol, which used to scandalize my aunts. When we opened her trunk afterward, doing that terrible arithmetic families do with a dead woman's belongings, I was fully prepared to find them there. Her shawls were there. Her silver anklets. A photograph of my grandfather looking too young to be anyone's grandfather.
The certificates were not in the trunk.
What was in the trunk, folded into a square so old it had gone soft as cloth, was a note in pencil.
My note.
I had written it when I was nine, in the ugliest scrawl of my life, the summer my grandfather died and she stopped eating dinner. Four words, no loops, the letters leaning on each other like tired men.
“Dadi dont be sad. I will sit with you.”
Five words. No apostrophe, because at nine I had not yet met the apostrophe. She had kept it for thirteen years... through two house moves, in the same trunk as her wedding anklets. The chandeliers and the swans and the laminated proof of my talent were, we later found, in a plastic bag on top of the almirah, with the old newspapers.
I sat on the floor of her room holding that pencil note and understood, finally and completely, what every essay judge had been trying to tell me in red ink.
The prize was never the loops. It was never going to be the loops.
She kept the words of a boy who could barely form his letters, because he had used them to say the one thing she needed said.
I keep that note now in the old folder with the certificates. It is the only prize in there I did not win.
It was given.
What the loops taught me anyway
I do not want to be unfair to my chandelier g. Those thousand hours at the four-lined page taught me things I still use: patience, the pleasure of doing a small thing properly, the knowledge that beauty is built one boring stroke at a time. But somewhere in my twenties I finally reversed the order of my worship. I read an essay about why safe poems lose, and it named my whole childhood in one line: I had been decorating instead of risking.
So I started risking. Badly at first, the way everyone starts. I wrote about my grandmother, about the trunk, about the way memory folds things small enough to keep, and my first drafts were honest and hideous, scrawled so fast that even I could not read them the next morning. It felt like a betrayal of Mrs. D'Souza... It felt wonderful.
When I finally shared one, I typed it and posted it on a community wall for poets, which meant that for the first time in my life, strangers met my words wearing no costume at all. Same font as everybody else. No swans, no lace, no lamination. Just lines. A woman I have never met commented that the poem made her call her grandmother. Seven certificates never did that.
My handwriting has fallen apart, by the way. Doctors could study it. The chandelier g died somewhere around my third notebook, and I let it go without a funeral.
But once a year, on her birthday, I take out a proper pen and a clean page, and I write my grandmother's name in the best cursive I have left. Slowly. Every loop I can still remember. It is the one occasion where I think she would agree the envelope matters, because the words inside it are only her name, and her name was already the whole message.
The rest of the year, I write ugly and mean it.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.