The Bully Who Asked Me to Write His Love Letter
He cornered me by the cycle stand with a request instead of a fist.
Vicky Bhandari had slapped the geography out of three boys in my class, and on a Tuesday in August he cornered me by the cycle stand.
I did the mental arithmetic all small boys do: distance to the gate, forty meters. Distance to the PT teacher, unknown. Value of my own life... negotiable. I had eleven rupees and a half-eaten packet of Parle-G, and I was fully prepared to surrender both.
He looked over his shoulder first, the way villains in films check for police. Then he leaned in and said the last sentence I would have predicted, out of every sentence available in every language.
“You write good, na?”
I want to describe what fame I had at thirteen. It was this: I wrote the farewell speech for our class teacher, and it made two aunties cry at the school function. That was my entire empire. But in a small school, word travels, and apparently it had traveled all the way down to the boy who took window seats by eminent domain.
“I need a letter,” Vicky said. “A good one. Love letter type.”
He said “love letter type” while staring at me with the exact expression he used before knocking someone's water bottle off a desk, so I did the only sensible thing. I agreed instantly and completely, terms to be decided by him, in perpetuity.
Of all the unexpected childhood truces ever signed, I still think ours had the strangest terms: my words in exchange for his protection, blue ink for a ceasefire, negotiated by the cycle stand under a neem tree. He also threw in a samosa every Friday. Vicky was a thug, but he was not a cheat.
The drafts
We met behind the school after last bell, twice a week, like criminals. I brought my rough notebook. He brought critique.
My first draft was everything I believed, at thirteen, that love required: moonlight, a rose, one heart doing things no cardiologist would endorse. Vicky read four lines and looked at me with genuine disappointment, which from him hurt more than the slap would have.
“No flowers,” he said. “She hates flowers. They make her sneeze.”
Fine. Draft two. I swapped the rose for the moon, doubled the moonlight, added a line about her smile lighting up rooms.
“Why are you writing about her smile? Write sorry first. Say sorry about the plate.”
“What plate?”
“The plate I threw. Just write it.”
Draft three, draft four. Slowly, line by rejected line, the letter stopped sounding like the films and started sounding like nothing I had ever read. He wanted sentences no boy sends a girl in class nine. Say I eat properly now, two rotis, sometimes three. Say I iron my own uniform and it looks decent. Say the house is quiet but I am managing. Say she does not have to decide anything, she can just come for Diwali and see.
I was thirteen and not clever, but I was not made of stone either.
Somewhere around “two rotis, sometimes three,” my stomach understood before my brain did.
“Vicky,” I said, very carefully, the way you hold something that might be either a wire or a snake. “Who is this letter for?”
He looked at the neem tree for a long time... The tree offered no assistance.
“My mother,” he said.
“She stays at my nani's house now. Since March.”
I did not say anything. There is a silence boys keep for each other that is the closest thing we had to tenderness, and I kept it. He picked up a stone and threw it at nothing, hard, and that was the whole confession. His parents had split their house down an invisible line, his mother had taken his little sister and gone, and the biggest fists in our school belonged to a boy who set the dinner plates for people who were not coming.
He could take anything in that school by force. The one thing he actually wanted had to be asked for in words, and words were the one thing he did not have.
So I lent him mine. It is the proudest ghostwriting of my career, and I have since been paid actual money for actual words. We did nine drafts. I kept my moonlight out of it. The final letter was plain as a bus ticket and it said things like I am sorry about the plate, and the house is too quiet, and Papa also does not say it but I am saying it.
He copied it out in his own handwriting, which was terrible, all the letters lifting weights, and I told him not to fix it. Her son's real handwriting was the point. Even at thirteen I knew that much.
I went with him to post it. He did not ask me to come; he just walked slowly enough that not following would have been a decision. At the red postbox on Station Road he held the flap open and stood there a second too long... the envelope halfway in, like a man letting go of a hand. Then it dropped, and he said “okay” to nobody, and we went and ate samosas even though it was only Wednesday.
The ceasefire holds
She came for Diwali. I know because he told me by the cycle stand, failing so hard at hiding his grin that he gave up and punched my shoulder instead, his dialect for gratitude. She and his sister moved back fully the next summer. I never learned what happened between the letter and that, and it was none of my business. My part was only the words.
Here is the part people find hard to believe.
Vicky never bullied anyone again.
Not gradually. It stopped like weather.
I have a theory I have carried for decades now, that most cruelty in small boys is just a message with no address on it, and once his message found its address he had nothing left to deliver with his fists.
I lost him after school, the way you lose everyone from before you were yourself. Then three years ago a wedding invitation arrived from a name I did not recognize... until I did. He runs a gym now, has forearms like dock rope, and when I walked in he shouted across the hall, “Writer!” which is how I learned what he had called me in his head all along.
He brought me to a small woman in a green sari. “Ma,” he said. “This is the boy.”
She knew exactly what that meant. She put her hand on my head the way only mothers of a certain generation do, a blessing with weight in it, and said, “You wrote it too neat. I knew some educated boy helped him.” Then she smiled. “But the two rotis line. That one was all him.”
It was. The best line always was.
I write about forgiveness sometimes now, and every attempt is secretly about a plate, a postbox, and a boy on Station Road saying okay to nobody. And whenever I read profiles of writers nobody has heard yet, I think about how the best writer I met in school never wrote a thing in his life except one copied letter, in handwriting like letters lifting weights, that brought his mother home.
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.