The First Time My Poem Made an Adult Cry
My aunt read it twice and left the kitchen; I felt terrified and mighty.
My aunt read my poem twice, folded it along the crease I had already made, and left the kitchen without touching her tea. I was nine years old and I was certain I was in trouble.
The tea sat there growing a skin. The pressure cooker whistled once, twice, and nobody lowered the flame. I sat at the kitchen table with my geometry homework open to a page of triangles I had not drawn, listening to her bedroom door click shut down the hall.
Let me back up.
That March, my grandfather died. He was my aunt Rekha's father and my mother's father and, in a way that felt more official to me than either of those, mine. He smelled of sandalwood shaving soap and the inside of an old radio. Every evening he sat on the verandah with the news crackling out of a transistor held together with rubber bands, and I sat on the floor by his feet doing nothing in particular, which is the entire job of a grandchild.
In June, Miss D'Souza gave our class a composition assignment: write about someone you miss. Everyone else wrote about a friend who had changed schools or a dog that had run off. I wrote fourteen lines about Nana. Thirteen of them were ordinary. The fourteenth was about his slippers, which were still by the front door three months later, facing outward, as if he had just stepped out of them and might step back in.
I did not know that line was any good... I only knew it was true, and that writing it opened a small cold place under my ribs. I got seven out of ten, because my margins were untidy.
The poem lived in my rough notebook after that, the one with the torn brown-paper cover. During the summer holidays my aunt came to stay with us, the way she did every year, arriving with mangoes and a suitcase that smelled like her whole house. On the third afternoon it rained so hard the gutters sang. She was making tea. I was at the kitchen table pretending to study, and my rough notebook was lying open where I had left it.
I watched her pick it up the way adults pick up children's things, casually, expecting nothing. I watched her stop stirring. Her bangles had been making their small constant sound against the counter.
And the sound stopped.
She read the poem standing up. Then she pulled out a chair, sat down across from me as if we had a meeting, and read it again with her thumb pressed flat against the page.
Then she folded the page, stood, and left the room.
The house went very quiet, the specific quiet of rain and a closed door.
I did what any nine-year-old does with evidence. I hid the notebook under my mattress, next to a broken yo-yo and a one-rupee coin I believed was lucky.
I rehearsed my defense. I had not written anything bad about Nana. I had only written that his slippers were still there. Slippers were facts. You could not be punished for facts.
My mother found me in the back room an hour later. "What did you do to Rekha?" she asked. Not unkindly. It was simply the standard opening of every investigation of my childhood.
"Nothing," I said. "Words."
At dinner my aunt came out with her eyes rimmed pink and her hair freshly combed, which somehow made it worse, that evidence of repair. She ate quietly.
Then, over the rice, without looking up, she said the fourteenth line of my poem back to me. Word for word. She had read it twice and it had stayed.
"Who taught you to see that?" she asked.
I said I didn't know, which was the truth. Nobody teaches you... the slippers do.
She reached over and held my wrist, not my hand, my wrist, the way you hold something whose pulse you want to check. Then she told me she had cried at the funeral because everyone was crying, but she had cried in her room today because of me, and the second kind was the real one, and it had taken three months and a child to get it out of her.
I had made an adult cry with a pencil, and no one in the house was angry with me. I understood that I was holding something, and I did not know where I was allowed to put it down.
Terrified and mighty.
That was the exact mixture. I lay in bed that night feeling like a boy who had found a matchbox and discovered his whole house was made of paper.
Naturally, I tried to do it again.
This is the part nobody tells you about power: the first thing a child does with it is aim it.
I spent the rest of August writing poems designed to make specific adults cry. I wrote one about my mother's cooking and read it to her with great ceremony. She laughed so hard she had to put down the ladle. I wrote one about my father coming home late from work, and he patted my head and asked if I had finished my sums.
Nothing... dry eyes across the board.
It took me years to understand why the slipper line worked and the aimed ones did not. You cannot point tears at a person like a torch. You can only tell the truth in its smallest possible clothes and then stand back. The slipper line had cost me something to write. The cooking poem had cost me nothing, and readers, even readers who love you, can smell exactly what a thing cost.
For a long time after that summer I wrote around Nana instead of about him. It took decades, honestly, before I sat down and wrote into the grief itself instead of circling it, and longer still before I understood that the poem in the kitchen had never really been about death. It was about family, about the way love keeps setting out slippers for people who are not coming back.
Last year, on a dare to myself, I entered a poem in a monthly poetry contest, my first submission anywhere since Miss D'Souza's seven out of ten. Standing in that kitchen at nine, I could not have told you what I wanted from writing. I can tell you now. I wanted the bangles to stop.
My aunt died two winters ago. Going through her almirah, between her wedding sari and a tin of loose buttons, my cousin found a page torn from a rough notebook with a brown-paper cover. It was folded along the same crease. It had gone soft as cloth from being opened and closed for thirty years.
She had kept the receipt for what I did to her.
I have written better lines since that one... I have never written a more read one.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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