The Poem I Carved Into a School Desk
Vandalism or first publication, depends on who is grading.
Sister Philomena confiscated my geometry compass on a Tuesday, which was fair, because I had been using it to publish.
This was St. Xavier's Boys School, Class 8B, third row from the window, second desk. The desk itself was older than most of our fathers. It had a lid that groaned like a ship's door, a pen groove that held everything except pens, and a surface so scarred with initials and arrows and lopsided hearts that writing on paper felt like a demotion. Everyone left something on that desk. Ranjit left a ballpoint drawing of a cricket bat. Somebody from an earlier decade left DEEPAK + ? because apparently even his love life was multiple choice.
I left a poem.
Four lines, carved over three weeks of double maths, one letter at a time, the compass point squeaking through decades of varnish while Pythagoras happened somewhere far away. I can still smell that fortnight: pencil shavings, wet raincoats drying on hooks, the metallic tang the compass tip left on my fingers after an hour of work. The poem went:
This desk is a boat.
The lesson is rain.
One day I will row out of here
and never be caught again.
I know. Twelve-year-old me believed "rain" and "again" carried the whole thing and "caught" was a bonus. Editors have been disagreeing with me ever since.
The carving was not rebellion, exactly. It was closer to pressure release. That year my father had been transferred twice, my best friend had moved to Pune without so much as a postcard, and the only thing that stayed still long enough to listen was forty kilos of government furniture. I did not know the word for what I was doing. I just knew that when the letters went in, something in my chest came out.
Sister Philomena found it during the monsoon inspection, the one where she walked the rows with her hands behind her back like a general reviewing very short troops.
She stopped at my desk... She read. The whole class went so quiet I could hear the rain change its mind twice.
"Who is the poet?" she asked.
Not who is the vandal. Who is the poet.
I have replayed that word choice for twenty years.
I stood up, because in Class 8B you always got caught, the only variable was how quickly. She looked at me, then at the desk, then back at me, doing some private arithmetic.
"Saturday," she said. "Nine o'clock. Bring your own sandpaper."
Punishment was the first review my writing ever received, and I have been chasing that much attention ever since.
Saturday came dressed in more rain. The classroom, empty, smelled of chalk dust and phenyl and the particular loneliness of a school without children in it. Sister Philomena sat at the teacher's table with her correction work and left me to my sentence, which was to erase my sentences.
If you have never sanded your own poem out of wood, I do not recommend it as a critique method, though it is thorough. The letters fought back. Varnish came off in amber curls. My arm ached in a way maths never managed.
And then, halfway through murdering my second line, I found him.
Under my poem, beneath a skin of old varnish my sanding had lifted, there were older letters, shallower, carved by a lighter hand: 1979. B. D'Souza. I was here and nobody knew.
I stopped... I actually looked around the empty classroom, as if B. D'Souza might still be there, forty years late for class, waiting to be acknowledged. He had sat where I sat. He had been bored where I was bored. He had pressed his one sentence into the wood and then gone off into the world, and the desk had kept it under its coat all this time, the way old men keep photographs.
That was the moment the desk stopped being furniture.
It was an archive. Every scratched initial was a byline. Every crooked heart was a submission. The whole thing was a wall of voices pretending to be a place to rest your elbows, and I had not defaced it, I had joined it. Years later, when I found an actual community wall for poets online, my first thought was: someone has built Class 8B, but this time nobody brings sandpaper.
I did finish the job... mostly. But wood remembers pressure even when it loses paint, and if you slanted your head against the window light you could still read my boat, my rain, my escape, printed in ghost grooves. Sister Philomena inspected the desk, ran her thumb across it, and said nothing about the ghost. She just returned my compass.
"Geometry only," she said.
"Yes, Sister."
"And Arjun." She was already walking away. "Rhyme 'caught' with 'taught'. It scans better."
The notebook
Here is the part I did not learn until our farewell in Class 10, when the school did that cruel, lovely thing schools do, making the leaving batch sit in their old classrooms one last time. Sister Philomena gave a short speech. Then she opened a fat exercise book with a brown paper cover, the kind we wrapped our textbooks in, and read four lines aloud.
My lines. Boat, rain, row, caught. Except she had fixed nothing. She read "caught" exactly as I carved it, wrong and mine.
Before she ever handed me the sandpaper, she had copied the poem down.
She had been doing it for years, it turned out, desk by desk, decade by decade: confiscated verses, carved confessions, the marginal graffiti of hundreds of boys who thought nobody was reading. B. D'Souza was in that book. So was DEEPAK, question mark and all.
She erased nothing. She just moved the wall.
I think about that notebook more than I think about any prize I have won since. Somewhere in a convent cupboard there is an anthology of everything we were punished for saying, kept safe by the very person who made us say sorry. If that is not an editor, I do not know what is.
What the desk taught me
I write on paper now, and screens, like a respectable adult. But the habits formed at that desk never left. I still press too hard with pens, an engraver's grip, as if the sentence might need to survive sanding. I still believe the first draft of anything true should cost you some effort in the wrist. And when I finally started writing seriously about childhood, about the transfers and the friend who left for Pune, I understood that the desk had been teaching me the only lesson that matters: put it where someone might find it.
Last year I entered four lines into a monthly poetry contest, my first submission in a decade. Not the desk poem. A newer one, about memory and varnish and a nun's brown notebook. It did not win... that is fine. Winning was never the point of carving.
I went back to St. Xavier's two winters ago for an alumni event. The old desks are gone, replaced by smooth plastic things with metal legs, surfaces that reject the compass point, furniture with no memory at all. A teacher I did not recognize told me the wooden ones had been auctioned off as scrap.
Somewhere, then, in somebody's storeroom or somebody's stove, there is a plank with a boat pressed into it, and rain, and a boy rowing out.
He was here. Now everybody knows.
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.