The Notebook That Survived Three House Moves
We lost furniture and photographs; my mother guarded the poems.
My mother packed the pressure cooker last and the notebook first. Every move, the same ritual. She would wrap it in one of my father's old undershirts, zip it into her handbag, and carry it on her lap in the truck cabin like a nervous animal that might bolt at a red light.
The notebook is nothing to look at. A school exercise book from 1998, the kind that cost six rupees at Sharma Stationery, with a brown paper cover she folded herself and my name written on the front in her handwriting, because mine at eight was, in her words, an insult to ink.
Inside are twenty-two poems. The first one is about the mango tree in our Lucknow courtyard, and it rhymes tree with free and also, ambitiously, with TV. There is a poem about a power cut that ends with the line, the fan is dead, I am also dead. There is a poem about my father's scooter, which I loved, and one about my cousin Bunty, whom I did not, and the poem makes this extremely clear.
We moved three times in eleven years, and every move took something from us.
The first move, Lucknow to Kanpur, took the dining table. It would not fit in the truck, and the driver charged by the trip, so my father sold it to the neighbours for less than the cost of the farewell sweets we distributed on our way out. For a year we ate sitting on the floor, and my mother announced that this was better for digestion, in the tone of a woman daring anyone present to consult a doctor.
The second move, Kanpur to Delhi, was the monsoon move. I still remember our life stacked on the pavement under one blue tarpaulin that surrendered around four in the afternoon. The rain got into the carton with the wedding album, and the photographs fused into one thick brick of other people's smiles.
The harmonium my grandfather left us swelled at the joints and never again agreed with itself about what note it was playing. My mother stood in the doorway of the new flat doing arithmetic with her losses, and then she opened her handbag and checked the notebook twice, the way you check a passport at an airport.
It was dry.
She exhaled like a woman stepping off a ledge back onto a roof.
The third move was the smallest and the worst.
The factory where my father kept accounts shut without drama, a notice on a gate, and we went from a two-bedroom flat to two rooms across the city where the kitchen and I could not both stand at the same time. I was sixteen, which is to say I was furious on a schedule.
While packing, I made a donation pile for the raddi man, old magazines, a cracked cricket bat, and, because sixteen is also cruel... the notebook.
My mother found it there within the hour. She had a radar for it, I think, a frequency only that notebook broadcast on.
"Ma, it's garbage," I said. "It rhymes school with fool four times. In one poem."
She took it out of the pile and wiped it with her palm, although nothing was on it. Then she looked at me the way she looked at the milkman when the milk came thin.
"Furniture you can buy again," she said. "Nobody sells your eight-year-old self back to you."
I rolled my eyes, because that was my job. She put the notebook in her handbag, because that was hers.
For years I told this story at dinners as comedy. My mother, guardian of the worst poetry in the northern hemisphere. She lost her wedding photographs and saved a poem in which I threaten my cousin with a buffalo. People laughed. I laughed. The notebook sat in her steel almirah in the folded undershirt, promoted to the shelf where the good silk lived.
Then, two winters ago, I went home to help her move a fourth time, into the flat below my aunt's, because knees have opinions and stairs win arguments. She handed me the notebook while I was rolling her shawls into a suitcase lying open on the bed.
"You keep it now," she said, casually, the way people say enormous things.
That night, in my old habit of reading it to laugh, I found the page I had somehow never found.
Tucked behind the back cover, folded into quarters... ruled paper gone soft as cloth. A poem in my mother's handwriting. Dated June 1979.
She would have been seventeen.
It was about a window. Ten lines, no rhymes, about sitting at a window in the afternoon while the house slept, and how the light moved across her wrist like something that had chosen her. It was better than anything in the rest of the notebook. It was better than most things I have read since.
"You wrote?" I asked her in the kitchen the next morning. She was cutting bhindi and did not look up.
"One notebook," she said... "Before marriage."
"Where is it?"
The shrug she gave me contained an entire archive. Her mother had told her the new household had no place for such things, so she left it behind on the shelf above her bed, the way you leave a haircut or a nickname. Years later her brother mentioned, without any cruelty at all, that old paper in that house generally ended its life under the morning stove.
She was not sentimental about it... That was the terrible part.
She reported it like weather from a country she no longer lived in.
I went back to my room and sat with the notebook on my knees for a long time. All those years I thought she was guarding my poems. She was guarding the idea that a child's handwriting is worth carrying on your lap through three cities. She could not save her own notebook, so she saved mine hard enough for both of them.
I did two things after that winter. I finally wrote about the family I come from instead of around it, which took longer and cost more than I expected. And I typed up the window poem exactly as she wrote it, changed nothing, and entered it into a monthly poetry contest with her name on it, first name and maiden surname, the name of the seventeen-year-old at the window. It did not win... She asked me twice when the results were coming, which from my mother is hysteria.
The mango tree poem I left alone. Some things are load-bearing.
Last month I moved flats myself, one city to another, my whole adult life in forty cartons labelled in optimistic marker. Movers came, strangers lifted my mattress into the sunlight, and everything I owned briefly stood on a pavement the way it had in the Delhi monsoon, hostage to weather and luck.
I understood my mother completely for the first time, standing there doing arithmetic with what I could not afford to lose. It is strange which inheritances arrive late, like memory settling a debt.
I packed the notebook first. I wrapped it in a dupatta she left at my place years ago, the maroon one that still smells faintly of her talcum, and I put it in my shoulder bag and carried it on my lap in the taxi while the truck followed with everything replaceable.
At a red light the driver glanced at the bag I was holding like an animal that might bolt. "Valuable?" he asked.
Everything we owned was in the truck behind us. "Yes," I said, and rolled up the window, and the light moved across my wrist all the way home.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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