I Signed My First Autograph at Fifteen
One school prize, one starstruck junior, one signature I'd practiced for years.
By the time anyone actually wanted my autograph, I had been practicing it for four years, so at least one of us was ready. The margins of my maths notebooks from classes six through nine are a museum of prototype signatures: the modest one, the one with the underline, the one with a star that I retired after my sister asked why I was signing like a hotel.
I was not famous. I was not even popular. I was simply certain, with the flat certainty of a child who has decided things, that the day was coming, and that when it came, I would not be caught scribbling like an amateur.
The day came on a Thursday in November, in the year I was fifteen, at the inter-school elocution and creative writing meet held in an auditorium that smelled of dust and floor polish and three hundred nervous children.
I had entered a poem. It was about my grandmother's hands, and it was, by the standards of everything else I wrote that year, suspiciously good, mostly because for once I had written about something I could actually see instead of something I wanted judges to think I felt.
They announced third place, and I clapped. They announced second, and I clapped slower... Then a man in a brown safari suit said my name into a microphone that whistled, and my legs stood up without checking with me first.
The prize was a dictionary, a certificate with my name in someone's beautiful cursive, and a shield the size of a dinner plate that said EXCELLENCE and nothing else, as though the details were my problem.
I would like to tell you I was gracious. I have witnesses who say I walked back to my seat like a bride.
Afterwards, in the corridor where they served tea to the teachers and glucose biscuits to everyone else, a boy appeared in front of me. Class seven, maybe. Spectacles held together on one side with wire. He was holding a long brown register, the kind shopkeepers use, and a pen already uncapped, which I want noted, because it means he had committed before I said yes.
"Didi," he said. "Autograph."
I want to describe the next four seconds honestly, because I have never fully come down from them. Somewhere in my chest, an orchestra that had been rehearsing in an empty hall for four years looked up... and saw an audience.
"Of course," I said, with a calm I had also been practicing.
I did the good one. The final version, the one with the confident initial and the disciplined underline, no star. And then, because the moment felt historic and I have never once left well enough alone, I wrote a line from the winning poem above it: "Her hands remember what the rest of her forgave." I handed the register back the way you hand someone a passport at a border. The boy read it, looked up at me with an expression I filed away as awe, said "thank you didi," and vanished into the biscuit crowd.
For one full day I lived at a new altitude. I told my mother, who said "very nice" in the voice she used for report cards and rainbows equally. I told my sister, who asked if the boy was sighted.
It did not matter...
Someone had wanted my name.
Not my roll number, not my homework to copy. My name, in my hand, because of something I wrote.
The correction arrived on Monday, as corrections do.
A girl from my class, whose cousin studied at the boy's school, brought the intelligence to lunch like a woman unveiling a cake. The boy's name was Deepak. The register was famous. Deepak collected everybody. He had the autograph of the egg-and-spoon champion. He had the autograph of a boy celebrated for fainting during assembly, who had reportedly signed, in full acceptance of his legacy, "why." He had bus conductors, one traffic policeman, and the man who came to school to refill fire extinguishers. I was, the cousin estimated, entry number two hundred and something.
My sister did not stop laughing until Wednesday. The shield that said EXCELLENCE watched me from the shelf and offered nothing.
Here is the strange part, though, the part I could not have explained at fifteen: the correction never fully took. Deflated, demoted, filed between a fire extinguisher man and a fainter... I kept writing anyway, and I kept entering things anyway. The next month I sent that same grandmother poem to a monthly poetry contest I found on a library noticeboard, my first envelope ever addressed to strangers, and losing it barely dented me. Some engine had been switched on in that corridor and did not much care about the fine print of its ignition.
Years of workshops and rejections and the slow unglamorous business of actually learning to write would eventually give me better reasons to continue. But the first reason was a boy with a shopkeeper's register, and I have stopped being embarrassed about that.
Nobody forgets the first stranger who treated their name like it might be worth something someday, even if he also had the fire extinguisher man.
I told the Deepak story for twenty years as a joke against myself, my one-day career as a celebrity. It killed at dinners. And then, two months ago, the ending arrived in the post, care of my publisher, in an envelope addressed in careful blue ink.
A handwritten letter. From a schoolteacher in Nashik. He said he had seen my name on a book and wanted to confirm something before he made a fool of himself: had I, in November of that year, at that particular auditorium, signed a brown register for a boy in class seven?
It was Deepak.
The spectacles are bifocals now, he wrote, but still crooked.
The register was long gone, lost in a house move decades ago, and he said he could not honestly claim to remember most of the people in it. But he remembered mine, he wrote, because I was the only one, out of all two hundred and something, who wrote a line above the name.
He said he had not understood it at twelve... and then one day at thirty he had understood it completely, and that he says it to himself sometimes about his own mother. He teaches English to class seven, the age he was. Every year, he wrote, when a student wins their first anything, he tells them to practice their signature, because somebody will ask one day, and it is a serious thing to be ready for a childhood hope that actually arrives.
At the bottom of the letter, after his name, there was a postscript. "My student Sayali won the district essay prize this month. She does not believe anyone will ever want her autograph. Please tell her she is wrong."
So last Sunday I sat at my desk with one blank card and a good pen, and I will admit, before signing, I practiced once on scrap paper, because form matters and fifteen-year-olds are watching. Then I wrote, "For Sayali, entry number one," and a line just for her above my name, and I did the signature. The final version. Confident initial, disciplined underline.
No star. Some things you retire. The rest you keep ready.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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