The Poem That Got Photocopied Around School
No byline, folded into quarters, quoted by people who didn't know me.
The first time I heard my own poem out loud, it came from the mouth of a boy who had once flicked ink at the back of my neck in geography class. He stood by the water cooler with two friends, holding a sheet of paper gone soft at the creases, and he read four lines in a voice I had never heard him use before. A careful voice. Then he said, "Whoever wrote this is a legend," and I walked past him with my schoolbag, my secret, and a heart going like a wedding drum.
This was 1999. Class 9, a convent school with green gates, a canteen that sold samosas shining with oil, and one photocopier in the office that ran hot by noon. To explain how the poem escaped, I have to confess something first: I never meant for a single person to read it.
I wrote it on a Sunday night, in bed, in the back pages of my rough notebook, by torchlight, because my mother believed staying up late was a moral failing and enforced this belief with the main switch. The poem was about the last period of the school day. The way the light came slanting through the west windows and turned chalk dust gold. The way even Mrs. D'Souza, who once made a boy cry over the word "seperate," slowed down and looked out at the gulmohar tree. The way thirty of us sat in one room, bored and restless, quietly becoming whoever we were going to be. It was not a clever poem. It was a true one, which I have since learned is much rarer.
On Monday I copied it out in my neatest handwriting, no name, and slid it into the suggestion box outside the staff room. Do not ask me why... The suggestion box was a joke, a small wooden coffin where complaints about the canteen went to die. Maybe that was exactly why. Dropping the page in felt like posting a letter into the sea.
What I did not know was that Sister Meera emptied that box every Tuesday, read every scrap in it, and was fighting a long, losing war to make the school magazine less boring.
She photocopied my poem and pinned it to the main noticeboard with one line written above it in red marker: "Found in the suggestion box. Will the writer please come forward."
The writer did not come forward.
I want to be honest about why. I was fourteen and I opened the batting for the B team. Boys like me were not supposed to notice what light did to chalk dust. If I claimed the poem, I would have to stand inside it in front of the whole school, and I did not have that kind of spine yet.
So I stood in the noticeboard crowd with everyone else, reading my own lines over a taller boy's shoulder, arranging my face into mild interest while my ears burned like two small stoves.
Then the photocopying started.
Somebody copied the copy before the notice came down. Then somebody copied that. Within two weeks there were versions floating around where the title sat crooked and the ink had gone grey from being a copy of a copy of a copy, and every single one of them was folded into quarters, because that is the official file format of a secret at school.
It fit inside a pencil box. It fit inside a sock. One version reached the boys' hostel across town, which meant my poem had traveled farther than I had.
The sightings were the best part. A girl in Class 10 copied it into her diary in gel pen, I know because her bench partner told everyone. Two lines showed up in farewell slam books that year, credited to "Anonymous," which was me, I was Anonymous. Someone misquoted the ending, changed "the light forgives the room" to "the light forgets the room," and I spent a full week privately furious before admitting the wrong version might be better. Getting improved by a stranger's bad memory is a very specific kind of humbling.
Once, Sister Meera stopped me in the corridor. She looked at me the way customs officers look at nervous men with large suitcases. "You read a lot, don't you," she said. It was not a question. I said yes, Sister. She held my eyes for three full seconds... then nodded and walked on, and I stood there sweating like a glass of cold water in May.
Here is the turn I did not see coming. In March, at the Class 12 farewell, a senior named Vikram Bhonsle stood up during the open mic and recited my poem. All of it... From memory.
And when he finished, and the clapping started, and someone shouted "Did you write that?", Vikram gave a small modest shrug that was not a yes and absolutely was not a no.
The hall applauded him. For my poem.
I sat in the fourth row and clapped too, because what else does a coward with a secret do with his hands.
I went home that evening ready to be bitter for the rest of my life... Instead something strange happened somewhere between the school gate and my street: the anger drained out and left a feeling I still cannot fully name.
A senior had carried my lines around in his head for months. He had wanted them to be his. People kept a thing I made folded in their pockets next to their bus passes.
Nobody knew my name, and somehow that was the proof it was working.
Fame is when people know your name. This was better: people knew my sentences.
So I fed the box again. Two more poems that year, both unsigned, both printed in the magazine as "Anonymous, class unknown." Sister Meera wrote in her editor's note that the school had a ghost, and that she hoped the ghost was doing its homework. The ghost was not doing its homework. The ghost was writing by torchlight and sleeping through mathematics.
It took me almost two decades to put my name where my poems were. The first time I posted one with a byline on a community wall for poets, my thumb hovered over the button for so long the screen dimmed. Every instinct from 1999 said fold it into quarters, slide it into a box, run. I posted it anyway. Later that year I even entered one in a monthly poetry contest, name attached, spine finally installed. It did not win. The sky did not fall. Both facts felt like information I had needed since Class 9.
I write a lot about childhood now, and about memory, which is childhood after the ink has gone grey from copying. And at a school reunion two years ago, a woman I barely remembered recited a line at the dinner table, the wrong version, "the light forgets the room," and said she had never found out who wrote it. I could have told her. I had the confession loaded and ready.
I smiled and said, "Whoever it was, I heard he was a legend."
Some poems belong to their writers. Mine belongs to a photocopier that ran hot by noon, and to everyone who ever unfolded it under a desk, and I would not take it back for anything. Somewhere in an old trunk in my mother's house there is a rough notebook, and in its back pages, in torchlight handwriting, the original still waits, folded flat under the weight of everything I became.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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