The Girl in Class Who Wrote Better Than Me
I hated her, studied her, and owe her almost everything.
Her name was Anandita Sen and she used semicolons in Class 7. Correctly. On purpose. I have never hated anyone so thoroughly, so privately, or so usefully in my entire life.
Between Class 6 and Class 9, our school held eleven writing competitions.
She won nine.
I came second in seven of those nine, which is its own particular flavor of misery: close enough to taste it, far enough to know the taste was not for me. The results went up on the green baize board outside the library every time, typed on the office typewriter, and every time the order of the top two names was as reliable as sunrise. Sen, then me... Sen, then me. I could have set my watch by my own defeat.
She sat in the third row, by the window, left side, where the morning light came in over the neem tree and landed on her desk like it had reservations there. She had ink stains on her middle finger and a way of looking out of that window mid sentence, pen lifted, that made you certain she was receiving dictation from somewhere the rest of us did not get a signal.
I need you to understand that her writing deserved the hatred. In Class 8 she wrote an essay about her grandmother's sewing machine, an ordinary black Singer, and there was a line in it about the thread remembering the cloth long after the dress is torn. Mrs. Kulkarni read it to three sections. Thirteen year olds do not applaud essays. We applauded. I clapped along with everyone else while something in my chest quietly filed for divorce.
My jealousy was not noble. Let me be exact about it. I checked her marks over her shoulder. I felt a small ugly sunrise inside me the day she got a B in geography. Before the interschool meet in Class 8, I prayed, actually prayed, hands folded, that she would catch chickenpox. God, to His credit... ignored me.
And then, because hatred with nowhere to go eventually becomes attention, I started studying her.
I became a spy with a library card. I noticed which books she returned and borrowed them next, and found her pencil marks in the margins, small ticks beside sentences, tiny question marks beside others.
I sat where I could see her desk during composition period and made my most important discovery: she wrote everything at least three times. While the rest of us handed in our first drafts wearing our first draft smugness, she was crossing out whole paragraphs she had clearly loved, killing lines I would have framed. Once I watched her strike through an entire page, flip it over, and start again with four minutes left.
She was not better than me. She was working harder than me, which was worse.
So I copied the method, since I could not have the gift. I rewrote. I cut the lines I was proudest of and grieved them privately. I read what she read, then what those writers read. My prose lost its costume jewelry. And in Class 9, at the district level competition, on a rainy Thursday I can still smell, the typed sheet on the green baize board finally put my name first.
Here is the part I did not see coming.
She found me at the cycle stand afterward, standing under the tin roof with the rain hammering down, and she said, "It was the ending. The bit with the father's slippers by the door. I read it twice." Then she wheeled her cycle out into the rain and left me standing there with my mouth open, because in one sentence she had revealed the whole secret: she had been studying me too.
All those years I thought I was the spy... I was also the assignment.
We never became friends, we were both too proud for anything that warm. What we became was better and stranger: two people who passed books across the aisle with one sentence verdicts folded inside. "Overrated after page 60." "The mother is the real story." "Your last poem was lazy and you know it." That last one kept me up for two nights and improved me for twenty years.
Midway through Class 11, her father got transferred to Vizag. She told me on a Tuesday, flatly, between periods, and was gone by the end of the month. No farewell party, her family did not believe in fuss. One day there was simply an empty chair by the window with the morning light landing on it out of habit, and a classroom that had lost its true north.
My writing sagged for a year. I had not understood until then that I had never once written for the teachers, or the judges, or the green baize board. Every word I wrote from Class 7 onward had been written at one reader, third row, left side, pen lifted, and now the words went out and hit nothing.
Envy is just admiration that has not yet figured out what to do with its hands.
I looked for her byline for years. Literary magazines, anthologies, the credits of anything... Nothing.
Then a school reunion group formed online, and there she was: Anandita, now in Pune, a chartered accountant, two kids, profile photo at a beach. I messaged her something clumsy about the sewing machine essay. She replied with a laughing face and one line: "God, that old thing. I don't write anymore. No time. Glad one of us stayed with it!"
Glad one of us stayed with it.
I sat with my phone in my hand for a long time. The better writer had put it down the way you put down a childhood game, cheerfully, completely, without a limp. And I understood that talent decides almost nothing. The thread remembers the cloth. The cloth, apparently, is free to forget the thread.
Everything I have done since carries her fingerprints. When I rewrite a poem for the fourth time, that is her. When I cut the line I love most, her. The first time I sent work to a monthly poetry contest as an adult, I caught myself wondering whose name would sit above mine on the results, and felt almost tender about it. And whenever I read profiles of writers nobody had heard yet, I search the names, every single time, for hers. It is never there... I keep looking anyway, the way you keep a porch light on.
I have tried to write about her many times and always ended up writing around her instead, the way you write around anything that made you. This is the closest I have come, and even now I notice I have organized it, shaped it, cut the sloppy parts, because somewhere she is reading over my shoulder with a pencil, leaving a small tick or a small question mark. Most of what I know about memory I learned by trying to deserve hers.
In every classroom my mind builds, the light still comes in over the neem tree and lands on an empty chair by the window. I am fifty pages of gratitude too late to say it to her face, so I will say it here.
Anandita. It was the ending. I read it twice.
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.