The Radio Station That Read My Poem at Midnight
I stayed up with my ear to the speaker, hearing my words in a stranger's voice.
The power went out at 11:47, thirteen minutes before the only thing I had ever wanted was supposed to happen.
I was fifteen, in a town small enough that the radio station shared a wall with a sweet shop. The show was called Raat Ki Dak, the night mail. It ran from midnight on the local station, hosted by a man named Farooq sahab, whose voice sounded like a truck idling in fog. He read letters from listeners. Complaints about the water board. Love notes signed with film star names. And sometimes, when the night was slow and his mood was right... poems.
I had sent him six. Yellow postcards, my best handwriting, my name and age printed in the corner the way the show asked. Six poems in six weeks... and nothing. In that same stretch he read one man's complaint about a neighbor's rooster twice. Twice.
The rooster had a better run on radio than I did.
The seventh poem I almost did not send.
My grandmother had died in March, and by June the house had learned to talk around her. Her sewing machine still sat by the window, oiled and covered, a black Singer with a treadle worn pale by fifty years of her foot. Nobody touched it. Nobody moved it either.
One evening I sat where she used to sit, pressed the treadle once, and the wheel turned like it had been waiting for someone to ask. I wrote the poem in twenty minutes, angry at everyone and no one, and posted it the next morning before I could fix it into something polite.
It was called The Needle Remembers.
That Tuesday afternoon, the station's daytime announcer said the night's show would feature letters from young listeners. I decided this meant me. There was no evidence... there did not need to be. Fifteen year olds run on prophecy.
Then the power went out at 11:47.
The whole lane dropped into that deep small town dark where you can suddenly hear dogs three streets away.
I dug the candle stub out of the kitchen drawer, the one my mother saved for exactly this, and lit it with the last match in the box. The radio was my grandfather's old Philips transistor, held together on one side with insulation tape, batteries dying slowly since Holi. I carried the candle and the radio to my room like a priest carrying two small gods and set them on the floor.
Static... then the station, faint, swimming in and out like it was underwater. I pressed my ear against the speaker cloth and kept the volume at a whisper, because being awake past midnight required explanations I did not have.
Farooq sahab opened with an old film ghazal. Then an advertisement for a tractor dealership, read with the same gravity as the news. Then the letters. The rooster man again, unbelievably. A nurse thanking the show for keeping her company on night shifts. A boy requesting a song for a girl identified only as S.
12:31. I know it was 12:31 because I was checking my wristwatch by candlelight between every letter, which is not a restful way to live.
“And now,” Farooq sahab said, “something from one of our youngest listeners.”
He said the name of my town. Then he said my name, surname first like a school register, and mispronounced it anyway, stretching the middle of it into a shape my own family would not recognize. I did not care. I have never cared about anything less.
And then he read my grandmother's poem in that fog and diesel voice, slowly, like each line was heavy in his hands.
Nobody warns you about the first time hearing your work in a stranger's voice. Nobody tells you what it does to the words. On the postcard the poem had been mine, private, half embarrassing, written in anger with a leaking pen. In his mouth it became a thing that existed in the world, separate from me, out walking on its own at midnight through every house with a radio on.
A poem read aloud by a stranger stops belonging to you, and that is the exact moment it starts to matter.
He reached the line I had been proudest of and most afraid of, the needle remembers what the hands forget, and he paused after it. The pause could not have lasted more than two seconds. I have been trying to write something worthy of those two seconds ever since.
Then it was over. He moved on to a song request from the bus depot, and I sat on the floor of my dark room with my ear against a dying radio and my heart going like her treadle at full speed.
That is when I heard my father's door open.
My father was not a talker. Since March he had said maybe forty words inside the house, most of them about electricity bills. He stood in my doorway in his vest, and in his hand was his own small silver radio, the one he kept strictly for cricket scores.
“You wrote about the bobbin,” he said.
It was not a question. He had heard it. He had been lying in his room in the dark, listening to the same faint station through the same power cut.
“Since when do you listen to Raat Ki Dak?” I asked.
“Six weeks,” he said. “You kept buying postcards.”
Six weeks. He had heard every night that my name was not called. He had sat through the rooster, twice.
He had waited through all that silence beside me without once letting me know I was not waiting alone.
He looked at the candle for a moment. “She used to sew after midnight,” he said. “Petticoat falls, blouse hooks, school uniforms. That machine sound meant the house was safe.” Then, at the door, without turning around: “Dadi would have scolded you for the line about her feet. Then she would have learned it by heart.”
He went back to his room. The whole exchange took less than a minute. In my family, that conversation was an opera.
I understand now what I could not have told you then. I wrote about the machine because I could not write about her. Years later I would read page after page of poems about grief and see the same trick everywhere: the sewing machine, the wristwatch, the empty chair at the table. We write the object because the person is too bright to look at directly. Half of what people file under memory is just this, furniture doing the mourning for us.
Last winter, three decades and several cities later, I typed a poem into a box on a website and entered it into a monthly poetry contest. Clicking the button took one second and felt like nothing at all. Then I caught myself sitting with my ear practically against the laptop speaker, waiting, fifteen again.
The results took three weeks... The rooster energy of my life continues.
The power came back at some point past one that night. The tube light buzzed awake over my desk, harsh and white and ordinary.
I switched it off. The candle had burned down to a coin of wax on the floor, and I sat with it until the flame finished on its own. Some things you do not interrupt: a poem in a stranger's mouth, a father in a doorway, a small light that stayed with you through the good part.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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