Stage Fright Runs in My Family
My father froze at his retirement speech; I inherited the freeze and fought it.
My father stood at the microphone for eleven seconds and said nothing.
I know it was eleven because someone filmed his retirement function on a phone, and I have watched those eleven seconds more times than I have watched anything else in my life. Thirty-four years at the electricity board, two hundred people in a hall with tube lights and marigold garlands, a speech folded in his shirt pocket.
He took it out. He looked at it... And the words, all of them, every word he had ever known, left the building.
He said, "Thank you, everyone, please eat," and sat down.
The hall clapped, confused. My mother squeezed his hand. On the drive home nobody mentioned it, which in our family is how you know something has happened. We are excellent at speaking. We are catastrophic at Speaking.
I was twenty-six then and already knew the freeze was in me too. It had shown up in school elocution, where I once recited half of Tagore and then stood mouthing air like a fish reviewing its life choices. It showed up at my sister's wedding, where I had a toast prepared and instead raised my glass and produced a sound that witnesses later described as "a happy cough."
So I did what freezers do. I became a writer. The whole appeal of the page, if I'm honest, is that it is a stage where nobody can watch you load the words. I wrote poems for years, sent them quietly to a monthly contest, collected small acceptances like a man saving matchsticks, and told myself that a poet's voice lives in ink and that was a philosophy, not a hiding place.
Then a small press picked six of my poems for an anthology, and the email ended with a sentence I read standing up: "Launch reading is on the 14th. Each poet reads for four minutes."
Four minutes. Two hundred and forty seconds. Twenty-two times longer than my father lasted.
The Candle
I found out about the candle by accident, three weeks before the reading. I had gone to my parents' flat to eat and to secretly hope the event would be cancelled by weather, plague, or judicial order. There was a power cut that evening, the good old kind, the whole lane dark at once. I walked into the back room with my phone torch to find the inverter switch, and there was my father, sitting on the floor in the dark, in front of a lit candle, speaking.
Full sentences. Steady voice. To no one.
He stopped when the torchlight hit him. In the candlelight I could see he was holding a paper, and I recognized the fold before I recognized the words. The retirement speech. Four years old by then.
"I read it sometimes," he said, not embarrassed enough for either of us, so I supplied extra embarrassment on his behalf. "To the candle. Your Ajoba taught me. He said a flame is an audience that never looks away, so you practice till the flame doesn't scare you either."
My grandfather, I learned that night at the age of twenty-nine, had been terrified of speaking too. A schoolmaster, of all things, who spent the night before every first day of term rehearsing to a candle in the storeroom so that thirty children would never see his hands shake. His father before him reportedly could not lead a single prayer aloud at the temple. Four generations. We didn't inherit land. We inherited a throat that closes and one candle-shaped trick for opening it.
"Read me the speech," I said.
He did. In the dark, in the power cut, to me and the flame. It was six minutes long, and the middle two minutes were not about the electricity board at all. They were about me. About a boy who wrote poems in the backs of physics notebooks and thought his father didn't notice. About how he, a man who measured load and voltage his whole life, had produced a son who measured things that cannot be measured, and how that felt like the only promotion he ever cared about.
He froze on that stage, I understood then, not because he had nothing to say.
He froze because he had too much, and it was about me, and I was in the room.
Stage fright is not the fear of having nothing to say. It is the fear that what you have to say matters too much to survive your own voice.
Four Minutes
I practiced to a candle every night for three weeks. I felt ridiculous for the first four nights. Sitting cross-legged in a dark rented room, reading poems about family to a five rupee flame while my neighbours' TV laughed through the wall. But my father was right, and his father was right: the flame doesn't look away, and it doesn't look impressed either. It just burns, indifferent and present, until your voice stops being a performance and becomes a fact.
Somewhere in week two I noticed the freeze had a shape. It wasn't fear of the audience. It was fear of the third line of my second poem, the line about my father, the truest line I'd written, the one an essay I'd read called the cost of the poem: there's a piece on why safe poems lose that says the line you're most afraid to read aloud is the reason the poem exists. My whole body agreed and objected at once.
The 14th came. A bookshop in Deccan, forty chairs, a mic that whined if you stood too close. My father arrived in his function shirt, the one from the retirement video, which I choose to believe was intentional and he claims was laundry rotation.
I got up. I looked at the crowd... And it happened, of course it happened, the old family inheritance: eleven seconds of nothing, my mouth a corridor with the lights off, forty faces turning politely concerned.
Then I did the only thing I had trained.
I found the single lit diya on the counter behind the audience, the one the bookshop owner keeps by a photo of her late husband, and I read to it.
Not to the crowd. To the flame.
First line to the flame, second line to the flame, and by the third line, the one about my father... my voice shook exactly once and held.
Four minutes... I remember almost none of it. I remember the end: looking down from the flame to the front row and seeing my father's face doing something I had never seen it do in public, which I will not describe, because some things you keep.
Afterwards he hugged me with the full arm-thumping violence of a man releasing four generations of pressure, and said, "You didn't freeze."
"I froze for eleven seconds," I said.
"I know," he said. "I counted. Family record still stands. Mine felt longer."
He gave the retirement speech, in the end. Last year, at his 65th birthday, in our living room, to nineteen relatives and one candle we lit on the table between the samosas, officially for ambience. He read all six minutes. He did not freeze. When he finished the part about me, he folded the paper along its ancient crease and put it back in his pocket, and I understood that the speech was never undelivered. It was just waiting for a room small enough to hold it.
The freeze still runs in my family. But so does the candle.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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