The Slam I Entered on a Dare
My friends signed me up laughing; I walked out with a calling.
My name was called at 9:40 p.m. by a man with a handlebar moustache, and I found out I was a poet the way some people find out they're allergic to shellfish: publicly, suddenly, with witnesses. Until that moment I was just a guy who had come to a cafe in Hauz Khas to watch his friend's cousin perform, drink one overpriced cold coffee, and go home.
What I did not know was that during my second trip to the counter, my friends Ritwik and Sana had written my name on the open mic list. Slot eleven. Under "performance name" they had written, and I want this on the record, "The Mystery."
They did it because two weeks earlier, at 2 a.m. on Ritwik's terrace, I had made the fatal mistake of being honest. Someone's phone had died mid-playlist, the city had gone quiet the way Delhi almost never does, and I said, into that silence, "I write sometimes." Just that. Two words. Ritwik sat up like a meerkat. Sana said, "Write what?" And I made it worse: "Poems. Whatever. Forget it."
You cannot say "poems, whatever, forget it" to your two oldest friends. It is legally a dare in reverse.
So there I was, slot eleven, listening to the moustache man say "The Mystery" into a microphone while Sana filmed my face and Ritwik pushed my chair with his foot like he was launching a boat.
Here is what I had in my pocket: a phone with 214 poems in the notes app, none of which anyone had ever seen, all of which were secretly organized into folders, which tells you everything about how casual this hobby actually was.
Here is what I had in my head... nothing. The family of thoughts had evacuated.
Only one plan remained, blinking like an exit sign: do the joke poem. I had a silly limerick thing about the Delhi metro, four lines, crowd-safe, self-deprecating.
Perform the joke, take the laugh, sit down, punch Ritwik, order dessert. A clean escape.
Slot Ten
The escape plan died because of slot ten.
Slot ten was a woman in her fifties, maybe sixties, dupatta pinned like she'd come from work, reading off an actual paper that trembled at the corners.
She performed a poem about eating dinner alone after her husband's death, about how she still cooked two rotis out of habit and had begun feeding the second one to a street dog who now waited at her gate at eight sharp, and how, she said, looking up from the page for the only time, "grief eventually learns to wag its tail."
The cafe went silent in that specific way where even the espresso machine seems to feel bad about itself. She got scores from the judges, sevens and eights, whatever, nobody cared, the scores were suddenly a silly hat on a serious head. She folded her paper and sat down alone at a table for one, and I watched her hands stop trembling now that it was over, and I thought: she just did the bravest thing I've seen all year, and she did it for a room of strangers and a free coffee voucher.
Then the moustache said, "Next up, The Mystery," and my legs stood me up without consulting me.
At the mic, I took out my phone. The joke poem was right there. And one folder below it, in a folder actually titled "never," was a poem about the year I lived alone in Gurgaon after college, when my only regular conversation was with the night guard, and I used to take walks at 1 a.m. just to stand under a particular streetlight because it was the one spot on the lane where my shadow looked like company.
I have thought a lot about why I opened the second folder. The truthful answer is... slot ten. She had paid full price.
Doing the joke after her felt like paying with buttons.
A dare gets you onto the stage. What you do in the next sixty seconds tells you who you have been the whole time.
I read the streetlight poem.
Voice too fast at first, one hand in my pocket like an idiot, phone brightness burning my eyes. Somewhere around the middle, at the line about learning the guard's daughter's exam results before my own parents knew mine, I heard a sound I had never heard before: a room full of strangers exhaling at something I wrote at 1 a.m. for nobody.
They snapped their fingers... I didn't know that was a thing. I thought something was wrong with the sound system.
I don't remember the scores. Sana has the video and claims a judge gave me a 9.1 and that I did a small bow "like a waiter." I dispute the bow. I do remember Ritwik's face, which had stopped laughing entirely and was doing something older and softer, the face of a friend recalculating you upward. He said, "Two hundred and fourteen? In folders?" And then, quietly, "You absolute miser."
That word stuck. Miser.
I had been hoarding the only currency that grows when you spend it.
After
The woman from slot ten found me by the counter afterwards. Up close she smelled of jasmine oil and marker ink, a schoolteacher's perfume. She tapped my phone and said, "Beta, paper. Phone light makes your face look like a ghost. And ghosts can't make eye contact." Then she told me she had started performing eight months after her husband died, because her doctor told her to "find people" and this was the only room where loneliness was a topic instead of a diagnosis.
I went home that night and did not sleep. Instead I did the thing I'd been not-doing for six years: I let the poems out. I posted the streetlight poem on a community wall for poets at 3 a.m., where by morning a stranger from Indore had commented that he had a streetlight too, his was outside a hostel in Bhopal, and did I think everyone has one... I think everyone has one. A month later I entered a monthly poetry contest with a cleaned-up version, and when I ran dry that winter, I started working from prompts the way other people do morning stretches, badly at first, then daily.
Eight years on, I have performed at forty-something open mics. I host one now, second Saturday of the month, at a cafe with better coffee and a worse sound system. I keep a rule from slot ten: any first-timer whose name was clearly written by their friends gets called "by dare or by choice?" from the stage, and the room cheers louder for the dares. We know what they're about to find out.
Ritwik and Sana still come. They sit in the back and heckle with love. Last year, for my birthday, they gave me a framed printout of the original sign-up sheet, which Ritwik had photographed that night "for evidence." Slot eleven. The Mystery.
Their handwriting, my life.
Some nights, walking home after hosting, I still stop under a streetlight, out of gratitude more than habit. The shadow it throws doesn't look like company anymore. It looks like a man who was smuggled onto a stage by two laughing friends, holding two hundred and fourteen poems and calling it nothing.
I look at that shadow the way you look at an old photograph.
Then I go home and write, because the folders are for spending now.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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