The Poem I Wrote in the Green Room
Ten minutes before my slot, the real poem finally showed up.
The poem I had rehearsed for six weeks died at 8:20 on a Saturday night, and I watched it happen by candlelight. The power went out across the whole lane, the venue's inverter coughed once and gave up, and somebody's aunt produced a red emergency candle from the chai counter like she had been waiting all year for this.
The venue was an old haveli in Old Delhi that hosts a spoken word night on the last Saturday of every month. The green room was not green and barely a room, a storeroom behind the stage with a cracked mirror, a ceiling fan that turned from memory, and now, one candle on an upturned crate, throwing everyone's shadows up the walls like a second audience.
My slot was 8:40. I knew this because I had checked the schedule eleven times.
In my hand was a printed sheet with a poem called Migrations. Six weeks of work. I had trimmed it, memorized it, workshopped it with two friends, practiced it in the bathroom, in the metro, into my phone's voice recorder at red lights. It had clever images. It had a line about borders and birds that I was privately very proud of. It was, and I could feel this in my stomach the way you feel bad street food, completely safe.
I just did not have the vocabulary for that feeling yet. I got it three minutes later, standing in the wings.
The poet before me was a girl of maybe nineteen in a college hoodie, and she performed in the candle dark with two phone torches held up by strangers. Her poem was about her mother's hands and it was not clever at all. It was true. Her voice broke on the fourth stanza and she did not apologize for it, she just waited, and two hundred people waited with her, and the haveli was so quiet I could hear the candle flame move.
My phone buzzed against my leg. One missed call. Papa.
He calls every Sunday at 9 in the morning, never on a Saturday night, so for one cold second I panicked... and then I remembered I had told him about the show. He had never once heard me perform. He was calling, I understood, to say something encouraging in his own language, which meant he would ask if I had eaten and whether Delhi had gotten any rain.
And standing in that dark wing, holding my safe little poem about birds, I finally saw the actual poem, the one that had been living in my house all along.
My father cannot say I love you.
It is not in his hardware. So every Sunday he asks about the weather, because the weather is the only door he knows, and I answer about the weather, because I am my father's son. Twenty years of forecasts between two people who would die for each other.
That was the poem. It had been the poem the whole time.
I had ten minutes.
I went back into the green room, flipped Migrations over, and begged for something to write with... No one had a pen. A performer named Ishita, half her stage makeup done by candlelight, handed me her kajal pencil without a word, the way soldiers hand each other ammunition in films. I wrote on the back of my dead poem in soft black eyeliner, by the light of one red candle, kneeling at the crate like it was an altar.
I am not going to pretend the writing was elegant. It was a scrawl. Half the lines were just phrases with arrows. Sunday, 9 a.m. Weather report. His voice on the word beta. The monsoon as the only love letter he ever managed to send. I wrote the ending twice because the kajal crumbled, and Ishita, now doing her other eye, said the only writing advice I have ever fully obeyed: stop fixing it, it is already true.
The real poem arrives late, out of breath, and asks why you started without it.
They called my name at 8:43.
I walked out holding a sheet with a corpse on one side and a newborn on the other. The power was still gone. Somebody raised a phone torch, then ten more, and I stood in that small constellation and made a decision I can only describe as jumping: I told the room the poem they were about to hear was nine minutes old.
Someone whooped. Delhi audiences are generous like that with anyone about to embarrass himself.
Then I read the weather poem. I read it badly by any technical measure, I lost my place twice, and none of it mattered... because at the line about my father asking whether it had rained, a man in the second row put his hand over his mouth, and I heard, in the dark to my left, one very specific sniff.
When I finished there was a silence with weight in it, the kind the girl in the hoodie had earned, and then the applause came up like the electricity should have.
The electricity, for the record, returned forty seconds after I got off stage. The universe has timing.
Here is what shames me a little: I nearly did not read it. In the wings, some committee in my head argued hard for Migrations. It is polished, said the committee. It has the bird line. You will not crack in the middle of it.
The committee was offering me safety, and safety on a stage is just a dignified way to be forgotten.
I read an essay on why safe poems lose months later and sent it to three friends with the subject line: the green room, explained.
The weather poem went on to have a longer life than anything I planned. I typed it up the next morning, kajal smudges and all, and entered it into a monthly poetry contest before I could talk myself out of it, on the theory that courage is mostly speed. Later I sat with it again properly and understood I had been circling poems about family for years while writing about birds. The birds were never the point. The birds were the weather report.
Migrations has never been performed. It sits in a drawer, printed side up, and on its back, in fading eyeliner, is the only draft of the best thing I have written. I have been offered lamination. I have declined. Some things should stay smudged.
And the calls did not change, in case you are hoping for that ending. My father still phones on Sundays at 9 and asks about the rain. But now, when I answer, I know exactly what is being said underneath, and I report the weather back to him slowly, in detail, cloud by cloud, the way you would say anything you truly meant.
Last Sunday he stayed on the line a beat longer than usual... and said, acha, take care of your throat, you have your shows.
Heavy rainfall. Visibility low. All of it love.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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