My First Book Launch Had More Samosas Than People
Catering for fifty, attendance of nine, and unexpectedly, joy.
Fifty samosas, nine humans. That is the arithmetic of my first book launch, and I have done that division so many times since that I can tell you the answer is 5.5 samosas per attendee, which is not a catering ratio, it is a cry for help.
The launch was on a Sunday at 4 p.m. at a small independent bookstore in Shahpur Jat, the kind of shop where the poetry shelf is one shelf but it is curated with actual love. The owner, Bina aunty, had hosted launches before and warned me gently on the phone. Keep expectations small, beta. I heard her, nodded at the wall, and then went and ordered samosas for fifty from Sharma Sweets, plus jalebi, plus a banner.
The banner deserves its own paragraph. It was printed overnight by a shop near my house, and it announced, in cheerful yellow letters a foot high, the launch of my poetry collection with my name spelled wrong. One letter off. Close enough that everyone would know it was me, wrong enough that it looked like even the banner had doubts.
I had done everything the internet told me to do. Event page, three weeks of posts, invitations to two hundred and eleven people on my personal list, a reminder message that I agonized over so the exclamation marks would sound confident but not desperate. Forty one people clicked going... Nineteen clicked interested.
Nine came.
Let me introduce the nine, because they deserve it. My mother, in her good silk saree, who arrived forty minutes early and immediately started straightening chairs.
My oldest friend Kabir and his wife, who had a wedding to attend at 6 and came anyway, dressed for the wedding, glittering absurdly among the bookshelves. My uncle, who I am fairly sure came because the market has good parking and my mother is his sister. Two members of Bina aunty's staff, on the clock but kind about it. A college junior I had not seen in six years, who saw the event page at 2 p.m. and just showed up.
And finally, a retired gentleman in a checked shirt, a complete stranger, who wandered in out of the June heat because the store had air conditioning, saw chairs arranged in rows, and sat down in the second one like he had bought tickets in advance.
At 4:25, with the ceiling fan doing its best and thirty empty chairs doing their worst, Bina aunty caught my eye and gave me a small nod that meant, we begin with who is here.
I want to be honest about the first ten minutes: they were grief. I read my opening poem to a room where the empty chairs outnumbered the full ones three to one, and my voice did that thing where it stays technically steady... while the person behind it is quietly filing for bankruptcy.
I had imagined this day for eleven years, and in eleven years of imagining, I had never once pictured rows of folding chairs with nobody in them, patient as gravestones.
Then the stranger in the checked shirt raised his hand in the middle of my third poem.
You do not raise hands at poetry readings. My mother looked scandalized on my behalf. But he was seventy something and air conditioned and unbothered by protocol, and he asked, pointing at the page, why did you say the kitchen went quiet, when the mother in the poem has just died? Kitchens are the loudest room in the house. That is where the crying happens, near the stove.
And just like that, the launch stopped being a funeral for my expectations and became a conversation.
Bina aunty, sensing weather change like all good booksellers, abandoned the rows entirely. Come, come, she said, flapping her hands, and nine people dragged their chairs into a circle in the middle of the shop, wedding clothes and silk saree and staff aprons and all. The samosas came off the trestle table and into the middle. Someone made tea. The uncle who came for parking turned out to know Faiz by heart, whole ghazals, and recited one with his eyes closed while holding a jalebi aloft like a torch.
The stranger, whose name was Mr. Wadhwa, had taught physics for thirty four years and lost his wife in the winter. He told us kitchens are the loudest room twice more, and the third time his voice thinned... and Kabir's wife, glittering in her wedding finery, put a hand on his arm without making it a moment. I read the kitchen poem again, changed one word out loud on his advice, and he nodded slowly like an examiner passing a student he had worried about.
My college junior bought three copies, one for herself and two on faith as gifts. My mother watched me sign them with an expression I had never seen before... and have been chasing since.
Nine people leaning in will hold your book up longer than ninety people politely clapping.
We ended past 7. The wedding guests were disgracefully late for the wedding and did not seem to mind. Everybody left with a bag of samosas, because I insisted, because a man can only carry so much fried irony home in an auto. Mr. Wadhwa took six, told me he would return next month whether or not anything was launching, and did, and still does, which is how a stranger who came for the air conditioning became the most reliable member of my readership.
Here is what I understood in the auto home, banner rolled up at my feet with my name spelled wrong: I had confused a launch with a verdict. Attendance felt like the universe scoring my worth in plastic chairs. But a book is not launched by a crowd. It is launched by whoever actually opens it, and my book got opened nine times that day, with tea, with arguments about kitchens, with a ghazal for company. Most books at big launches get opened zero times between the speeches and the selfies.
That week I posted the kitchen poem, Mr. Wadhwa's edit included, on a community wall for poets, where it found more strangers willing to raise their hands. A month later, on a dare from Kabir, I entered it into a monthly poetry contest. I had spent years reading profiles of writers nobody had heard yet and feeling sorry for us as a species. I stopped after the launch. Unheard is not unloved. Unheard is early.
People ask sometimes, delicately, whether the small turnout hurt. Of course it hurt. It hurt the way the truth hurts... briefly and usefully. And then it handed me a circle of chairs, a physics teacher with a broken heart and excellent editorial instincts, and the single best afternoon of my writing life.
There is a photograph from that evening, taken by Bina aunty on my phone. Nine people, one author, everyone holding a samosa up to the camera like a trophy.
Behind us, the banner. Name still wrong.
I framed it anyway. Both things in that frame turned out to be true: they misspelled me, and I showed up anyway.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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