Chalk Poems on the Pavement, Gone by Noon
Someone writes them at dawn and lets the city's feet edit.
The first one appeared on a Tuesday, outside the fruit stall where I buy bananas I never finish. Four lines in blue chalk, written straight onto the footpath: "This pavement has carried forty years of mothers. Walk like you know that."
I stood over it while the morning crowd split around me the way water splits around a stone. A man with a gas cylinder on his shoulder read it too, grunted, and stepped around the words instead of over them. That small swerve of his feet felt like applause.
By noon it was gone.
Not erased. Edited.
A thousand sandals and office shoes had walked through it until "forty years of mothers" was a blue smear, and then not even that. I know because I went back at lunch to photograph it and photographed dust instead.
The second one arrived nine days later, near the bus stop on the corner, same handwriting, this time in yellow: "The 340 is late again. So is everything you are waiting for. Wait anyway." Two college girls were laughing at it, and one read it aloud in the exaggerated voice of a news anchor... and halfway through the reading, her voice stopped being a joke.
I started leaving for work twenty minutes early after that.
For six weeks I mapped them. They only appeared within a three street radius of the fruit stall. Never on Sundays. Always gone by noon, sometimes by ten if it had rained, because rain turns chalk into watercolour and watercolour into memory.
I photographed every one I could catch and posted the pictures on a community wall for poets, where strangers started asking for the next one like it was a serial they were following. Somebody commented that it was the best ephemeral street art in the city precisely because nobody was signing it. Somebody else said it had to be an art student building a portfolio. A third person said, with total confidence, that it was a retired schoolteacher, because only teachers still trusted chalk.
Everyone was wrong, including me.
I had decided it was a young insomniac with paint stained jeans and heartbreak to spare. That was the story I wanted, so that was the story I told myself. Which is why, when I finally dragged myself out of bed at 4:40 one morning with a thermos of bad coffee and stationed myself in the doorway of the shuttered medical store, I nearly missed him.
The municipal sweeper came first, the way he came every morning, green uniform faded to the colour of old leaves, broom hissing along the gutter. I looked past him for my insomniac. The street stayed empty... The sky went from black to the colour of a bruise healing.
And then the sweeper leaned his broom against the lamppost, lowered himself to his knees with the slow ceremony of a man whose knees keep accounts, and took a stub of blue chalk out of his shirt pocket.
He also took out a notebook. A school notebook, the ruled kind, its cover gone soft as cloth. He opened it to a marked page, squinted, and began to copy.
I crossed the road the way you approach a bird you don't want to frighten. He heard me anyway and looked up without guilt, without surprise, the chalk still touching the ground.
"You are the one photographing them," he said. Not a question. "You stand there. Tuesdays."
His name was Dattaram. He had swept that street for twenty two years. The notebook belonged to his wife, Sushila, who had died fourteen months earlier, on a Tuesday, and who had spent her whole life writing poems in it after the housework was done and showing them to no one.
Not to him. Not to their son in Pune. No one.
He found the notebook while clearing her steel cupboard, wedged behind the good bedsheets that were being saved for guests who never came.
"I read one page a night," he said. "I read slowly. She would laugh at how slowly." He tapped the pavement with the chalk. "One poem a week, I put here. Where she bought vegetables. She walked on this exact footpath ten thousand times."
"She wrote them for no one. I am just delivering the mail late."
I asked him the obvious, stupid question. Why the pavement? Why not a book, a frame, something permanent, something that would not be under everyone's feet by nine and gone by noon?
He looked at me like I had asked why funerals have flowers.
"If it stays, nobody reads it," he said. "You have a calendar on your wall. When did you last read it? Nothing gets read like a thing that is leaving."
Then he picked up his broom and swept around the wet blue words, carefully, the way you sweep around a sleeping child, and moved on down the street, and the city began arriving to walk his wife into the stone.
What the Feet Decide
I kept photographing them, but it was different once I knew. I noticed things I had missed. The poems were domestic in a way no art student would fake: pressure cookers, the smell of ironed cotton, the specific loneliness of two o'clock in the afternoon when the tiffin is washed and the flat goes quiet. One began, "I have salted his food for thirty years and he has never once tasted the salt." I stood over that one for a long time. A delivery boy read it next to me and said, softly, Arre, which is a complete review.
With his permission, though he waved the word permission away like a fly, I kept posting them. I filed them where they belonged, with the other poems that circle grief without flinching, and people I will never meet wrote things under Sushila's lines like "my mother, exactly" and "who is this woman." Who is this woman. She would have been seventy one. She made, by Dattaram's testimony, the best sabudana khichdi in the building and a poem about it that rhymed "pearl" with "whole world" and somehow earned it.
He refused every suggestion that involved his own name. Her name, he allowed, once, written small at the bottom of a chalk poem like a signature on a steamed up mirror. It lasted until 9:15 in the morning. I checked.
The notebook was finite.
I knew this the way you know winter is coming... and still act surprised. Through those weeks I understood I was watching a man conduct the slowest possible goodbye, one Tuesday at a time, letting the city do the letting go that he could not do alone. There is a whole shelf of writing about memory and what we do to keep it, but I have never seen anything truer than a sanitation worker on his knees at dawn, copying his dead wife's handwriting in chalk so that ten thousand strangers could walk her home.
The city read her for eleven more Tuesdays. Then the notebook ended, the way notebooks do, mid page, with white lines left over.
The last thing he wrote on the pavement was not hers.
I could tell before he told me, because the handwriting was different, uneven, pressed too hard, the writing of a man who holds a pen the way he holds a hammer. It said: "Thank you for stepping lightly."
It rained at eleven that day. I stood under the medical store awning and watched the blue letters loosen and run into the gutter in thin bright threads, like ink going back to wherever ink comes from. Dattaram swept the water along with his broom, not looking down.
By noon the pavement was just a pavement, grey and blank and full.
I still leave for work twenty minutes early. Old habit... I read the ground as I go.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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