The Wall of Poems Outside the Hospital
Families tape verses near the gate, a noticeboard for hope.
The first poem I ever read on that wall was held up with surgical tape, and somehow that felt right.
Whoever put it there had run out of the ordinary kind, I suppose, or maybe surgical tape is simply what a hospital hands you when you ask at the desk with shaking hands. The poem was four lines in blue ballpoint on the back of a pharmacy bill. It said, more or less, that the writer's mother had taught her to make rice without burning it, and that she was not ready to make rice alone. I read it eleven times. I know it was eleven because counting things was the only activity keeping me upright that week.
My father had been in the cardiac ICU of the government hospital for six days. Visiting hours were four to five, which meant the other twenty-three hours belonged to the corridor, the phenyl smell, the tube lights that hummed one note forever, and the stretch of pavement outside gate number two where the chai stall opened at five in the morning and closed whenever the last worried person went home.
Between the gate and the chai stall there was a wall. Yellow once, grey mostly, stained where a hundred monsoons had wept down it. And taped to that wall, at heights ranging from a tall man's reach to a child's, were poems. Dozens of them. Some on notebook paper, some on the backs of X-ray envelopes, one written directly onto a torn piece of a cement bag in handwriting so beautiful it looked printed.
Nobody official had sanctioned it... Nobody official had stopped it either, which in a city like ours counts as a blessing.
The guard at gate two was a man named Ramdin, sixty-something, with a moustache that had gone white in patches like a map of somewhere cold. Every morning I watched him walk the length of the wall before his shift, pressing down the corners that had lifted overnight, moving the lowest poems higher when rain was coming. He did it the way a man waters plants he did not plant.
On my third morning I asked him who started it. He shrugged. "Somebody's sorrow," he said. "Sorrow starts everything." Then he checked my visitor slip like we had been discussing the weather.
The poems were not good, mostly. I want to be honest about that. There were Urdu couplets copied from memory with the second line slightly wrong. There was a child's crayon drawing of a stick figure on a bed with the words GET UP NANU in orange. There was a typed page of Ghalib somebody had underlined so hard the pen had gone through. There were prayers pretending to be poems and poems pretending to be prayers, and after a while I could not tell the difference and stopped trying.
None of it was good. All of it was true.
I had not written anything since college. Back then I wrote the kind of clever, armoured poems that impress exactly nobody, and I quit the way you quit anything that never saw you cry.
For six days I read that wall like scripture and told myself I was just a reader here.
Then came the night before my father's surgery. They make you sign a consent form that lists everything that can go wrong, in font small enough to be merciful. I signed it at 11 p.m. and they gave me a photocopy, and I sat on the pavement outside gate two with that photocopy on my knee, and at some point... I turned it over.
I wrote about his hands.
That was all.
How his hands taught me to hold a cricket bat and a pen and a razor, in that order, and how in the ICU they had taped a pulse monitor to his finger and his hand looked, for the first time in my life, like something that could be taken from me. It was fourteen lines. I did not fix any of them.
At three in the morning I taped it to the wall, low down, half hidden behind an electricity meter, the way you submit a thing while praying nobody reads it. Then I went and sat in the corridor and waited for the sky to change colour.
The surgery took five hours.
It went well.
Recovery was slow in the way rivers are slow, moving even when you cannot see it move. There was a nurse called Sister Agnes who scolded my father into eating, and the afternoon he made his first joke, something terrible about the hospital dal being the real heart risk, I walked out to the chai stall and cried into a glass of cutting chai like a professional.
On my way back in, I stopped at the wall out of habit. Under my poem, in pencil, in a stranger's handwriting, someone had written: Mine came home. Yours will too. Keep the chair by his bed warm.
I stood there a long time... Auto rickshaws went by. The chai man banged his kettle. Somewhere inside the building my father was complaining about dal. And I understood, finally, what the wall was actually for.
Hope, in a place like that, is not a feeling. It is a thing you tape up where strangers can see it, so they can borrow it when theirs runs out.
My father came home on a Tuesday. Life resumed the way it does, rudely, with electricity bills and office emails, and I mostly stopped thinking about gate number two... Mostly.
Four months later I went back with a box of laddoos for Ramdin, because my mother raised me right. From the auto I could already see something wrong. Two men in municipal overalls, rollers, a tray of fresh yellow paint. The administration had received a complaint about defacement... Defacement.
The wall was being returned to blankness while I watched.
Ramdin saw my face and held up one finger, went to his stool by the gate, and pulled out a plastic folder from underneath it. Inside, in polythene sleeves, was every poem. Every single one. The rice poem. The crayon Nanu. The cement bag with the beautiful handwriting. Each one had a date pencilled in the corner in his own hand, the day it went up.
"You saved them," I said, uselessly.
"My wife died in this hospital," he said. "Nineteen years back. The first paper on that wall was mine." He said it the way he said everything, like he was checking a visitor slip. Then he found my consent-form poem, with the pencilled reply still under it, and handed it back to me. "This one's owner I know," he said, and almost smiled.
I photographed everything in that folder before I left, every sleeve, both sides. Later I posted the pictures on a community wall for poets, because those verses deserved more witnesses than one gate could give them, and strangers wrote under them exactly the way that pencil stranger had written under mine. One woman recognised her own sister's handwriting. She had not known the poem existed.
As for me, I kept writing. Badly at first, then less badly. I finally learned to write toward the grief instead of around it, and, harder still, to write about hope without flinching, which I had always assumed was a skill for softer people. It is not. It is a skill for people who have sat outside gate number two.
Last month I passed the hospital in a taxi and made the driver slow down. The wall was yellow, clean, freshly official.
And near the electricity meter, low down, half hidden, one new poem. Blue ballpoint. Held up with surgical tape.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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