The Poem Scratched Into the Hostel Wall
Generations of students added a line each; nobody knows who started it.
Behind the steel cupboard in room 214 of Mukherjee Hostel, someone had scratched a rule into the plaster: Add one line. Sign nothing.
Below it, in forty-one different sets of handwriting, was a poem.
I found it during my first week of college, and I found it for the least poetic reason imaginable: I was hiding a contraband electric kettle from the warden, and the gap behind the cupboard was the only space in that room the man had never thought to inspect. I wedged myself in with my phone torch and came face to face with four decades of strangers.
The oldest lines were barely there, scratched with what must have been a compass point, gone silver with age. Some had years beside them. 1987. 1991. 1994. Others floated undated, in ballpoint, in pencil, one in what I eventually realized was correction fluid applied with a pin. The handwriting changed every line, cramped then flamboyant then careful then wild, like a relay race run in ink.
The first line, the 1987 line, the one that started everything, read: "I was here, it was hard, I stayed."
Under it, the strangers had kept going. "The fan turns like it is looking for someone." "My mother's voice arrives two days before her letters do." "Exams end. The loneliness reschedules." Somewhere near the middle, some blessed comedian had contributed: "The mess dal is also anonymous collective art." And directly below that, in different ink, a stern reply: "Line 22 is not taking this seriously." Which had become, by accident or genius, line 23.
Nobody talked about it openly. That was the strangest part. When I asked my senior about it, he denied all knowledge with the specific smile of a man who had already added his line. The poem was the hostel's one universal secret, passed down not by telling but by kettle-hiding and mosquito-chasing and all the other reasons a nineteen-year-old ends up behind a cupboard with a torch.
The etiquette, as far as I could reconstruct it, was this: one line per occupant, usually added in the final weeks before leaving, never signed, never explained. You did not add a line because you had something clever to say. You added a line because the room had watched you become someone, and the wall was the only witness willing to keep records.
I spent my entire first year not writing mine. Everything I drafted sounded like a yearbook entry. The wall had earned lines like "I was here, it was hard, I stayed," and I kept producing sentiments a greeting card would reject for being too smooth.
Then, in my third year, the notice went up: full renovation over the summer break. Scraping, replastering, painting. The kind of notice that means nothing to almost everyone and everything to the six of us who knew what was behind the cupboard in 214.
The night before the contractors came, the electricity failed on schedule, because in our hostel it always failed, and we worked by candlelight, which felt less like inconvenience and more like ceremony. Six of us crammed into the gap and around it, one reading aloud, two transcribing, the rest holding candles and arguing about whether a faded word was "harbour" or "herbarium." Wax dripped on my wrist. Forty-one lines, older than most of us, moving one by one from plaster to paper in a dark room that smelled of smoke and instant noodles.
It was at line fourteen that my whole night tilted.
I was the one transcribing it. "Some nights I practice saying things I will never say to my father."
Dated 1993.
And I stopped... because I knew the handwriting. I knew the slant of the g. I knew the crossed seven in the date, crossed with that particular impatient stroke, because I had grown up watching that seven on cheques, on school forms, on the backs of envelopes.
It was my father's.
I did not say anything to the others...
I copied the line twice, once for the record and once for myself, and when I went home that summer I dug out his old letters from the trunk under my parents' bed and held one against my copy until my hands stopped pretending it might be a coincidence.
I called him from the courtyard because I could not do it in the same room as his face. "Papa, did you stay in Mukherjee Hostel? Room 214?"
The pause went on so long... I checked whether the call had dropped.
"Is it still there?" he said.
He was nineteen when he wrote it, he told me. His own father was a man of registers and silences, the kind of man you reported marks to, not feelings. My father had stood behind that same cupboard with a stolen candle on his last night in the hostel and scratched the only honest sentence of his young life into government plaster, then boarded a train and never mentioned it to a single living soul for thirty years.
I read him the whole poem over the phone, all forty-one lines.
He was silent the entire way through...
At the end he said, "Read fourteen again." So I did.
And then, in the pause that followed, my father said the things he had practiced. Not to his father, who was gone, but to me, which I have come to believe is how these debts actually get paid: one generation late, and in full.
A poem with no names on it belongs to everyone who was ever young and afraid in that room.
The painters came in June. I stood in the doorway of 214 like a relative at a hospital bed and watched the primer roll over 1987, over the fan that turned like it was looking for someone, over the unserious dal, over my father's fourteen. It went quicker than forty years should.
But we had the transcription, and here is the thing about anonymous collective art: it does not actually live in the plaster. The plaster was only ever the current address. Before the break ended we had the poem photocopied, and the master copy went up inside the new cupboard door in 214, taped at all four corners, with the rule rewritten at the top in block capitals and a fresh page stapled behind it. Line forty-two went on in my handwriting before I graduated. It says: "Fourteen, we say it now."
Nobody in that hostel will ever know what it means, and that is exactly as it should be.
I typed up all forty-two lines and posted them on a community wall for poets, listed the author as unknown, plural, and watched strangers argue in the comments about which line was best. Someone said the poem read like profiles of writers nobody had heard yet, which is precisely what it is: forty-two of them, one line each, no bylines, no bios. I have written about memory plenty of times since, but nothing I make alone ever holds the way that wall held.
Last winter I visited the campus for a reunion. The corridor smelled the same, phenyl and damp and somebody's smuggled cooking. A first-year let me peek into 214 with the suspicious hospitality of a boy who has a kettle to hide. The cupboard door swung open, and there it was: pages now, many pages, new lines in inks I did not recognize, the photocopy gone soft at the corners like an old banknote.
At the top, block capitals, still holding: ADD ONE LINE. SIGN NOTHING.
The plaster forgot. The room did not.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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