The Ghazal I Performed at a PTA Meeting
Agenda item four was school uniforms; I brought longing and roses.
Agenda item four was school uniforms, and I had prepared a ghazal about longing. In my defense, nobody at Westbrook Elementary had ever specified what public comment was for.
You need to understand what a PTA meeting in our district is like. Cafeteria that smells of bleach and yesterday's tater tots. Folding chairs designed by someone who hates the human spine. A microphone that works for everyone except the person currently using it. And Principal Okafor at the front table, a woman with the patience of a lighthouse, presiding over forty-five minutes of parents relitigating the pickup lane.
Agenda item three that October was the budget. Specifically, the line in the budget where the fourth grade poetry unit used to be. It had been "consolidated," which is what money says when it means erased. My son Aarav is in fourth grade. In September his teacher, Ms. Lund, had the kids write poems about a person they missed, and Aarav came home with six lines about my father, who died when Aarav was five, and the poem mentioned the click of his dominoes and the smell of his shaving soap, details I did not know Aarav had kept.
I read it standing up in the kitchen. Then I read it four more times... Then I signed up for public comment.
I meant to write a speech. I sat down the night before with bullet points about test scores and enrichment and whatever language money respects. It was a terrible speech. It was beige oatmeal in paragraph form. And around midnight, out of frustration, I opened the lessons I had been taking online, because for a year I had been quietly learning to write after everyone in my house went to bed, the way some people quietly learn Portuguese. That month's unit was the ghazal.
If you have never met one: a ghazal is an old form, Persian and Urdu by lineage, couplets strung like beads, every couplet ending on the same refrain, each one aching in a slightly different direction. It is the form you use when you want to say the same loss five ways. The classic ones are full of roses, nightingales, wine, and a longing so dignified it wears a collar.
I wrote one about the school. About what gets cut and what refuses to be. My refrain, the phrase every couplet had to land on, was "still grows."
The couplet I was proudest of went: "Cut the line from the ledger, cut the hour, cut the rose: / what a child buried in winter, sir, still grows."
I practiced it in the car in the parking lot, twice, and then I walked into the cafeteria smelling of bleach and tater tots and sat through the pickup lane discourse and the budget presentation with my heart going like a trapped bird.
"Public comment," said Principal Okafor. "Three minutes each. Please state your name."
A dad in a fleece vest used his three minutes on the pickup lane. A mom used hers on the vending machines. Then my name.
The microphone, true to tradition, died the moment I touched it, so I performed a ghazal to a cafeteria of tired parents with my bare voice, which in hindsight was better. You cannot hide behind a dead microphone. I said, "My name is Nisha, my son is in fourth grade, and instead of a speech I brought a poem, because the thing you're cutting is the thing I'm holding."
And then I did it. Five couplets. Roses in a cafeteria. Longing between the budget and the uniforms. My voice shook for two couplets and then, strangely... stopped shaking, because somewhere in couplet three I stopped performing and started meaning it.
Silence.
Not warm silence... Cafeteria silence, fluorescent and total. Somewhere a folding chair creaked like a ship. One man clapped three times, alone... then evaluated his life choices and stopped. Principal Okafor said, "Thank you. Agenda item four, uniforms," and I sat down with my ears roaring and spent the uniform debate composing my family's relocation to a district where nobody knew me.
I drove home certain I had committed social suicide with a rhyme scheme.
Here is what actually happened.
In the parking lot, before I reached my car, a man caught up with me. I knew him vaguely, another fourth grade parent, Farid, quiet at every meeting, the kind of person the pickup lane discourse washes over like weather. He was holding his keys... and not using them.
"That was a ghazal," he said. Not a question.
"It tried to be," I said.
He looked at the school for a second. Then he recited, from memory, in Urdu, a couplet his grandmother used to sing in Karachi while she cooked, and then he translated it, hands moving like he was setting the words down gently on a table between us: something about the candle knowing the moth's address by heart.
He had been in this district nine years. He had sat through perhaps ninety meetings. This was the first time I had heard him say anything that was not "here" during the sign-in.
Some people are not quiet. They are just waiting, sometimes for years, for one sentence in their mother tongue to walk into the room.
We stood in that parking lot for forty minutes. His grandmother had known hundreds of couplets and he had kept maybe twelve, and he carried them the way you carry the last photos of someone, terrified of the day the memory card fails. Nobody in his daily life knew he had them. I went home and could not stop thinking about how many Farids one cafeteria can hold, and later that week I found a whole page of profiles of writers nobody had heard yet, and read them the way you drink water after a long run. There are so many. They are all at somebody's PTA meeting, saying "here."
The budget did not change because of my poem. I want to be honest about that, because stories like this usually end with the school board weeping and the arts fully funded, and what actually happened was slower and smaller and, I think, better. In November, Principal Okafor ended the meeting by saying the winter concert was still on despite the cuts, and then, deadpan, without looking up from her papers: "What a child buried in winter still grows." A direct quote. Item five followed immediately. I sat in my folding chair vibrating.
In January she found money, not the district's, some grant she had chased personally through the holidays, for a monthly after-school hour that the sign-up sheet called Poetry Club and the kids renamed The Longing Society, which tells you everything about what fourth graders actually know. Ms. Lund runs it. Farid came in February and taught eleven kids what a refrain is, using his grandmother's couplet about the candle, and Aarav came home saying "radif" like it was a Pokémon.
And Farid and I have a standing thing now, first Sunday of the month, a cafe halfway between our neighborhoods. He brings a couplet from memory before it can leave him; I bring whatever I am failing to write about hope. We argue about translations. We finish nothing. It is the best meeting I attend.
Last Sunday I got there early and watched the table before he arrived: two coffee cups, one notebook, steam rising and vanishing, rising and vanishing, like a refrain. Agenda item one was longing. Agenda item one is always longing.
There is no agenda item two.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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