Her Handwritten Verse Is Taped to My Mirror
My grandmother's cursive blesses me every morning before I do anything foolish.
There is a strip of yellowed cellotape on my bathroom mirror holding up the most dangerous sentence I own.
It is a scrap of paper torn from a small ruled notebook, the kind shopkeepers use for accounts. The ink was blue once and is grey now. The cursive slants hard to the right, as if the words are leaning into a wind, and the loops of the g's are enormous, extravagant, completely out of proportion to the sensible woman who made them. It says: Be still, and know that I am here.
My grandmother pressed it into my hand at the railway station in Vijayawada the year I was twenty four. I was moving to Gurgaon with two suitcases, a broken engagement, and the results of an exam I had failed by four marks. I remember the platform smelled of wet gunny sacks and vada frying somewhere down the line. She folded my fingers over the paper the way you close a box, and she said, 'Read it when your head is loud.'
I taped it to my mirror mostly to be polite, in case she ever visited and checked.
She died fourteen months later, in her sleep, holding no grudges that anyone could find.
And the scrap of paper stopped being polite and became load bearing.
Here is what I mean by dangerous. That sentence has physically stopped me from doing foolish things, and I am a person with a talent for foolish things.
It stopped the resignation email I wrote at six in the morning with a subject line I will not repeat. I had the phone in my hand, thumb hovering... and I looked up to check my own furious face and read her cursive instead, and by the time I finished brushing my teeth the email had demoted itself to a draft.
It stopped at least three midnight texts to a man who did not deserve my typing hand. I charge my phone in the bathroom now, on purpose. The mirror stands guard.
It even stopped me from skipping a funeral. My friend's father died and I had convinced myself that my absence would be somehow tactful, that grief wanted privacy... when the truth was that grief frightened me and I wanted the highway exit.
Be still, said the mirror, and know.
I went. I stood in the back and was useless and present, and my friend held my wrist at the door and said, 'You came,' in a voice I still hear.
For years I thought the verse was Scripture, full stop. Then a man I was dating, a diligent churchgoing type, squinted at my mirror one morning and said, 'That's not the verse. It's Be still, and know that I am God. Psalm forty six. Your grandmother got it wrong.'
I remember being strangely furious at him, the way you get when someone corrects your mother's cooking. But I filed it away as fact. She was eighty when she wrote it. Memory slips. The pen wanders. I loved the paper anyway, the way you love a clock that runs six minutes fast, adjusting for it, fond of the flaw.
The tape went yellow. The edge curled like a leaf. I started photographing the paper every few months, terrified of steam and time.
Then, two winters ago, my mother finally emptied the old steel Godrej cupboard in Vijayawada, and she called me to come sort a shoebox of letters. We sat on the floor with tumblers of coffee and read our dead like homework.
My grandmother, it turned out, had been a prolific writer of two line letters. To my mother, in the terrible year of her miscarriage. To my uncle, homesick in Muscat, unloading ships. To a widowed neighbor whose sons had stopped visiting. Postcards, inland letters, margins of wedding invitations.
The same verse was in almost all of them. And in every single one, in that hard slanting cursive, it said here.
Not God. Here.
Once is a slip. Two dozen times across forty years is a theology.
My mother went quiet when I pointed it out, and then she told me something I had never heard. When the miscarriage happened, my grandmother arrived unannounced from three towns away, by two buses and a shared auto, carrying a steel tiffin of rice and rasam. My mother, wrecked, had asked her something like where was God in all this. And my grandmother had apparently said, without any drama, 'God is too far for a Tuesday. I am nearby.' Then she cooked for nine days and went home.
She did not misquote the verse. She translated it into the dialect of a woman who shows up.
I sat on that floor and understood, finally, what was taped to my mirror. Not a blessing from on high. A promise with bus tickets behind it. Every letter was her handing herself over as the proof of the sentence. Be still. Someone is coming with a tiffin. I know because I am the someone.
People talk about keepsakes that guide you as if they are compasses, elegant instruments pointing somewhere abstract. Mine is not a compass. It is a hand flat on my sternum, pressing down gently, every single morning, before the day gets its chance at me.
Two years after we opened that shoebox, I finally managed to write about the grief instead of around it. The poem was mostly about her g's, those extravagant loops, all that flourish spent on ordinary paper for ordinary people. I entered it into a monthly poetry contest because she conducted her whole life in front of witnesses and I thought the poem should take its chances the same way. It did not win. She would have found that funny. Later I put a copy where poems about memory go to find their people, and a stranger wrote to me about her own grandmother's misquoted verse, a different scripture, the same beautiful vandalism.
Last month my niece got into a college in Bangalore, and the family group chat filled with confetti. She is eighteen and terrified and pretending not to be... which I recognize professionally. Before she left, I tore a page from a shopkeeper's notebook, because the paper matters, and I copied the verse in my own handwriting, which does not slant and has disappointingly modest g's.
My pen stopped at the last word... I knew the correct one. I knew the official one.
I wrote here.
At the airport I folded her fingers over it the way you close a box. 'Read it when your head is loud,' I said, and the words came out of my mouth in my grandmother's rhythm, secondhand and still warm.
The original is still on my mirror, fresh tape over old tape, four layers now, like sediment. Every morning a dead woman tells me to be still, and a living one, slowly, is learning how to say the rest of the sentence with her own life.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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