The Poetry Slam That Ended Our Rivalry
We competed for years until one honest poem disarmed us both.
Aman and I hated each other politely for six years, which is the most exhausting way to hate anyone. We shook hands after every slam like diplomats from countries technically at war.
We met at an intercollege poetry slam in Pune in 2017. He performed before me, a poem about his grandmother's sewing machine, and made two of the three judges cry. I stood backstage doing quiet arithmetic on how much of my set he had just made redundant. I came second. He came first. Somebody's aunty pushed through the crowd and gave him a rose.
That should have been the end of it.
Instead it became the shape of my twenties.
A rivalry between friends is a strange machine. You feed it everything. I checked every lineup for his name before I checked the venue address. If he won in August, I trained like an athlete for September. Mutual friends learned to never mention one of us to the other, the way you learn not to mention rope in the house of a man who was hanged, as my grandfather used to say about far less dramatic situations.
The pettiness was operatic. I once swapped my opening poem twenty minutes before a bout because I heard him warming up something quiet in the stairwell, and I wanted the audience to feel a lightning strike right after his drizzle. He once, and he admitted this only later, timed his entrance to walk past the judges' table exactly when I hit my weakest stanza.
"Good set," he would say afterward.
"Yours too," I would say.
Both of us lying. Both of us knowing.
Here is the thing nobody tells you about a rival: he knows your work better than your friends do. Your friends clap. Your rival takes notes. One night in Mumbai I caught him in the second row silently mouthing the ending of my poem along with me, every word, and I felt violated and flattered... in a ratio I still cannot compute. I could have done the same with any of his. I had all of them memorized. I told myself it was reconnaissance.
It was, of course, devotion.
But I was years away from being able to afford that word.
The Night the Lights Went Out
The slam that ended it happened in December, in a cafe called Kohinoor that smelled of cardamom and extension cords. Twelve poets, one title, a crowd packed shoulder to shoulder on plastic chairs. Halfway through the third performer, the power failed. The generator coughed twice and died with it. The organizer, a woman with the calm of someone who has survived many worse evenings, produced a carton of candles.
So the slam went on in a dark room lit by maybe thirty small flames, one of them on a stool where the mic stand used to matter. No mic. Just your voice and the dark.
I had come armed. My poem that night was, I can admit now, a takedown.
It never said his name, but every person in that room would have heard it.
It was clever. It was armored.
I had rehearsed it in the mirror until my face stopped doing anything at all, which I mistook for professionalism.
He drew the slot before mine.
He walked up to the candle with no paper in his hands, and Aman never performed without paper. He held pages the way other people hold railings. He looked out at the dark and said, "I wrote this yesterday. It's not finished." A beat... "Neither am I."
The poem was about us.
It was about his father's kidneys failing that spring, about a hospital corridor in Aundh that smelled of phenyl and cold coffee, and how at two in the morning, scrolling his contacts, the only person he wanted to call was me. Because I was the only one who knew both his poems and his lies, and he could not face a person who knew only one or the other. He never called. He wrote instead, the way we both always did. And then he stood in that candlelight and said the line that took my armored little poem out of my pocket and set it on fire without touching it:
"I built my best work out of beating you, and I don't know who I am when you're not in the room."
Nobody snapped their fingers. Nobody breathed. Thirty candles did all the moving in that room.
Then it was my turn.
I stood at the stool with six years of strategy in my chest and a takedown in my back pocket, and I could not do it. Not would not. Could not, the way you cannot swing at someone who has just opened his hands. So I told the truth instead, off script, badly. About checking lineups like weather forecasts. About the rose his aunty gave him in 2017 and how I had wanted that rose more than I have wanted some people. About mouthing his poems in second rows of my own.
Halfway through, I lost my line. Just gone... blank... the performer's nightmare.
And from the front row, in the dark, my rival mouthed it back to me.
Every word. He had my unfinished, unrehearsed confession memorized in real time, because that is what six years of paying furious attention trains you to do.
I finished the poem looking straight at him.
A rivalry is just a friendship you are too proud to file the paperwork for.
Neither of us won that night. A first-timer, a college girl with a poem about her mother's steel kitchen tins, beat us both, and it was the correct result. We had come to fight and accidentally held a funeral for the fight instead. She had come to say something true, which is the whole job.
We drank chai on the footpath afterward until almost two, the first real conversation of a six-year acquaintance. He told me about his father. I told him about the takedown poem in my pocket, and he made me read it to him right there, and he laughed at the good lines like they were compliments, which, I finally understood, they always had been.
It took me months to write about the forgiveness instead of around it. The poem that came out of that winter was the least clever thing I had ever written and the first thing I ever felt was finished. I entered it into a monthly poetry contest, and before I did, I sent Aman the draft. He sent back three notes and one sentence: "Finally you sound like the guy from the footpath." It placed. He was the first person I told.
I read an essay once about why safe poems lose, and it named exactly what I had been doing all those years. My armored poems were safe. Armor is safe. Nobody cries at armor. Aman walked up to a candle with no paper and no protection, and he did not win the slam either, but he ended a war, which is a bigger trophy than that cafe had on offer.
We still compete. Last month he placed above me in a contest and sent me a single rose emoji, the aunty's rose, our oldest joke now. I am already writing the poem that will beat him in September. He knows. He is counting on it.
The takedown poem is still in a drawer at my parents' house. It is genuinely good. It will never be read aloud. Some poems do their best work in the dark, unlit, like the candles we did not need once the power came back on.
I keep it as a photograph of the person I almost stayed.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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