My Handwriting Changed When I Did
Old notebooks show exactly which year my letters started slanting away.
My mother saved every notebook I ever ruined, which is how I found out exactly when I stopped trusting people. It is written down. Not in the words. In the letters themselves.
She died in November, and by March my brother and I had emptied most of her house in Pune. Under her bed, behind the suitcase of wedding silk, there was a cardboard carton labelled RIYA SCHOOL in her round teacher's print. Inside were twenty two notebooks, stacked by year like sediment.
I sat on the bare mattress and read myself in order.
Age seven: fat, hopeful letters, every o a balloon straining at its string. I dotted my i's with full circles because a girl named Sneha did, and I wanted to be Sneha. My g's had show-off tails. It was the handwriting of a child who assumed she would be watched, and was glad about it.
Age ten: cursive arrives, borrowed straight from my mother. My capital R was her capital R exactly, the same little kick at the leg. I did not know I had copied her until I saw the letters side by side, her label and my page, mother and daughter in the same ink.
Age twelve: the letters start to swagger. Long confident crossbars on the t's, like arms flung out on a terrace.
Then the notebook from 1999. On the page dated 14 October, in the middle of a sentence about a history test, the writing changes.
It gets small... It leans backward, away from the direction of the sentence, like someone bracing. The circles over the i's become dots... then near misses.
Same pen, same girl, same paragraph.
Different hand.
I know what happened on 13 October 1999 because I was there, in the room with the brown curtain, listening through the wall while my father explained to my mother, in the calm voice he used for waiters, that he had another family in Nashik. Two children. The older one was a year younger than me.
He left before Diwali.
I never wrote about it. I checked.
I read every page of that notebook and the three after it. There is not one sentence about my father anywhere. There is a history test, a fight with Sneha, a list of songs taped off the radio. And there is the handwriting, shrinking, tilting away, holding its breath for four years.
Handwriting is the body keeping minutes of a meeting the mind refuses to attend.
That night, in the emptied house, I did what everyone does now. I typed what handwriting says about you into my phone and read graphology articles until two in the morning. Most of it is fortune telling for stationery lovers. Big loops mean you are generous. Heavy pressure means passion. The actual scientists, when you finally find them, are unimpressed: handwriting analysis predicts personality about as well as your star sign does.
But the studies do agree on one thing, and it is the thing. Writing is the body moving, and the body is a terrible liar. Grief shows up in grip. Fear changes pressure. My letters leaned away from the future because I did.
Age sixteen, the slant softens. That was Mrs. D'Souza, who taught English and made me read my essay about rain out loud to the whole class, then said, quietly, so only I heard it, "You should keep writing. But stop writing safe."
Age nineteen, the backward lean returns for exactly one notebook. First heartbreak, a boy named Arjun, a December I still skip when I count my Decembers.
Age twenty two, the last notebook in the box, the writing is upright, plain, a little impatient. That was the year I left for Bangalore. The year I decided, without ever deciding, to be someone with no visible weather.
My brother found me on the mattress at midnight, notebooks fanned around me like tarot cards. "Anything valuable?" he asked.
"Evidence," I said.
He picked up the 1999 notebook, flipped through it, saw nothing. That is the strange privacy of it. The words hide you and the letters tell on you, but only to someone who has known both versions of your hand.
My mother knew.
That is the part that undid me. In the margin of the October page, in pencil so faint I missed it twice, right beside the paragraph where my writing collapses, she had written one word: dekha. Seen.
She never mentioned it... Not in 1999, not in any of the twenty five years after. She just kept the notebooks under her bed the way you keep an X-ray, proof of a break that healed crooked, in case anyone ever asked.
Nobody asked. I found it anyway.
I took the carton back to Bangalore on the train, on my lap the whole way, like a pet. In April I started copying out the old pages in the evenings, and somewhere in the copying I began answering them, writing back to the girl with the shrinking letters. The answers came out as poems, which surprised me, because I had not written a poem since Mrs. D'Souza's classroom. Most of them circled memory, and the way it lives in the wrist as much as in the mind. One was about childhood, the balloon o's, the girl who dotted her i's with circles because she believed a page deserved decoration.
I wrote that one by hand, deliberately, in my seven year old alphabet. It felt like forgery for the first two lines and like time travel after that. My wrist remembered the loops before I did. Then I typed it up and entered it into a monthly poetry contest, because Mrs. D'Souza said stop writing safe, and twenty five years is long enough to sit on an instruction.
It did not win... It was longlisted, which for a first poem in two decades felt like being recognized at an airport by someone kind.
Here is what I believe now, after the box, after the margin, after the longlist. Your handwriting is not your personality. The loop merchants are wrong about that.
It is something better and worse. It is your seismograph.
It records the quake even when you refuse to report it, especially when you refuse to report it, and it keeps the record in plain sight, on the same page as your history test, where anyone who loves you enough to look could read it.
Last week my niece, who is six, showed me her homework across a video call, holding the page up so close it went blurry. Her a's are balloons. Her name sprawls across the top line like it owns the school. And her capital R has a little kick at the leg. My mother's kick, arrived intact in a child who never met her.
"Your handwriting is beautiful," I told her.
"I know," she said, and went back to it.
I hope nobody ever reads her notebooks in order and finds the page where the letters flinch. But if that page ever comes, I hope somebody keeps the notebook. I hope somebody writes seen in the margin, in pencil, and waits however many years it takes for her to find it.
My handwriting leans forward again. I checked this morning, the way other people check their pulse.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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