The Poem I Memorized to Survive School
I recited it silently in bathrooms between bullies and bells.
The second floor bathroom of St. Xavier's Boys had a broken window latch, a tap that dripped in three four time, and me, every lunch break of eighth grade, standing in the last stall with my feet pulled up on the toilet lid so my shoes would not show under the door.
I was not hiding from a person. I was hiding from a schedule. Dev Malhotra and his two shadows checked the canteen first, then the library steps, then the field behind the gym, in that order, every day, the way a customs officer checks luggage.
If they found me, the routine was small and efficient. Bag emptied. Tiffin sampled. One slap if I spoke, two if I did not. It took four minutes.
They were never even angry. That was the worst part, how bored they looked while doing it.
Nobody hands you a manual for surviving school bullying. You assemble one out of whatever is lying around. Mine turned out to be a dead poet.
My grandfather noticed before my parents did. He noticed because I had stopped finishing my rice, and in his accounting of the world a boy who leaves rice is a boy in trouble. He did not ask a single question. Instead, one Sunday, he put a typed sheet in front of me, yellow at the edges, and said, "Fifty rupees if you can say this without the paper by Friday."
It was Tagore. Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high. Thirteen lines. I learned it for the money, I want to be honest about that. I was thirteen and fifty rupees was two weeks of orange bar ice cream.
But a poem does not care why you let it in.
By Friday I had it. By the next Wednesday, standing on the toilet lid while Dev's voice went past in the corridor, I found myself saying it with no sound, just my lips and my breath, one line per exhale. Where the mind is without fear. Footsteps. And the head is held high. The tap dripping. Where knowledge is free. The bell... finally, the beautiful bell.
I want to be careful here, because movies lie about this. The poem did not stop anything. Dev still found me twice a week. My tiffin still came home lighter. What the poem did was quieter and stranger: it gave me somewhere to stand inside my own head while the outside was being handled by people who did not consult me.
They could empty the bag. They could not empty the boy.
A poem you keep in your mouth is the one thing no one can knock out of your hands.
I said it at the bus stop. I said it in the corridor outside the staff room, waiting to be blamed for something. I said it under my breath during the pledge, a private pledge inside the public one. By December the paper copy lived in my geography textbook, folded into eighths, soft as cloth from handling.
Which is how Dev got it.
January, first period after lunch, my textbook slid off the desk and the folded square shot out like a seed from a fruit. Dev sat one row behind me, by the window. He picked it up before I could move. I watched him unfold it with two fingers, the way you open something you expect to be shameful, a love letter, a bad mark, ammunition.
He read the whole thing. I know because I watched his eyes go down the page and then go back up and go down again. Then he folded it along my folds, put it in his shirt pocket, and looked out the window.
He never said one word about it... Not that day, not ever. He did not mock me, which I expected, and he did not return it, which I hoped. He just kept it, the way he kept everything of mine he wanted.
I told my grandfather the poem was lost and asked him to type another. He typed two. "One for the pocket, one for the drawer," he said. "Never keep a poem in only one place."
Three weeks later I saw the thing I have never been able to unsee. It was a Tuesday, I had stayed late for maths tuition, and the walk home took me down Dev's lane, which I normally avoided the way you avoid a dog you have been bitten by.
He was standing outside his own gate... Just standing.
From inside the house came a man's voice, not shouting words exactly, shouting weather, and a sound like a chair meeting a wall. Dev's schoolbag was still on both shoulders. He was looking at the gate latch the way I looked at the canteen door.
And his lips were moving.
I could not hear him... I did not need to. I knew the rhythm of it by then better than I knew my own heartbeat, one line per breath, thirteen lines, the head held high going into a place where it would not be.
I walked past on the far side of the lane. He did not see me, or he chose not to, and I have come to believe those are the same mercy.
The bullying did not end that week. It just went hollow, like a tooth. Dev stopped leading it, and without him the shadows lost interest, because cruelty in school is almost always one boy's weather that everyone else stands in. By March they had moved on to someone else, and I am ashamed to say I was too relieved to be brave for that boy. That is the honest ledger of it.
The poem made me a survivor. It did not make me a hero.
Those turned out to be different courses.
I never spoke to Dev again. He left after tenth. Someone said Dubai... someone said Indore. For years I only thought of him in bathrooms, which is its own strange epitaph.
Then last year, thirty years and one grandfather later, I finally wrote it all down, the stall, the folded square, the lane, and I posted it on a community wall for poets because it had waited long enough. I had spent a decade writing around that bathroom. Writing about healing in the abstract, tidy poems, safe poems. This one I wrote plain, with the drip of the tap in it.
A week later a comment appeared from an account with no photo and a name made of initials. Four words.
"One for the pocket."
I sat with my thumb over the reply box for a long time. What do you say to your customs officer, your fellow reciter, the boy who took your armor because he needed armor? I thought about forgiveness and decided that whatever I felt was smaller and more specific than that word. In the end I typed the only thing that was true, and it was Tagore's line, not mine, the one we had both breathed in doorways we were afraid of.
Where the mind is without fear.
He never replied. The tap, somewhere, is still dripping in three four time. And the head, most days now, is held high.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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