The Notebook Under My Mattress
Everything I couldn't say at dinner went there, in pencil.
In our house, dinner had a sound, and the sound was steel on steel. Spoon against plate, ladle against pot, my mother's bangles against the serving bowl. No voices. My father believed talk at the table interfered with digestion, or that is what my mother said he believed, since he never said anything long enough to confirm it.
I was eleven when I started the notebook. Red cover, forty pages, SCIENCE FAIR written on the front in my most boring handwriting, because a notebook that looks like homework is invisible in an Indian household. It lived between my mattress and the plywood base of my bed, in the corner near the wall, where the tucked sheet made a pocket.
Everything went in there. Everything that got swallowed at dinner along with the rice.
I wrote that Bittu uncle called me healthy every single visit and laughed at his own joke, and that I had started eating before guests arrived so I could refuse food in front of him. I wrote that my cycle had a bent wheel for five months and I had stopped asking. I wrote that Saturday maths tuition made my stomach hurt from Friday night onward. I wrote that my father had laughed exactly once that year, at a crow that fell off the water tank and recovered its dignity mid air, and that his laugh was a stranger's laugh, and that I wanted to hear it again and did not know the trick.
I wrote all of it in pencil. Pen was for school. Pencil could be erased, and I erased often, the way you swallow twice. Some pages of that notebook were more eraser than writing, grey ghost paragraphs you could read only by tilting the page against the bulb.
I wrote in pencil so my feelings could be erased before they became evidence.
For two years the notebook did what notebooks do. It held. It did not fix my cycle or shrink Bittu uncle, but there is a kind of loneliness that gets survivable the moment it is written down, the way a weight gets liftable the moment it has handles.
Then, the winter I turned thirteen, the world started editing itself.
The cycle came back from the repair shop on a Tuesday, wheel true, chain oiled, a new bell I had never asked for.
Nobody announced it... It was simply standing in the verandah, kickstand down, facing out, ready.
Three weeks later, Saturday tuition ended. My mother said the teacher had raised his fee and it was not worth it. The teacher, I found out much later, had raised nothing.
And Bittu uncle, who had visited one Sunday a month my whole life, missed January. Then he missed February... Then he became a man we met only at weddings, where my father stayed beside me like a fencepost the entire evening.
Any one of those things is a coincidence.
Three is a reader.
I did the test you do. I closed the notebook on a torn bus ticket, placed exactly on page thirty one, and checked it every evening for a week.
On Thursday the ticket was on page thirty two.
I lay on my bed with my heart going like a pressure cooker and did the arithmetic of terror. Someone knew about the eating trick. Someone knew about the stomachaches. Someone had tilted my ghost paragraphs against a bulb. And then, underneath the terror, a slower thing arrived, because I ran through the changed world again, item by item. Cycle. Tuition. Uncle.
Whoever was reading me had not punished a single sentence.
They had gone down my list of unsayable things and quietly crossed them off.
My mother could not have kept it secret; her love was loud, it clattered, it asked questions. This was silent repair. This was steel on steel.
This was my father.
I never caught him. In two more years of writing I never once found the almirah open or the mattress crooked. The only proof he ever left, and I believe now it was left on purpose, was the pencil. I kept a stub in the notebook's spine, worn to my grip. One evening it was sharpened... Not new. Mine, sharpened, the shavings gone, the point patient.
A sharpened pencil, from a man who did not speak, is a sentence. It says: keep going. It might even say: this is the only door either of us has, so let us not name it, naming is a kind of closing.
So I kept going, and here I have to confess the part I am least proud of and most grateful for. I started writing to be read. Not lies, never lies, he would have smelled a lie the way he smelled rain coming.
But I curated. I wrote that I liked the new bell twice, once when I meant it and once for him. I wrote, testing, that Papa laughed at the crow and I wished he would laugh more, and that spring he took us to a comedy film in the theatre, first and last time in his life, and laughed his stranger's laugh in the dark next to me, and I sat there watching a wish come true and pretending to watch the film.
And in my last year of school I wrote the big one. I want to study literature, not engineering. I know what it costs. I want it anyway. Then I did not sleep properly for three weeks, because some sentences you cannot erase even in pencil; the paper remembers the pressing.
He said nothing for a month... Steel on steel.
Then one dinner, to the dal, not to me, he said, "The forms for Delhi. The literature one, that also fill."
Eleven words.
I counted them then and I can count them still. In our family that was not permission, that was a speech from the throne.
I filled the form. I studied literature. The notebook came to Delhi with me and slowly stopped being needed, the way a crutch does, and turned into poems instead, because a childhood spent compressing feelings into pencil turns out to be excellent training. Years later I entered one of those poems into a monthly poetry contest. It was about a bicycle bell nobody asked for. The judges called it a poem about small kindnesses. They were wrong. It was a poem about the only conversation my father and I ever had, conducted over six years, through a mattress.
He had his stroke two winters ago. It took the right side of his body and most of his words, which felt like the cruelest possible joke to play on a man who had saved so few of them. In the hospital, on the fourth day, when the machines had settled into their own steel on steel, I took out a notebook, red cover, forty pages, bought that morning from the pharmacy downstairs, and a pencil, and I wrote: I knew you were reading. I sharpened my whole life for you. Then I put the pencil in his working hand and held the notebook steady on the blanket.
It took him four minutes to write two words, the pencil trembling like something newly hatched, and if you have only two words available, at the end, after everything, these are perhaps the correct ones.
Sab padha.
Read everything.
He kept the notebook under his hospital mattress until they discharged him. The nurses thought it was sweet. They had no idea they were looking at my family's entire spoken history, and that it was, at last, in ink.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.