The Poetry Club Where the Misfits Met
Room 14B, Thursday lunch: the only place we all made sense.
Room 14B did not officially exist. It was the room behind the geography room, where the school kept broken globes and rolled-up maps of countries that had changed their names, and if you asked the office about it they would tell you there was no 14B, the numbers went from 14 to 15. Which is exactly why Mrs. Kashyap chose it for us.
Thursday, lunch break, forty minutes.
That was the whole constitution.
She never called it a club for misfits. She called it Poetry Circle, on a paper sign that stayed up for one day before someone drew things on it, after which there was no sign, and you found us the way you find anything that matters in a school, by rumor. But we knew what we were. The school had sorted us by then, the way schools do, quickly and without appeal.
There was Kabir, who stammered on the letter k, which would be a manageable cruelty except that his own name began with it, so every introduction was an ambush.
There was Deepa, six feet tall in ninth standard, who had perfected a way of standing that tried to refund three of those inches. There was Josy, the scholarship boy, whose uniform was always one wash more faded than everyone else's and who noticed everything and forgave almost all of it. There was Ruth, who had a dead brother nobody was allowed to mention, so she mentioned him constantly, in poems, where he played cricket forever. And there was me, fat, bookish, thirteen, fluent in sarcasm because sarcasm is armor you can make at home for free.
The first Thursday, Mrs. Kashyap put a biscuit tin in the middle of the table and said, "Rules. What is read in this room stays in this room. Nobody explains their poem. Nobody apologizes before reading." She looked at each of us. "That last one is the hard one."
She was right... We were apologizers. We had been apologizing all our lives, for our height, our voices, our shoes, our dead. It took Kabir a month to read without saying sorry first.
When he read, he did not stammer.
I have since learned this is common and it has never stopped feeling like a magic trick: the boy who could not say his own name could say anyone's poem, including his own, as long as it rhymed somewhere ahead of him, like stepping stones he could see before his foot came down.
In October the power failed during a storm, and the storeroom behind the geography room had no window worth the name. Josy went out and came back with a candle from the chemistry lab and a matchbox from watchman-knows-where, and we read that Thursday in a dark room by one flame, passing poems into the light. It was, we all agreed, the best meeting we had ever had.
After that the candle became law even when the electricity worked. Mrs. Kashyap kept it in the biscuit tin. Whoever read sat nearest the flame.
A misfit is only a person whose room has not been found yet.
I should tell you about the bathroom poet, because this is really a story about him.
All that year, lines had been appearing in the boys' bathroom on the second floor, written in black marker in small careful capitals, high on the wall where a mop would not reach. Not the usual bathroom literature. Lines like WE ARE ALL REPORT CARDS OUR FATHERS SIGN WITHOUT READING. Lines like THE BELL DOES NOT END THE CLASS, IT ONLY MOVES IT. The school painted over them twice; they came back like damp. And the whole school quoted them, seniors, juniors, even the ones who beat people like Kabir, everyone repeating the words while calling them stupid.
In the Circle we suspected each other, obviously. We were the poets... who else? Everyone denied it, and everyone believed everyone else's denial except Ruth's, because the lines had that mixture of funeral and joke she carried in her pockets. She swore on her brother it was not her, and that oath ended the investigation, because Ruth did not spend her brother on small things.
Then, one Thursday in February, the door of 14B opened at twelve forty, and Arman Contractor stood in it.
You need to understand who Arman was. Cricket captain. Head boy in waiting. The kind of boy teachers used in sentences as a unit of measurement. If our school was a country, and it was, with borders and checkpoints, Arman was its currency. He stood in the doorway of the room that did not exist, looked at the candle, the tin, the maps of renamed countries, the five of us arranged around the flame like a seance for the socially deceased, and asked, "Is this where the poets sit?"
Nobody answered... Deepa, I remember, straightened to her full height for the first time in living memory, as if to say: we may be misfits but this is our room to misfit in.
Mrs. Kashyap said, "It is. The rules are on the door." There was nothing on the door. "No explaining. No apologizing. What is read here stays here."
Arman took out a school notebook with the cover torn off, sat in the empty chair, and read us eleven lines about his father timing his batting practice with a stopwatch, and how he had started praying for rain in a state that was in drought. Then he put the notebook down, and Kabir, our Kabir, leaned over and looked at the handwriting, small careful capitals, and said, with no stammer at all, "It is you."
The bathroom poet.
The king himself, sneaking out at lunch to write on his own kingdom's walls the things his throne would not let him say out loud.
He came every Thursday after that, right up to the board exams. He never told his friends and we never told anyone, and I want you to sit with the deliciousness of that arrangement: the five least powerful children in the school, holding the most powerful boy's secret, and holding it gently, the way you hold anything given to you in candlelight. The social order of the whole school rested on our silence, and we kept it... not out of fear.
Out of membership.
Because that was the actual lesson of 14B, the one I have spent thirty years re-learning in offices and marriages and waiting rooms. I had assumed loneliness was a property of people like us, the stammerers and the too-tall and the scholarship-faded. Arman taught us it was a property of schools, of any place that sorts people, and that the sorted-on-top can be lonelier than anybody, because at least nobody expected us to enjoy the sorting.
Mrs. Kashyap retired in 2009. We found each other again the way everyone finds everyone now, and the Circle exists as a group chat that goes quiet for months and then produces, at two in the morning, a poem with no apology attached. Ruth runs it. Josy became an accountant who writes ghazals about tax season, and last year I helped put two of his poems up on a community wall for poets, where strangers finally read the boy who noticed everything. I have been slowly writing about the others too, for a series of profiles of writers nobody had heard yet, because the world is full of Room 14Bs and somebody should keep the minutes.
Arman died in 2021, in the second wave, in a city far from any of us. At his memorial, held on a screen, his daughter read a poem she found in his desk. Small careful capitals. It was about a candle in a dark room, and five faces around it, and it ended: THAT WAS THE ONLY CLASS I EVER ATTENDED WHERE I WAS NOT AHEAD OR BEHIND.
The power cut at my house last monsoon, and I lit a candle before checking my phone for the torch, out of some loyalty older than electricity. For forty minutes, my kitchen was 14B. Then the lights came back on, the way bells ring and lunch ends, and I sat there a while longer anyway, the way we always did, until Mrs. Kashyap blew out the flame and said the sentence I still hear every Thursday of my life.
"Same time next week. Bring what you could not say."
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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