I Practiced a Signature for a Name I'd Change
At fifteen I rehearsed futures in the back of my notebook.
The last four pages of my class ten physics notebook contain no physics. They contain roughly three hundred signatures belonging to women who do not exist.
I found the notebook last month in a carton labelled COLLEGE MISC in my parents' storeroom, under a badminton racquet with two strings gone and a geometry box that still smelled of pencil shavings. The front of the notebook is all dutiful diagrams, ray optics, neat arrows, marks out of ten. Then you flip it over, open it from the back the way we opened everything secret, and there she is. There they are. All the women I was planning to become.
At fifteen, I practiced three signatures.
The first was Meera Ashar. Ashar was not anyone's surname that I knew. I had built it from sounds I liked, the way you build a body for a ghost. Meera Ashar was a writer. Her signature was all confidence, the M like a mountain range, the underline flicked back beneath the whole name like a cape. Meera Ashar gave interviews. Meera Ashar had opinions about coffee. Meera Ashar was, crucially, not from a two-room flat above a hardware shop in Ghatkopar.
The second was Meera Khanna, and I am afraid it is exactly what you think it is. Ronak Khanna sat two benches ahead in tuition and once asked to borrow my Camlin eraser, an event I ran as breaking news in my head for two full weeks. Meera Khanna's signature was rounder, softer, a signature that had been asked to compromise and had agreed cheerfully. I practiced her about forty times and even then some part of me noticed she was the most boring of the three.
The third had no surname at all. Just Meera, with a full stop after it, like the single-name authors on the spines in the library. That one I practiced the least, because it frightened me the most. It assumed the world would one day need no further clarification.
My actual name, the one on the fee receipts and the ration card, was Meera Vinod Salvi. It felt to me then like a queue token. Something issued, not chosen.
I never once practiced it.
My mother caught me at it on a Sunday afternoon. I was lying on my stomach on the bed, notebook against the pillow, perfecting Meera Ashar's cape flourish while the pressure cooker whistled in the kitchen. She leaned over my shoulder, read for a moment... and I braced for the standard lecture on wasted paper and wasted futures.
Instead she said, quietly... "Your A is weak. It should not look like it is apologising." Then she went back to the kitchen.
I did not understand that sentence for twenty years.
Here is the turn, and I promise you I did not see it coming either.
When we cleared the storeroom last month, my notebook was not the only notebook in that carton. Underneath it, wrapped in a plastic bag from a shop that closed in the nineties, was a thin diary that had been my mother's. And in the back of it, in fading blue ink, a seventeen-year-old girl had practiced a signature, over and over, the same one, only one.
Sunita Vinod Salvi is my mother's married name. The diary said Sunita Prabhakar Jadhav, forty, fifty, sixty times, the loops getting braver down the page.
She had not been rehearsing an escape. She had been rehearsing a keeping.
She was about to be married, about to have her name amputated and replaced as a matter of course, and in the back pages of a diary she was memorising herself before the change, the way you stare at a house before the train pulls away.
I had practiced names to run toward. She had practiced hers to say goodbye to it.
At fifteen I rehearsed the women I might become. It took me two decades to learn my mother had rehearsed the woman she had to stop being.
I sat on the storeroom floor with both notebooks open, hers and mine, two girls thirty years apart doing forgery in opposite directions, and I cried into a badminton racquet, which I do not recommend for absorbency.
When I asked her about it that evening she laughed and waved her hand, that gesture women of her generation use to declare a wound officially closed for visitors. "Everyone did it," she said. "It was normal." Then, after a pause... not looking at me: "Prabhakar. My father. He had beautiful handwriting. I wanted mine to match his before mine stopped being his." That is the most she has ever said about it, and I have learned not to dig where she has planted grass.
What happened to my three women, you ask. Meera Khanna died of natural causes around class twelve, when Ronak Khanna revealed a personality. Meera the single-name legend I released like a balloon, with gratitude. And Meera Ashar, the invented writer with the cape, turned out to be real all along. She was just wearing my name.
Because the strange arithmetic of it is this: I did become a writer, a small one, the kind with a day job and a drawer of drafts, and when my first poem was accepted by a tiny journal, the editor asked how I wanted the byline to read.
I stared at that email for a long time... Fifteen-year-old me had prepared three answers, all of them rehearsed, all of them signed and ready.
I typed Meera Vinod Salvi. Full name. The queue token.
Except it did not feel like a token anymore. It felt like the only signature I had never needed to practice because I had been signing it, in one way or another, my whole life. The Vinod in the middle is my father, and the Salvi carries my mother in its shadow, and somewhere behind that, unrecorded, a girl named Jadhav with beautiful borrowed loops.
The poem itself came out of a prompt I almost scrolled past: write about a name you almost had. I sent the finished thing to a corner of the internet that runs profiles of writers nobody had heard yet, which felt right, because Meera Ashar had spent decades being unheard on principle, and it was time.
These days I write a lot about new beginnings, which is funny for someone whose big discovery was that she did not need one.
I kept both notebooks. They sit together on my shelf now, back pages touching, physics facing outward, all our secret women pressed between the covers like flowers.
And my signature today? It is a mess, honestly... Doctors' prescription territory. But the A stands up straight.
It does not apologise to anyone.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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