Being the Quiet Kid Was a Full Personality
Teachers called me shy; I was busy recording everything.
My class three report card said "does not participate," which was rich, because I was the only person in that room paying attention. Mrs. D'Souza wrote it in red ink, and I remember thinking, even at eight, that I could have told her three things about her own classroom that she did not know.
I could have told her that Ashwin in the second row chewed his collar only on days his father dropped him off. That the peon, Raghu bhaiya, whistled the same four notes every morning, always stopping before the fifth... like a sentence he never let himself finish. That she herself touched her wedding ring when she talked about her hometown, twisting it a quarter turn, always the same direction.
I did not tell her any of this... Obviously. I was the quiet kid. Telling people things was not in the job description.
The adults had a whole vocabulary for me and every word of it was wrong. Shy, which suggests fear. Reserved, which suggests a hotel table. Slow to open up, which suggests a stubborn jam jar. Nobody reached for the accurate word, which was busy. I was busy. There was an enormous amount of incoming material and only one of me on shift.
By class six I had started writing it down. A small notebook, then many. Not a diary. Diaries are about the self, and the self was the least interesting person available. These were field notes on everyone else. Overheard sentences, catalogued like specimens. "My mother says we are fine now." "He only fights on Sundays." "If you hold the ticket the whole way, you will not lose it." The way our maths teacher's voice went up half a step when he said his son's name. The precise sound of two hundred students going silent when the principal walked in, which is not silence at all, it is a hundred small noises agreeing to hide.
Lunch breaks, I sat at the end of the corridor near the water taps with my tiffin, and the school walked past me like a river past a stone. People say things near quiet kids that they would never say near loud ones.
We are furniture with ears.
I heard friendships forming and dissolving. I heard two teachers fall in love across an entire academic year, one borrowed pen at a time.
Then, in class nine, the notebook got taken.
Vikrant Mehra, back bench royalty, fished it out of my bag while I was at the taps, and by the time I returned he was standing on a bench holding it open, ready to perform me for the class.
I stood in the doorway with wet hands and understood that my entire inner life was about to become a lunchtime show.
He picked a page at random and read out loud: "Rohit cried behind the sports room after the match. Not because they lost. Because his father left before the last over."
The classroom did not laugh.
Rohit was sitting right there. Everyone looked at him, and he looked at me, and I watched him decide something. "It's true," he said, finally. "He did leave." And then, to me, quieter... "I didn't think anyone saw."
Vikrant, to his credit, read one more entry, which turned out to be about the four notes Raghu bhaiya whistled, and the fifth one he never allowed himself, and a strange thing happened in that room. Somebody said, "What does yours say about me?" And then somebody else said it. And then it was not a trial anymore, it was a queue.
I was never shy. I was busy. There is a difference, and it took me thirty years to stop apologising for it.
I want to be honest: it did not turn me popular. This is not that story.
The queue lasted one lunch break, the world reset by Monday, and I went back to the water taps and the river went back to flowing past. But something had shifted by a few degrees. Vikrant returned the notebook without being asked. And Rohit started sitting near me sometimes, not talking, which was exactly correct, because he had understood the terms.
What I know now, and could not have said then, is that quiet children are not empty. They are archives. Every school has two or three of us, stationed by windows, filed under furniture, recording the whole institution in some private format. Teachers kept writing does not participate on my reports, and every year it stung a little less, because slowly I understood that watching was participation. Somebody has to hold the minutes of the meeting.
Somebody has to remember the fifth note.
The loneliness was real, I will not romance it away. There were birthday parties I heard about on Mondays. There was a school farewell where I stood near the speakers for three hours so the music could do my socialising. For years I wrote about loneliness as if it were the whole story, until an essay I read about why safe poems lose, over on a writing blog, put a crack in that. The safe version of my story was: poor quiet kid, nobody saw him. The true version costs more to say: plenty of people would have seen me. I had chosen the far end of the corridor. The stone picks the riverbed too.
Seventeen notebooks came with me into adulthood. They live on one shelf, spines out, other people's weather recorded in a child's improving handwriting. Two years ago I started translating some entries into poems and posting them on a community wall for poets, with the names changed, the way you release old photographs once everyone in them has finished becoming who they were going to be. A woman wrote to me about one of them, the poem with the borrowed pens, asking, "How do you know this? This is exactly how it happened for us." I did not have the heart to tell her that it happens that way for everyone, and that this is the entire secret of the job.
At parties now, I still hold a glass I am not drinking and operate the old equipment. My wife, a loud kid, retired, spots me doing it and mouths across the room, working? I nod. She covers for me. Every archive needs a front office.
And Mrs. D'Souza, if some current of the internet ever carries this to you: you were a good teacher, and you were wrong about one thing only. In the winter term of 1994, you stopped wearing your ring for eleven days, and you told us stories about your hometown twice as often, and your voice did the thing voices do when they are keeping a person alive by description. Then the ring came back... and the stories stopped.
I did not understand it then. I recorded it anyway, the way lighthouses photograph ships without knowing their cargo.
Does not participate.
Madam, with respect... I was the only one taking attendance.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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