Poetry on the Back of a Rickshaw
The best couplet I ever read was hand-painted and moving at thirty.
The best poem I read in 2019 was doing thirty kilometres an hour through Aminabad, painted in yellow on the mudflap of a cycle rickshaw. It said, in Hindi, roughly this: take the whole world's wealth if you want, brother, but never let go of your mother's feet.
I was twenty-six, three years into calling myself a poet, and I had spent that entire morning at a cafe failing to finish a poem about, I am ashamed to say, the moon. The rickshaw cut across my scooter at the Kaiserbagh crossing, I read the couplet in the four seconds it was legible, and then... it was gone behind a tempo carrying steel rods. I actually laughed out loud inside my helmet. The mudflap had done in two lines what I could not do in four notebooks.
You have seen these if you have lived in any Indian city. Truck bumpers that say buri nazar waale, tera muh kala. Auto rickshaws with shayari about unfaithful lovers stencilled above the exhaust pipe. Horn OK Please. We treat it as decoration, like the plastic flowers on the dashboard.
That day I started treating it as literature, because it had just outwritten me at a traffic light.
I began keeping a list. Phone notes, one couplet per line, location and date like a birdwatcher. Mudflap near Charbagh station: do not race me, my owner has loans. Water tanker on Ring Road: the thirsty do not ask the well its caste. A school van, of all vehicles, carrying the single darkest line I collected all year: everyone waves at a burning house.
My friends found the hobby hilarious. My mother found it worrying, in the way she found most of my poetry career worrying, which is to say she asked if street poetry paid better than regular poetry, and I said they pay exactly the same, and she sighed at a frequency only disappointed mothers can produce.
Finding the Painter
It took me four months to think of the obvious question...
Somebody writes these.
Somebody holds a brush, leans over a mudflap, and decides that this truck deserves a poem about mothers and that one deserves a threat about the evil eye. So I went looking, which in practice meant standing around transport yards asking drivers who did their lettering until someone pointed me at a shop behind the Naka Hindola bus depot, a single room with paint tins stacked like a wedding cake and a man everyone called Rasheed ustad.
Rasheed was sixty-something, spectacles held together at one hinge with copper wire, fingers permanently the colour of whatever he had painted last. That week it was parrot green. When I told him I collected the couplets he painted, he looked at me the way you look at a man who says he collects doorbell sounds.
“Collected for what?” he said.
“Because they're good,” I said. “Better than what gets published.”
He put down his brush and gave me twenty minutes of his opinion on published poetry, which he could not read, his son used to read it to him, and which he considered fussy, perfumed, and afraid. His word... afraid. Darpok. He said the men who drive trucks are away from home three hundred nights a year, and you cannot paint a fearful poem for a man like that. You paint him something he can carry.
Then he showed me the notebook. A fat school register, cloth cover gone soft as skin, maybe nine hundred couplets in three different handwritings collected over forty years. Some copied from other painters, some overheard, some traded at dhabas the way other men trade cigarettes. And some, the pages he turned past a little faster, his own.
I asked him which one on the road was his favourite... He didn't answer that day. Painters are not obliged to be characters in your story just because you showed up with questions.
The Yellow Couplet
I kept going back. I would buy the tea, he would let me copy from the register, and slowly the room stopped being research and started being a place I went when my week fell apart. I never told him I wrote poems about the moon. Some humiliations you keep.
On maybe my sixth visit I described the rickshaw mudflap from Aminabad, the yellow one about the mother's feet, and his face did something complicated. He asked which crossing. He asked the colour of the rickshaw's canopy. Then he wiped his hands on a rag that made them dirtier and said, “That one is Salim's. My son. He painted maybe forty of those before he went.”
Went.
Kidneys, four years earlier, at thirty-one. Salim was the second handwriting in the register, the neat one that leaned left.
He had painted his mother couplet on every rickshaw whose owner would allow it, and after he died, Rasheed kept repainting them when the yellow faded, tracking his son's poems around the city the way I had been tracking couplets.
Same hobby. Different weight.
He was keeping his boy in traffic, moving through the city at thirty kilometres an hour, read by strangers at red lights who would never know they were at a memorial.
I did not know what to say, so I said the true thing, which was that Salim's couplet had made me laugh with joy inside a helmet and then made me call my own mother that night. Rasheed nodded like this was the correct and expected function of a poem, and went back to his parrot green.
I wrote about him eventually, with his permission, though he asked me to change nothing and improve everything, which is the best editorial note I have ever received. When I finally wrote about memory honestly, it was his register I was describing, not my notebooks. I entered that piece into a monthly poetry contest, and when it did not win I went and told Rasheed, expecting sympathy... He said the mudflap poets lose every competition ever held and their work still travels further than the winners'. Hard to argue. His son had readers in three states.
Later I posted my transcription of the register's best lines on a community wall for poets, credited to Rasheed ustad and Salim, sign painters, Lucknow. People replied with couplets from their own cities, from Karachi trucks and Dhaka rickshaws and one glorious tempo in Pune, and for a week the thread felt like a single very long highway.
Rasheed died in the winter of 2023.
His nephew runs the shop now and paints mostly phone numbers and GST details, because that is what the market wants. But the register survives, and some of the mudflaps do too.
Last March, stuck at the same Kaiserbagh crossing where this all started, I saw yellow letters on a rickshaw two lanes over. Fresh paint, leaning left. Somebody, and I have my suspicions about the nephew, is still touching up Salim's lines.
The light turned green before I could read the whole couplet... I like to think that was deliberate. The best street poetry doesn't wait for you. It gives you two lines and thirty kilometres an hour, and if you want the rest, you have to follow it into traffic.
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.