The Stranger Who Returned My Manuscript
I left three years of work in an auto; he found one phone number.
Somewhere between Lajpat Nagar and my flat, in an auto rickshaw whose driver I never looked at, I left a cloth bag containing three years of my life. One hundred and forty-one poems, handwritten, no copies, because I am the kind of fool who believed typing them up was a job for later.
I know how that sounds now. In 2020 it made sense. I wrote by hand because screens made me perform and paper made me honest, and I kept everything in one fat spiral-bound stack inside a yellow cloth bag from a sari shop, and I carried it everywhere the way you carry things you cannot imagine losing. The manuscript had started from a prompt I found the winter my engagement broke: write the apology you never received. One hundred and forty poems later I was still answering it.
The night I lost it was raining the way Delhi rains in September, all at once and out of spite. I flagged the auto outside the Lajpat Nagar market with wet spectacles and a phone at two percent. I remember paying... I remember the driver taking a five hundred and hunting for change under his seat.
I do not remember picking up the bag, because I did not pick up the bag.
I realised at my gate. Ran back to the road like a man in a film, stood in the rain looking at four hundred identical autos going four hundred directions. No receipt... No number plate. My phone died as I stood there, which spared me the humiliation of calling someone to explain what I had done.
I want to describe the two weeks that followed without melodrama, so here is the plainest version: I stopped writing, I stopped sleeping properly, and I told nobody the full size of it. When people asked... I said I lost a bag. Saying I lost the book made it true in a way I could not afford. My sister found out anyway, because sisters do, and made me file a report at the police station, where a constable wrote handwritten poems, 141 in a ledger with a seriousness I will never forget.
It did not help. It helped.
The Call
Eighteen days later, my father called me.
Understand that my father and I had not spoken in four years. Not a dramatic silence, no single fight to point at, just a long cooling after my engagement collapsed and he said what he said and I said what I said, and both of us filed the argument under unfinished and stopped taking each other's calls. My mother was gone by then. There was no switchboard left between us.
“A man rang the landline,” my father said, no hello, four years ending in five words. “A tailor from Seelampur. He has your book.”
Here is what had happened.
The bag rode that auto for the rest of the night. The next passenger, a tailor named Mohammad Aslam, found it at his feet, looked inside, and understood two things: this was somebody's heart, and there was no name on it. He took it home. For two weeks, after twelve-hour days at his machine, he went through one hundred and forty-one poems page by page, hunting not for meaning but for a phone number, an address, anything. His own English, he told me later, was mostly measurement words. His teenage daughter read the harder pages aloud.
On the back of poem one hundred and six, in the margin, in handwriting I had forgotten leaving there, was a ten-digit number and the word Papa.
I had scribbled it two winters earlier, in a hospital corridor that smelled of phenyl and burnt tea, when an uncle was ill and someone dictated my father's number in case things got worse overnight. I never dialled it. I wrote poems around my father for three years and never once dialled it... and it sat there in the margin of a poem about apologies until a tailor from Seelampur, sewing together the torn edge of a stranger's life after his shift, found it and did what I could not.
A stranger read three years of my grief looking for a way to give it back, and the only door he found was the one I had been refusing to open.
My father drove to Seelampur himself. I did not ask him to, and to this day I do not fully understand why he did, except that maybe he wanted to read the situation before handing it to me, or maybe he wanted an errand that let him call his son. He sat in Aslam bhai's two-room house, drank tea, and was shown the manuscript, wrapped by then in plastic against the damp, tied with tailor's cord in a neat cross like a parcel of new clothes.
He read some of it... Aslam bhai says the old man went quiet for a long time. My father has never said, and I have never asked, but there are one hundred and forty-one poems in that stack and a lot of them are about him, and not all of them are kind, and he came home from Seelampur and called me and said, “Come for dinner. Bring nothing. It's here.”
Lost and found miracle is the phrase people reach for when I tell this story, and I let them have it, but I have come to believe the miracle was arranged in the ordinary way that all miracles are: by one person deciding a stranger's life was worth two weeks of his own evenings.
What I Owed
I tried to pay Aslam bhai. This went about as well as you would expect. He accepted, after negotiation, one set of clothes' worth of stitching business per year and a copy of the book if it ever became a book. His daughter Rukhsar, the one who read the difficult pages aloud, accepted a stack of poetry collections and, later, help with an application. She writes now, quietly, better than I did at her age. Last year one of her poems went up on a community wall for poets, and I have shown it to more people than I ever showed my own.
The manuscript became a book, eventually, thinner and better, and the dedication runs three names deep: my mother, my father, and a tailor from Seelampur. Before that, on my sister's orders, I sent the strongest poem to a monthly poetry contest, the first time I let the work leave my hands on purpose. It placed nowhere. I framed the rejection, because it proved the poems existed somewhere other than a yellow bag, in copies, plural, backed up, typed, the whole religion of duplication I now practise like a convert.
My father and I have dinner every other Sunday. We still cannot talk about the poems directly, so we talk about Aslam bhai instead, whose shop stitched the elder man's winter coat, and this is how men like us do it, one proxy at a time, one stitch at a time. There is a word for what came back in that plastic-wrapped parcel and it is not manuscript. When I finally wrote about hope, honestly, that parcel is the image I used.
The margin of poem one hundred and six is preserved exactly as it was. Ten digits and one word, in my own hand, waiting two years for a stranger tired from his sewing machine to hold it up to the light and ask his daughter, what is this here, is this a number, is this a name.
It was both. It always had been.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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