The Graffiti Poem That Kept Changing
Someone kept editing the wall, and the whole lane kept reading.
The wall behind Nathu's tea stall had been insulted for years before it started to sing. Paan stains, torn election posters, a phone number for a plumber who died in 2019, that was the wall. Then one Monday in July, somebody painted four lines on it in black, in Hindi, in handwriting so careful it looked like a school punishment done twice.
Roughly translated, the lines said: This lane remembers everyone who left it. The gutter keeps their names. The kites on the wire are letters nobody collected. Even the dogs here sleep facing the exit.
It was not a cheerful poem. It was, everyone at the stall agreed, slightly rude about the dogs. But it was ours. By Wednesday, rickshaw pullers were parking in front of it to eat lunch. By Friday, Nathu had turned his bench around so customers could read while they drank. A man who sold socks from a cart read it out loud every morning like a weather report.
Then the poem changed.
I noticed it on a Tuesday because the sock seller's voice went up an octave mid-line. Someone had crossed out the words left it with one neat blue stroke and written above them: loved it. This lane remembers everyone who loved it. Same handwriting? Different handwriting?
The lane split into factions before eight in the morning. Nathu said it was the original poet improving his draft. The plumber's widow, who still lived above the number on the wall, said no poet returns to a finished poem, only a guilty person returns.
A week later, the gutter no longer kept their names. Blue paint again: the rain repeats their names. Then the kites stopped being letters nobody collected and became letters still on their way. Somebody was walking through that poem at night with a small tin of blue and turning every one of its sad rooms to face the light.
I had been in the city three years by then, sharing a room with a cousin and a water drum, and I had mostly written around my loneliness instead of about it. But this wall did something to my mornings. I started copying each version into the back pages of my account notebook, dated, like a ledger of somebody else's heart. Version one, 14 July. Version two, 22 July. My cousin said I was tracking a stranger's edits like other people track cricket scores.
He was right... and I did not stop.
The last line held out the longest. Even the dogs here sleep facing the exit. For a month the blue paint left it alone, and the lane developed theories. The editor had died... The editor had run out of hope, or paint. The editor agreed with the poet about the dogs.
Then one morning in August, after a night of rain, the exit was gone.
Even the dogs here sleep facing the morning.
The sock seller read the new line twice and then simply sat down on the kerb. Nathu gave him tea he did not pay for.
That was the day my cousin and I decided to catch the editor. We were young and had no television, so a stakeout felt like a festival. We took a flask, two packets of glucose biscuits, and Nathu's bench, and we sat in the dark mouth of the lane from eleven at night onwards, whispering, slapping mosquitoes, accusing each other of breathing too loudly.
At ten past two, a man came down the lane pushing a bicycle with a whitewash bucket hanging from the handlebar. Municipal uniform, the kind of grey that starts grey. He leaned the cycle against Nathu's shutter, looked at the wall for a long time, and took out a small blue tin from a cloth bag.
We did not jump out and shout. Something about the way he stood made shouting impossible. We walked up slowly, and he heard us... and he did not run.
He just capped the tin, like a man caught watering someone else's plant.
His name was Suresh. He had been sent, back in July, with a work order that said: remove the nuisance writing from the wall behind the tea stall. He had come with his whitewash and his roller, read the poem once... and found that his arm would not lift.
"So I removed it," he told us, and there was no smile on his face, only the stubborn look of a man reading out his own defence. "One word at a time. The order says remove the nuisance. The sad words were the nuisance. I removed the sad words."
He had been filing reports for six weeks saying the removal was in progress. Technically, not one report was a lie.
I asked him if he wrote poetry himself. He said no, absolutely not, he had failed Hindi twice in school. Then he admitted that his father used to sing at weddings, and that he had spent eleven days deciding between morning and sunrise for the dogs, and that he had chosen morning because sunrise felt like showing off. A man who weighs two words for eleven days can call himself whatever he wants. I know what I call him.
A poem on a wall belongs to whoever stops walking.
We kept his secret the way the lane keeps all its secrets, which is to say four people knew by Thursday and everyone knew by Sunday, and it changed nothing, because nobody wanted it to change. Men started leaving small things near the wall at night. A marigold. Once, a boiled egg, which remains the most confusing tribute I have ever seen offered to literature.
Elections came in September the way weather comes, without asking. A contractor arrived with two boys and a roller and painted the whole wall the flat cream colour of official forgetting, and by evening a candidate's face was smiling where the dogs used to sleep. The lane went quiet around it. Nathu turned his bench back to its old position. The sock seller announced no weather for three days.
I did the only thing I could think of. I typed out every version from my account notebook, all five drafts with their dates, and posted the whole ledger on a community wall for poets online, under the heading: found poem, editor unknown to the government. Strangers from cities I have never seen began arguing over the drafts exactly the way our lane had, and one woman wrote that version four had made her call her mother. Later that winter I wrote my own poem about Suresh and his blue tin and entered it into a monthly poetry contest. It did not win... It did not need to. It had already worked once, out loud, at a tea stall, which is more than most poems can say.
The candidate lost, incidentally. His face peeled through October.
And on the first cold morning of November, the sock seller's voice cracked across the lane again, one octave up. We came running. Low on the cream paint, in small black letters, in handwriting so careful it looked like a school punishment, somebody had written two words.
Start again.
Below them, already, one neat stroke of blue.
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.