The Night Shift Guard Writes Ghazals
Between rounds at 3 a.m., his register fills with couplets.
The visitor register at my building's gate has a poem hidden between a Swift Dzire and a gas cylinder delivery. I know because I signed directly underneath it at 2:40 in the morning, half asleep, and my own name looked embarrassing next to it, like a plastic chair placed beside a throne.
I was working deadlines that year, the kind of design job where the client is in another time zone and your body slowly forgets which one it lives in. I came home at two, three, sometimes four. The night guard, Rafiq bhai, would swing the small gate open without being asked, log my entry, and say the same sentence every night: "Aaram se, seedhi geeli hai." Careful, the stairs are wet. The stairs were never wet. I understood much later that it was simply his way of saying: someone noticed you come home.
That night in March, the pen he handed me was still warm, and above the line where I was meant to sign, in Urdu script tilted like rain, there were two lines that had nothing to do with vehicles or visitors. I can read Urdu slowly, the way you wade through water... I stood there wading.
The couplet said, roughly: the whole city has doors and every door has a man like me, awake so that sleep can happen to other people.
I looked up. Rafiq bhai was looking at the street with tremendous concentration, the way a man looks at nothing in particular when he wants you to sign quickly and go upstairs.
"This is yours?" I asked.
"Woh entry galat ho gayi thi." A wrong entry, he said. A mistake. He reached for the register.
I did not give it back.
I read the lines again, out loud this time, badly, and somewhere in my terrible pronunciation he stopped reaching. When I finished he corrected one word, quietly, the way you straighten a picture frame in someone else's house.
That is how the 3 a.m. mehfil started. Two men, one gate, one thermos of tea that tasted faintly of iron. He had been writing ghazals for thirty years, he told me, all of them in registers, because a register is the one notebook a guard is allowed to hold without anyone asking why. Vehicle numbers on the left page. Couplets on the right, squeezed between entries, disguised in the same hurried hand. Eleven years at our gate, eleven registers, all stored in the metal cupboard nobody opened because it also contained the society's disputes from 2013.
He never learned poetry anywhere. He failed out of school in Sitapur at thirteen and learned metre from the radio, from Begum Akhtar and from a transistor that only caught the station properly if it sat on the boundary wall. "Radio was my ustaad," he said. "And the night. The night corrects you. Write a false line at 3 a.m. and you will hear it. Daytime forgives too much."
I asked him once why he never showed anyone. He tapped the register.
The building sleeps, so somebody has to stay awake and describe it.
He said it like a duty roster, not a philosophy. Then he went on his round, torch swinging, and I sat at the gate reading vehicle numbers and couplets, couplets and vehicle numbers, the strangest anthology I have ever held.
The ghazals were not what I expected from a man in a grey uniform with a whistle. They were love poems, most of them, and they all circled one refrain, one radif that came back register after register, year after year: tum aati nahin. You do not come. I assumed the beloved was a convention, the way ghazals often keep an empty chair at the table.
I was wrong... and I found out in the worst way, by asking cleverly.
His wife had died in Sitapur in 2011, two months before he got this job. He took the night shift on purpose. "Din mein sab poochte hain, kaise ho," he said. In the day everyone asks how you are. At night, nobody asks... and you can finally answer honestly. Every couplet since 2011 had been a letter to a love that had stopped receiving mail, written in a book meant for recording who enters and who leaves.
Then, in June, the society upgraded.
A committee member with a lanyard installed a visitor management app at the gate. Tablet on a stand, OTP for guests, entries in the cloud. Progress, genuinely. Nobody was against it, least of all Rafiq bhai, who learned it in an afternoon and thereafter operated the tablet with two respectful index fingers. But the registers were now officially waste. The secretary told the staff to sell the old ones to the raddi wala with the newspapers.
Eleven years of ghazals, weighed and sold by the kilo.
I found out on a Saturday morning, which is to say almost too late. I ran down in my sleeping clothes and negotiated with the raddi wala on the pavement like a man buying back his own family photographs. He could not understand why I wanted ledgers, and I could not explain without giving away thirty years of a man's privacy, so I paid ninety rupees for eleven registers and carried them upstairs in two trips, sweating, triumphant, ridiculous.
Rafiq bhai came on shift at eight that evening and found them stacked inside his booth with a note: your entries were correct.
He did not mention it for four days. On the fifth night he handed me tea and said, "Aap ne kitne padhe?" How many did you read? I told him the truth: all of them, and one of them twice, the one about the pigeon that lands on the tablet stand every dawn like the old world checking in on the new one. He nodded slowly and looked at the street with tremendous concentration.
With his permission, which took two more weeks and one long argument about whether anyone would laugh, I typed out forty of the couplets and put them up on a page that runs profiles of writers nobody had heard yet. I wrote three lines of introduction: night guard, Sitapur, thirty years of ghazals, published previously in eleven volumes with a print run of one. Then I went to sleep and forgot about it... the way you drop a coin in water and walk away.
The comments came from places he had to ask me to point to. A student in Hyderabad set one couplet as her status. A retired teacher wrote out a correction to his metre in one sher, and Rafiq bhai accepted it with delight, an ustaad at last, at sixty-one, after the radio. And a woman in Lucknow recorded herself singing his refrain, tum aati nahin, in slow tarannum, and posted the audio underneath.
I brought my phone down at 3 a.m. and played it for him at the gate.
He listened standing up, torch switched off, one hand resting on the tablet stand, while a stranger's voice sang his wife back into the lane for a minute and forty seconds. When it ended he said nothing... for a long time. Then he swung the small gate open out of habit, though no one was coming, and said, "Aaram se. Seedhi geeli hai."
And for the first time in eleven years, I swear the stairs actually were.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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