Writing Love Poems for a Man Who Couldn't Read
I read them aloud on the terrace, and he memorized every one.
The first time I handed my husband a poem, he held it upside down, and neither of us said anything for a full minute.
Then he turned it right side up, studied it like a mechanic studies an engine that will not confess its fault, and handed it back to me. "Read it to me," he said. "Paper has your words but not your voice. I want the better version."
I found out three weeks after the wedding that Ramesh could not read. Ours was an arranged match, quick by any standard, and in the flurry of horoscopes and halls and my mother crying into cardamom tea, nobody had thought to mention it. He left school at nine when his father's lungs gave out, went to his uncle's garage in Karol Bagh, and learned engines instead of letters. By nineteen he could diagnose a scooter by sound alone, the way a doctor reads a cough. By thirty he owned the garage. Numbers he knew cold, could total a parts bill faster than my calculator. But letters had simply happened to other people, the way sailing happens to other people, or snow.
I had a master's degree in literature and a drawer full of poems no one had ever seen. You can imagine what my friends said. One of them, over coffee, actually used the word tragedy. "You, of all people. A man who will never read a word you write. What will you even talk about?"
I did not have an answer then... I have one now. It took me eleven years to earn it.
The terrace became our reading room. After dinner, when the heat lifted off the city and the pigeons made their last fussy circuits and the smell of frying onions rose from the flat below, we carried two folding chairs up the narrow stairs, and I read to him. Poems first, mine, hidden for years from people who could read, offered nightly to a man who could not. Then whatever else: newspapers, novels, the instruction manual for the new mixer, which he made me read twice because he found the translation hilarious.
Here is what nobody tells you about reading your own poems aloud to an audience who cannot check the page. There is nowhere to hide. A man who reads with his eyes can be fooled by clever line breaks, by white space doing the work the words shirked. A man who receives a poem only through his ears hears exactly what is there. The first time I read Ramesh something dishonest, a poem where I had dressed a plain feeling in borrowed silk, he listened all the way through, nodded slowly, and said, "That one has a rattle in it. Somewhere in the middle. Something is loose."
He was right.
Stanza three. I had known it and hoped no one would notice. A man who could not write his own name had just given me the most precise criticism of my life, in the vocabulary of carburetors.
He could not read a single word I wrote, and he is still the best reader I have ever had.
He memorized everything.
That was the part I did not discover for almost a year. I thought the poems evaporated on the night air, that I was writing on water, and I had made a strange peace with it. Then one evening, stuck on a line, I muttered the opening of a poem from months before and got the third word wrong. From behind his newspaper, which he held for the photographs and, I later understood, for the dignity, my husband corrected me.
Then he recited the whole poem... twenty-two lines. He did not miss one. He had the pauses right. He had my pauses right.
"How many of them do you have?" I asked.
He looked embarrassed, the only time in eleven years I ever saw it. "All of them," he said. "Where else would I keep them?"
People talk about love across literacy as if the literate one is carrying the other. Let me tell you how it actually divided up. I could read Ghalib. He could read the sky before rain, the health of a stranger's engine from two streets away, the exact moment in an argument when I no longer meant what I was saying. On our terrace at dusk, the city going amber and then blue, he would point at things and read them to me: that flock means the weather turns Thursday, that generator will fail within the month, that couple on the opposite roof has quarreled, look how they stand. I had married a man who was illiterate in one language and fluent in forty others, and in most of the ones that matter, I was the one who could not spell.
He carried the poems too, physically I mean, and I only learned this because of the monsoon. He came home one July soaked to the bone, and as I hung his shirt I found paper in the breast pocket, gone soft as cloth, ink bleeding into ghosts.
My handwriting. A poem I had read him in March and left on my desk. He could not read a word of it.
He had carried it against his chest for four months.
"Why?" I asked... it came out barely a voice.
He shrugged, wringing rain from his sleeve. "So it stays near the heart even when you are not talking."
I went into the bathroom and cried the way you cry at weddings, ashamed of nothing.
After that I stopped hiding the drawer. I posted one of the terrace poems, the one about the pigeons and the frying onions, on a community wall for poets, and when strangers responded I read him every comment aloud, and he memorized his favorites of those too, and quoted one stranger back to me for years whenever I got precious about my work: "Madam ji, the onions are doing the heavy lifting here." Later I wrote about him directly, about a love that never once passed through the eyes, and reading that one aloud on the terrace, to its own subject, under the drying laundry, remains the most terrifying publication of my life. He listened with his eyes closed... then he said, "No rattle." It is the best review I will ever receive.
You are waiting, maybe, for the ending where I teach him to read. I offered, in year two, delicately, brochures on the table, evening classes at an academy where grown people learned without shame. He looked at the brochures a long time. Then he said, "If I learn, will you still read to me on the terrace?" I said of course, nothing would change. He said, "Then what is the letters' hurry?" And the brochures stayed on the table until the table needed wiping.
But in year nine, he came to me with a pencil and asked me to teach him to write one word. Just one. I assumed his name, for the shop paperwork, for the bank.
It was not his name. It was mine.
He practiced for three weeks, in secret, in the garage ledger, between columns of parts and sums, and I only found out when I saw it: my name, forty times over, crooked at first and then less crooked, marching down the margins of his accounts like a procession. And on the last page, in the wet cement of the garage's new floor, where his workers had signed their initials for luck, one word in enormous shaky letters that will outlast every poem I have ever written.
Not his name. Mine. In cement. At the feet of the engines.
My friend asked what we would even talk about. Eleven years of dusk on a terrace, and we never once ran out. He gave me back every poem I ever gave him, word for word, pause for pause, and one word extra, the only one he ever learned to write, and he wrote it in stone.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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