Her Poems Made Me Jealous of a Past I Wasn't In
I loved her words and resented everyone who caused them.
I learned about the men before me the way archaeologists learn about buried cities: layer by layer, from her published poems.
Meera never hid anything. That is the first thing you should know, because this story makes me look bad enough without you thinking she was secretive. Her whole past sat in plain sight on a shelf, seventy-eight pages, paperback, second printing. I bought it after our third date from the bookshop near her flat, telling myself it was romantic interest. Then I went home and read it at two in the morning with a pencil, cross-referencing... which is not what poetry is for.
I work at a bank. I audit things for a living.
I audited her book.
The exhibits, as I thought of them: a poem about a man who tasted of cigarettes and apology. A poem set in Berlin involving somebody's coat and a bridge.
And the one that ruined my sleep, fourteen lines titled only “R.”, which ended with the sentence: I still cook for four.
I did the arithmetic constantly. If the Berlin poem was 2016 and the cigarette man was “the winter I turned twenty-three,” then who overlapped with whom, and who was R, and why four? I checked the acknowledgments page for names the way you check a phone bill. At her readings I would sit in the second row and feel genuinely ill while strangers applauded pain that other men had caused her.
Once, at a bookstore in Defence Colony, she read “R.” aloud and a woman near the aisle wiped her eyes, and I hated the woman, the poem, the letter R, and most of the alphabet on either side of it.
I never said any of this out loud, obviously. I said things like “that one's powerful” while privately studying a 2016 workshop photograph I had found online, memorising a stranger's forearm like it was evidence in a fraud case.
Jealousy of a partner's past is a strange animal, because there is no rival to compete with. The men were gone. Some were married, one had emigrated, at least one, I gathered, she wouldn't have crossed a room for.
I was not competing with them. I was competing with their poems, with the versions of them she had made permanent, and you cannot win against a published thing. It has an ISBN. It will outlive your marriage and your gravestone.
The night I finally broke, we were eating dinner and I asked, in a voice I had rehearsed to sound casual and which came out like a customs officer.
“Who is R?”
She laughed... Then she saw my face and stopped laughing, and there was a silence of the kind that precedes either an ending or the truth. She put down her fork, went to the bedroom, and came back with the notebook.
Not the book. The notebook, the real one, drafts, arrows, crossed-out lines, tea rings.
“R,” she said, “is Rajeshwari. My grandmother. She cooked for four every day for eleven years after my grandfather died. Him, her, and my two uncles who moved to Surat and never once came back to eat it. I watched her scrape three plates into the bin every night of my childhood. That's the poem.”
I sat there recalculating my entire audit.
“The Berlin one?” I asked, quieter.
“I've never left the country. The coat was my mother's. The bridge is from a film.” She turned pages. “The cigarette man was real. But his apology in the poem is one my father owed my mother and never paid. Poems are braided, Ashwin. Three truths and a lie, and the lie is usually the plot.”
Then she said the thing I have thought about nearly every day since.
You are not jealous of a man. You are jealous of a poem. And a poem is where a woman puts something down so she can walk to you with empty hands.
I would love to tell you I was cured at the table... I was not. Jealousy of the past does not die of one conversation; it dies of education, slowly, like a superstition. But I started studying differently. Instead of auditing her book, I began actually learning how to read: I worked through profiles of writers nobody had heard yet, and I noticed every single one of them had buried things in their poems that were not lovers. Fathers. Gods. Hospitals. Old versions of themselves. I read my way through pages on forgiveness one insomniac week and understood, belatedly, that I had been reading her book as a diary when it was closer to a burial ground, and a well-tended one.
And I had to accept the harder half too, because honesty costs or it isn't honesty: some of the men were exactly what I feared. The cigarette man was real... and she had loved him at twenty-three with a wholeness I sometimes catch the fossil of. Acceptance did not mean deciding the past was smaller than I'd thought. It meant the opposite. It meant standing in front of the whole buried city and saying: this is what built the ground I live on. Every line those years cost her was a line that walked her here, to this table, to me, asking my stupid customs-officer questions and being answered gently.
We married two years later. The poems kept coming, and I became their first reader, which I hold the way other men hold trophies.
Then, last spring, she published a new one in a journal. It was titled “Fourteen,” which is our house number, and buried in the middle was a man who counts stairs under his breath and salts his eggs from too high, so the salt falls like weather. I count stairs under my breath. I have salted eggs from a height every morning of our shared life, because my mother did, because hers did.
At the launch reading, she read it aloud, and near the back a young man closed his eyes at the stair-counting line and breathed out slowly, the way you do when a poem lands on a bruise. And I felt something turn over in me, quiet and final, the last coin of the old jealousy spending itself.
Because I understood, at last, how it works. Somewhere in the future, a stranger will read that poem, or love someone who has it memorised, and they will feel a small mean ache about the salt and the stairs, about a man in a past they were not in. Some poor auditor of another woman's shelves will hate me a little, the way I hated a forearm in a photograph.
I hope it stings, friend... I mean that kindly.
It means I happened. It means she wrote me down.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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