My Husband Doesn't Read My Poems. He Frames Them.
He understands none of the metaphors and hangs every single one.
My husband has framed forty one of my poems and understood, by his own count, three. He announced this the way he announces that the water bill has gone up: plainly, without apology, while straightening a frame by two millimetres.
We were standing in the hallway of our flat, which by then looked less like a hallway and more like the corridor of a very small museum with a very narrow acquisitions policy. Forty one frames, all the same brand from the same shop in Karol Bagh, because Dheeraj believes in bulk discounts the way I believe in line breaks.
“Which three?” I asked.
He pointed at the one about my grandmother's hands. Then the one about the 2019 power cut. Then, after a long pause, the one about mangoes, which is not about mangoes at all, so the honest count was two.
I did not correct him. You learn, nine years into a marriage, which corrections are love and which are only vanity.
Here is what you should know about Dheeraj. He is a cost accountant. He reads instruction manuals for pleasure, cover to cover, including the safety warnings in four languages. On our second date he explained depreciation to me with such tenderness that I mistook it for flirting, and to be fair, coming from him, it was. He has never voluntarily read a poem in his life. Not in school, where he memorised them like tax codes and forgot them by June. Not at our wedding, where my college friends read Neruda and he nodded politely at what he later called “the tomato thing.”
The framing started in our first year. I had printed a poem to post to a magazine, decided by evening that it was terrible, and dropped it in the kitchen bin on top of the tea leaves. The next Sunday it was hanging on the wall by the shoe rack. Slightly stained. Framed.
“That was rubbish,” I told him. “It was in the bin for a reason.”
“You made it,” he said. “We do not throw away things you made. We are not that kind of family.”
I want to tell you I found it romantic... I found it confusing. I had been raised to want understanding: poetry circles, people who quote you back to yourself at dinner. My mother spent forty years married to a man who never once asked what she was reading, and I had promised myself a reader.
I got a framer instead.
He came to my readings and clapped in the wrong places, straight into the gaps I had built for silence.
When I started entering a monthly poetry contest, mostly to give my procrastination a deadline, he built a spreadsheet: submission dates, results, a column labelled OUTCOME in capital letters. When a poem of mine finally placed, he printed the results page and framed that too, which is why there is a screenshot hanging on my wall between two sonnets, like a receipt taped inside a novel.
My friends found the whole thing adorable. “He worships you,” they said. I would smile and think: worship is easy. Worship is what people do to things they don't understand. I didn't want an altar. I wanted a conversation.
Then came the bad year.
I won't itemise it. His mother's illness, my stalled manuscript, a flat that went too quiet at exactly nine every night.
We did not fight, and that was the frightening part.
We administrated. We passed each other the salt with tremendous efficiency.
That year I wrote a poem I never meant to show anyone. It was about a woman who marries a kind man and slowly realises she has translated herself into a language nobody in the house can read.
There was a line about living with someone the way you live with a load-bearing wall. It ended with her standing at the front door at three in the morning, keys in hand, doing the arithmetic on what leaving costs. I had spent a decade writing about love as if it were weather. That year I learned it is closer to masonry. The poem was the best thing I had written in years, and it was cruel, and it was true the way things are true at three in the morning... and slightly less true at breakfast.
I printed it, because I edit on paper, and then hid it in my desk drawer under old drafts, like contraband.
You already know where this is going.
Frame forty one.
I came home from work and there it was, hanging at the end of the hallway at exact eye level, in the same frame as everything else, as though it were just another poem about mangoes. I stood there with my bag still on my shoulder... and my heart doing something percussive and wrong.
“You read it,” I said. He was at the dining table with his laptop open, doing whatever it is that costs do at that hour.
“Yes.”
“Did you understand it?”
He closed the laptop. I remember the specific click of it.
“Yes,” he said. “That one I understood.”
This is the part I keep returning to. He had spent nine years framing what he could not read... and the first poem he fully understood was the one in which I priced out leaving him.
And he put it on the wall. Not in a drawer. Not in the bin, where I had once put my own work.
On the wall, beside our wedding photo, where the afternoon light hits.
“Why would you frame that?” I asked. I was ready for tears, for a fight, for anything except efficiency.
“Because it is the truest one,” he said. “And because if it hangs there, you will know I saw it. If I put it back in your desk, you will spend ten years wondering whether I saw it. That is the worse marriage. That one I am not doing.”
We talked that night the way we had not talked in a year, dinner going cold between us, both of us bad at it and doing it anyway. He did not promise to become a reader. I did not promise to become simpler. Somewhere in the middle of it he said the thing I have been trying to write around ever since, an accountant's proverb if there ever was one: “I can't always follow you. But I can keep the record. Everything you make happened, and it stays.”
Being understood is lovely, but being kept is rarer. He hangs every version of me on the wall, including the one that wanted to leave.
Guests ask about that poem now. At dinners, someone always drifts down the hallway and stops in front of frame forty one, because it is the only one that makes people go quiet. Dheeraj tells them, “My wife wrote that one about me. It is not flattering. It is my favourite.” Nobody ever laughs. One or two of them usually glance at their own spouse across the room, doing arithmetic of their own.
I used to think unconditional support in marriage meant applause, a partner who cheers at everything, understands everything, mirrors you perfectly. It turns out it can also mean archiving. It can mean a man with a spreadsheet and a hammer who decides that nothing you make, not even the sharp things, will be allowed to disappear.
When I finally posted the leaving poem on a community wall for poets, strangers filled the responses with their own framers: a father who laminated the bus ticket from every trip his daughter ever took, a husband who cannot read English but keeps his wife's notebooks alphabetised, a grandmother who stitched a grandson's first story into the back of a quilt. An entire quiet species of people who keep what they cannot decode.
Last month Dheeraj came home with frame forty two. It is hanging in the hallway now, empty, exactly level. “For the next one,” he said.
I asked him what happens if the next one is about him again. What happens if it is worse.
He took out his measuring tape and ran it along the remaining wall, all the way to the kitchen door, and wrote the number down.
“Then we will need a bigger hallway,” he said.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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