My Grandmother's Diary of Unread Poems
Sixty years of verses in a drawer, waiting for one reader.
My grandmother hid her poems under her saris for sixty years, and the first line of the first diary, dated three weeks after her wedding, reads: "If you are reading this, I finally have a reader. Sit down. This will take a while."
I found the diaries eleven days after her funeral, doing the job nobody wants and everybody circles: emptying her steel almirah. My mother could not face it. My aunts kept starting and then discovering urgent reasons to make tea. So it fell to me, the granddaughter with the flexible job and the unflexible habit of finishing what other people begin.
The saris came out first, each one releasing its little ghost of naphthalene and sandalwood. Then the biscuit tin of loose buttons. Then, at the bottom of the deepest drawer, wrapped in an old cotton petticoat and tied with the drawstring of the same petticoat, five diaries. Fat, cheap, sturdy diaries, the kind banks used to give away in January, their covers advertising a fertilizer company, a tire company, a bank that no longer exists.
Inside: poems. Dated, numbered, in Hindi and sometimes a broken, determined English, in a hand that started out round and girlish in 1962 and ended, in the last diary, as a spidery scrawl I recognized from birthday cards. The final entry was dated nine days before she died.
Sixty-one years. As best I can count, 1,143 poems.
Not one of us knew she wrote.
The Woman in the Margins
I want to be precise about who my grandmother was to us, because the gap is the whole story. She was the quietest person at every table. She was the maker of the mango pickle, the mender of school uniforms, the one who stood in doorways during arguments, drying her hands on her pallu, saying nothing. When she spoke, it was to offer food. In seven decades of family photographs she is almost always at the edge of the frame, half turned, as if she had been on her way somewhere and agreed to pause.
We thought she was the margin.
She was the text.
I read the first diary sitting on the floor of her room, on the cold mosaic tiles, my back against her bed, and I did not move for four hours.
There was a poem about the first monsoon after her wedding, when she was seventeen and homesick, and how she stood on the roof and let the rain make it look like she was not crying. There was a poem about my grandfather, unsparing and tender at once, comparing him to a ceiling fan: "useful, constant, always above, stirring the air without ever once touching it." There was a poem from 1974 about a miscarriage none of us had ever been told about, four lines long, with a name in it.
She had named her. None of us knew there had been a her.
And there was a poem about me. Diary four, March, the year I turned nine. It described a granddaughter reading under the dining table with a torch, and it ended: "This one narrates her life under her breath. God protect the noticers. The world sits on them first."
I had to put the diary down and walk around the room.
She had seen me... All those years I thought I was watching the family unobserved, taking my little notes, and the actual writer in the house had been watching me, taking hers.
She was not hiding the poems from us. She was saving them for someone who would not interrupt.
I believe that now, though it took me months of writing through the grief to get there, months of being angry on her behalf at everyone, including her, including me. Because my first reaction was fury. Sixty-one years. She had sat through my board exam results and my cousin's terrible wedding shayari and decades of us reciting film songs at the top of our lungs, and never once said, I also write. We would have listened.
Would we, though?
Here is what the diaries taught me: she tried. Once. Diary two, 1979. She showed a poem to someone, unnamed, identified only as "S." The next entry is dated a full year later... It says, in its entirety: "S laughed. Not at the poem, they said. It does not matter. The drawer does not laugh." And then she wrote 800 more poems and showed them to nobody. A whole year of silence, one laugh wide.
I think about "S" more than is healthy. I have narrowed the suspects to three people, all long dead, all beyond apology. It does not matter, she said... She was lying. It mattered for forty-four more years. If you take one thing from a stranger's essay, take this: when someone hands you a page with their handwriting on it, you are holding an organ. Behave accordingly.
One Reader, Then Many
The family council about the diaries lasted three Sundays. One aunt wanted them locked in the bank vault, which I pointed out was just a colder drawer. My mother wanted photocopies for everyone, and then cried, and said she could not read them yet, and asked me to keep the originals safe until she could. My uncle, who surprises me once a decade, said the truest thing: "She dated every one. Nobody dates 1,143 poems for God. Dates are for readers."
So I became her reader, as the first page had appointed me, and then I decided one reader was not enough for sixty-one years of waiting.
I started small. I translated a poem about winter fog and posted it on a community wall for poets, with her name, Shanti Devi, and her dates. I sat there refreshing the page like a teenager... The first comment came in an hour, from a woman in another country entirely: "Tell me there are more."
There are more, I typed, and cried onto my own keyboard, because there were more, there were so unbearably many more, and every single one of them had been ready this whole time.
Since then, a page of profiles of writers nobody had heard yet ran a small feature on her, the fertilizer-company diary photographed open to the monsoon poem, and strangers now quote my grandmother to each other, sixty years late and, somehow, right on time. Last month I entered the poem about the ceiling fan into a monthly poetry contest under her name, with my mother listed as heir. It reached the shortlist. When the email came, my mother read it standing in the kitchen doorway, drying her hands on her pallu, standing exactly where her mother used to stand, and said quietly, "Shabash, Amma," to the empty hallway.
People ask if I feel guilty publishing what she hid. Some days, yes... Then I reread the first line of the first diary. If you are reading this, I finally have a reader. That is not a lock. That is a door left open with the light on.
The diaries live in my almirah now, bottom drawer, wrapped in the same petticoat, because some rituals you do not improve. But I keep the fifth one on my bedside table most nights, with her ballpoint pen clipped to it, the pen I found beside her bed, still working.
Nine days before she died, at ninety, she wrote her last poem. It is two lines. I will keep the second one for the family.
The first line says: "The drawer is full. Send the rest ahead."
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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