Teaching My Mother to Read My Poems
She learned the letters late; my words waited patiently for her.
My mother signed her name with a thumbprint until she was fifty-three. She could bargain a vegetable seller down to his last rupee, calculate interest in her head faster than the bank clerk, and recite two hundred devotional verses from memory, but a page of printed text was a locked door she had stopped knocking on decades ago.
She was married at sixteen. School had ended for her at nine, when her father decided that a house that had a girl who could cook did not need a girl who could read, and nobody in that house argued with him, least of all the nine-year-old. She carried that decision quietly for the rest of her life, the way you carry a stone in your shoe when you cannot afford to stop walking.
I became the family's strange one, the one who wrote. When my first poem was published in a small journal, she took the page from my hands and held it up to the tube light like a doctor examining an X-ray. 'Which one is your name?' she asked. I pointed. She pressed her thumb over it, gently, the same thumb she used instead of a signature, and gave the page back to me as if it were breakable.
For years she kept every clipping in a steel tin that had once held biscuits. She could not read a single line inside it. She guarded it like a passport anyway.
The teaching started because of an eye chart. After her cataract surgery, the doctor asked her to read the letters on the wall, and she laughed, a small covering laugh I had heard my whole childhood, the one she used when shame walked into the room. 'Doctor sahib, I only know the shapes,' she said. On the rickshaw home she was quiet for a long time... and then she said, without looking at me, 'Teach me. Slowly. Don't tell your brothers.'
We began with a children's primer, the kind with a mango drawn next to every letter. She was fifty-three years old, learning at the same table where she had once fed me as a child, and she hated every minute of the first month. She had been the final authority in every room she had ever entered, and now a laminated alphabet chart made her feel small.
'This is stupid,' she announced one evening, pushing the book away. 'I raised four children without any of this.'
At midnight I found the kitchen light on and heard her whispering the letters to herself like a prayer she was embarrassed to be caught saying.
She made rules. I was not allowed to laugh, not even kindly. I was not allowed to tell my brothers, who loved her in the loud, useless way of sons who visit twice a year. And I was not allowed to teach her the way the schoolmasters of her village had taught, with a stick and a sigh. 'Teach me like I taught you to hold a spoon,' she said. 'You dropped everything for a year and I never once called you stupid.'
Progress came in strange units. First the sugar packet. Then the destination board of the number seven bus, which she read out loud on the road, to no one in particular, like a woman announcing a victory. Then the newspaper headlines, one syllable at a time, her finger under every word as if pinning it down before it could escape. She read the way a child walks on ice: slowly, furiously, refusing all offered hands.
The one thing I did not give her was my poems.
This will sound cruel, but writers will understand it. Nearly everything I had ever written was about her. Her hands, her silences, her marriage, the years she spent standing at the stove while her own tea went cold. I had spent a decade writing about family in a voice I could only manage because I knew she would never read it. There is an honesty you can afford only behind a locked door, and her illiteracy, God forgive me, had been the lock.
So I taught her from newspapers and cereal boxes and left the biscuit tin on the high shelf where it had always lived, and told myself she had not noticed...
She had noticed.
I came home early one Thursday, monsoon slamming the windows, and found her at the kitchen table with the tin open and a clipping flattened under the primer.
She had been at it a while... Later I worked out that twenty lines must have taken her the better part of an hour. Her finger was resting under a line about her own hands, the one where I had called them rough as jute, and I stood in the doorway with my wet umbrella dripping a small lake onto the floor... waiting for whatever was coming.
'You wrote that my hands are rough,' she said, not looking up. 'They are,' she went on, before I could begin apologizing. 'But you got the reason wrong. It was not the dishes. It was the winter I washed other people's clothes so your father could finish his exams. Fix it.' Then she turned the clipping over, carefully, as if there might be more of me on the back.
All those years I had thought I was writing about a woman who would never check my facts.
It turned out I had simply been publishing rough drafts, and my one true editor had been waiting for her reading glasses.
She read at the speed of forgiveness, one word at a time, and the poem stood still and waited for her, the way she had waited for me all my life.
After that we made it a ritual. Every Sunday she took one poem from the tin and worked through it while I made the tea for once. She corrected the color of a sari: blue, not green, bought in Meerut, how could I not know this. She corrected the year of a funeral. She approved, with a single grave nod, of a poem about my father that I had never dared show anyone; later I understood that poems about love embarrassed her far less than poems about herself.
Last spring she picked out the poem about her hands, the corrected version, and told me to send it somewhere. I entered it into a monthly poetry contest, mostly so I could tell her I had. When the email came saying it had made the shortlist, I read it aloud to her twice, and then she made me put the phone into her hand so she could read it herself, finger under every word, lips moving... taking her time with the word congratulations like it was a sum she wanted to check.
She signs her name now. It takes her a while, the letters round and careful as a schoolgirl's, and when she finishes she still presses her thumb underneath, out of habit, or maybe insurance. 'In case the letters don't count,' she says.
The letters count, Ma. They were only ever waiting for you.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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