His Signature Was the Only Word He Could Write
My grandfather practiced it nightly, a one-word autobiography.
Every night at nine, after the news and before his tobacco, my grandfather practiced writing his own name. He was seventy one years old, and it was the only word he knew how to write.
He kept a ruled notebook for this, the cheap kind meant for schoolchildren, with a brown paper cover and a margin printed in faded pink. It lived on the shelf above the radio, next to a ballpoint pen tied to a length of string, because pens in our house walked off and this one had a job.
He was born in 1938 in a village where school was a room that sometimes had a teacher. He attended for less than two years before the fields claimed him. He could measure land by walking it, heel to toe, and be accurate within a handspan. He could tell you the yield of a mustard crop by rubbing one pod between his fingers. He knew the year of every wedding, every flood, every quarrel over a boundary wall going back to before Partition. But letters never stayed with him. He said they were like birds: he could watch them all day and still not hold one.
For most of his life, official India knew him by his thumb. At the pension office, at the bank, at the land registry, a clerk would take his hand without asking, roll his thumb across a purple ink pad, and press it onto the paper like a stamp. There is a word for it in Hindi, angutha chhaap, thumb printed, and people say it the way they say something is broken. He never once complained about the fields, the debt, the years.
He complained about the ink pad.
He said it made a man into livestock.
So at sixty three, when a new bank manager told him a signature would do, he came home and asked my father to teach him one word. Not the alphabet. Not reading. One word: Raghunath.
My father wrote it out in pencil, large, the way you write for a child, and my grandfather copied it underneath. Then he copied it again. Then, as far as I can tell, he copied it every single night for the remaining eight years of his life.
I used to watch him at it when I was small. He gripped the pen the way he gripped a sickle, whole fist, tendons standing up, tongue pressed to the corner of his mouth. He did not write the letters so much as build them, one post at a time, like a man putting up a fence around something he refused to lose again. The R always leaned left. He would inspect each attempt at arm's length, frown... and go again.
Once I asked him why he kept practicing a word he had already mastered. He looked at me over his spectacles and said, A name gets rusty. Everything a man does not repeat... he surrenders.
You should have seen him sign at the bank. It was a ceremony. He would refuse the counter clerk's hurry with a raised palm, set his feet, uncap the pen, and produce his name slowly, magnificently, while a queue of literate men shifted and sighed behind him. Then he would read it back to himself, the one word he could read, and nod at it like an officer approving a parade.
We use the word illiterate as if it were the opposite of intelligent. My grandfather carried entire archives behind his eyes. He knew three hundred devotional songs. He dictated letters to me for years, and his composition was better than mine: formal openings, a proverb deployed exactly where an argument needed weight, tenderness smuggled into the last line where the reader least expected it. Write this, he would say, staring at the middle distance: Tell her the guava tree she planted has fruited, and that the fruit is sour, exactly like her temper, and that I am eating it anyway. He was a writer. He simply had no letters, the way some singers have no instrument.
He died in February, in his sleep, with the radio still warm. We found the notebook when we cleared the shelf. Except it was not one notebook. There were eleven, stacked and tied with the same string that had held the pen, dated in my father's handwriting on each cover because my grandfather had asked him to.
Ten of them were exactly what you would expect. Raghunath, Raghunath, Raghunath, thousands of times, page after page, eight years of a man keeping the rust off his own name.
The eleventh was different.
Halfway through it, the word changed. First it was my grandmother's name, Savitri, copied in that same fence post hand, wobbling, crossed out, tried again... slowly straightening over the pages like a sapling being staked. Then my father's name. Then my aunt's. Then, on the last written page, half finished, abandoned mid letter on some ordinary night he did not know was his last: the first four letters of mine.
He was writing his way toward us, one name at a time.
No one had known.
Not my father, who taught him the first word. Not my grandmother, who slept an arm's length from that shelf for fifty years. He had sat under the forty watt bulb, night after night, secretly extending the fence, post by post, around every person he loved, in the only script he would ever own.
His signature was a one word autobiography, and he revised it every night of his life.
I did not cry at the funeral.
I cried three weeks later, alone, when I finally sat down and read the eleventh notebook page by page, watching Savitri straighten. Then I did the only thing I know how to do with weight like that: I wrote it down. The piece I wrote about him was less a poem than a deposition, and when I entered it into a monthly poetry contest under the theme of memory, I felt like I was signing on his behalf, the way he once pressed his thumb where his name should have been.
Later I published his story among profiles of writers nobody had heard yet, because I have come to believe that is what he was. Not a man who could not write. A man who wrote one word his entire life and made it carry everything: defiance, dignity, the guava tree, the sour fruit, the eating of it anyway.
I keep the eleventh notebook in my desk drawer, under the good paper. The last page still ends where he ended, four letters of my name and then white space, the pen lifted for tobacco or sleep or whatever small errand a man trusts he will return from.
Some nights I take out a pen and sit with that page. I have not done it yet...
But one of these nights, in his hand, not mine, I am going to finish it.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.