My Parents Never Read, So I Read to Them
Every night I returned the alphabet they had paid for.
My mother signs her name the way other people defuse bombs: slowly, breath held, tongue pressed against her teeth. Three letters, practiced for two weeks on the back of an old calendar before she opened her first bank account. She still glances up at me when she finishes, every single time... Did it come out right? It always comes out right.
Neither of my parents can read. My father is a tailor with a shop the size of a parked scooter, in a lane in Meerut where the electric wires overhead hang like a child's scribbles. My mother cleaned rice, rolled papads for a snack shop, and stitched falls onto other women's saris for two rupees apiece. Between them they paid for one school uniform, one tin trunk, one set of secondhand textbooks with someone else's name scratched out of the covers, and me.
I was the first person in our family, going back as far as anyone could count, who could look at a wall and know what it was saying.
They could not check my homework, so they invented a ritual instead. Every night after dinner the electricity went, because in our town it always went, and my mother would light a candle stub on a steel plate in the middle of the floor. My father would sit against the wall, legs stretched out, thumbs still dented from the day's scissors, and say the same three words: Padh ke sunao. Read it out to us.
So I read.
I read my science chapter about photosynthesis, and my father, who has never once seen the word chlorophyll, nodded like a man hearing a court verdict go his way. I read the day-old newspaper the shop next door threw out: my mother wanted the television listings, my father wanted wrestling results and politics, in that order.
I read wedding invitations for half the lane, because gold lettering means nothing if nobody can decode it. I read electricity bills, ration lists, the letter from my uncle in Dubai that my father made me read four times, not because he didn't understand it, but because he liked the part where his brother asked about him.
The candle did something to the words. In its light, the shadows of my hands moved across the page like a second, larger boy reading over my shoulder, and my voice sounded older than eleven. Some nights the wax pooled and drowned the wick before I finished, and my father would say, we will hear the ending tomorrow, the way rich people save dessert.
For one hour every night, I was the wealthiest man in that house.
Then I turned fourteen and became an idiot.
This happens to most of us; my version was crueler than average. My friends' fathers signed their school diaries with looping, confident signatures. Mine pressed his thumb into a purple ink pad, and the clerk would wave him toward the wrong line because of it. One afternoon he came to school for a parents' meeting holding the printed notice upside down, asking me quietly which door we needed, and I hissed at him to just give me the paper. In front of two classmates.
He handed it over without a word and looked at the floor of the corridor his money had paid for me to walk on.
That evening he still said it... Padh ke sunao.
I said I had a headache.
The candle stayed unlit that night... and then, in the way of these things, it stayed unlit. I got a scholarship, a hostel bed in Delhi, a life measured in semesters. When I called home, my mother held the phone like it might bite her, and our conversations were four sentences long: eaten, yes; sleeping, yes; money, no; come home, soon.
The turn came eight years later, when my mother had cataract surgery and I went home to cook badly for two weeks. Looking for the tea, I found a notebook wedged behind the spice tins. Cheap, sun-yellowed, its cover soft as cloth from handling. Inside, in pencil, were rows of trembling letters. The Hindi alphabet, attempted, abandoned, attempted again. Her own name, over and over, the same three letters she signs like a bomb technician.
And on the last used page, another word, written maybe fifty times, wobbly at the top of the page and steadier by the bottom.
My name.
My name was the first word my mother taught herself to read. When I asked her about it, she shrugged with her bandaged eye turned away from me and said, your scholarship letter came, and everyone at the post office had read it before we did. The postman read it, the shopkeeper read it, the neighbor read it twice. I wanted to read the name on it myself... Just the name. I sat with your old first-standard book after your father slept.
Every night I had returned the alphabet they paid for, one syllable at a time, and they had received it like change counted back from a large note: carefully, gratefully, checking nothing.
I went out to the courtyard and cried the way you cry at twenty-two, furious at yourself, silently, into the smell of someone else's dinner smoke. Then I went back inside, took down the steel plate, and lit a candle even though the electricity was working fine. My father looked up from his stitching. I read them the newspaper. He asked for wrestling first, politics second. Some rituals survive being abandoned... they just wait.
We read on the phone now. Sunday nights, speaker on, my mother shushing the pressure cooker so she can hear. I read them news, I read them my own poems, which embarrasses all three of us in a way we have privately agreed to enjoy. Years after I found the notebook, I wrote a poem about it, about her pencil and my name, and entered it into a monthly poetry contest mostly so the story would exist somewhere outside our kitchen. When the acceptance mail came, I read it to them over the phone, and my father said, read it again, slower, the way he used to say we will hear the ending tomorrow.
People ask sometimes why so much of what I write circles back to family, as if there were somewhere else to stand. When I finally wrote honestly about my childhood, I discovered I had nothing to say about poverty. I wrote about a candle. I wrote about a man who saved the endings of newspaper articles like dessert. Poverty was just the room it all happened in.
My mother reads slowly now, lips moving, one finger under the line like a child, which is to say like a beginner, which is to say like someone brave. Last month a courier came and she signed for the parcel while I stood behind her, and she did not glance back at me afterward to ask if it came out right.
That, more than any degree with my name on it, felt like a graduation.
I keep a candle stub in my desk drawer in the city. The power never fails in my building; the building would consider it beneath itself. But some nights I light the stub anyway, put a page in front of me, and read aloud to the empty room.
Padh ke sunao, I tell myself.
Somewhere two people who cannot read a word of it are the entire reason it gets read at all.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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