My Mother Documented My Childhood in Verse
My fevers, first steps, and tantrums, all in rhyming couplets.
Other children had baby books. I had a rhyme scheme.
My mother kept notebooks, ordinary school notebooks with brown paper covers, the kind shopkeepers sell in stacks of ten, and in them she recorded my entire childhood in rhyming couplets. Not diary entries. Not milestones with dates. Couplets. My first steps exist in verse. My chickenpox exists in verse. The famous biting incident of 1998, in which I bit my cousin Montu at his own birthday party, exists in verse, and I am sorry to report that in it, I do not come off well.
She wrote at night, sitting up in bed after the house went quiet, notebook against her knees, pen cap between her teeth. That is my oldest picture of her: the lamp, the knees, the scratching sound. I assumed all mothers did this, the way you assume all houses smell like yours until you visit a friend and learn otherwise.
The couplets were not good, exactly. She would be the first to say so. She forced rhymes the way she forced sweaters over my head, briskly and without apology. She rhymed "fever" with "believer." She rhymed my name with a vegetable when necessary, and it was often necessary.
But they had a metre you could set a clock by, and they missed nothing. Two lines for the day I stood up holding the sofa. Two lines for the tooth that came out in a jalebi. Four lines, a double entry, unprecedented, for the day I came home from school and announced I no longer believed in God, aged nine, with great ceremony. Her couplet on that occasion ended, roughly translated, "the Almighty, being older than this philosopher, agreed to wait."
As a teenager I found the notebooks unbearable. Fourteen is the age at which love embarrasses you in direct proportion to its size. She read a couplet out loud at my birthday once, something about my exam results and my haircut, and I did not speak to her for a full day. She never read aloud at a birthday again... and it took me twenty years to hear the click of that door closing.
She kept writing, though... She just stopped performing. There is a difference, and I have come to believe it is the difference that matters most in every kind of love.
Last year we packed up the flat. My father is gone now, and the place had become too big for her in the way empty places grow, the rooms somehow adding square footage at night. She was moving to a smaller flat near my sister, and I flew home for the boxes and the arguments about which steel utensils were sacred. On the second evening, on the top shelf of the steel cupboard, behind the good tablecloth, I found the notebooks. Eleven of them, tied with the string from a sweet box, in order.
I sat on her bed and read my own childhood cover to cover, and I want to say it took hours, but a childhood in couplets moves fast. Fevers, floods, report cards, the dog we had for one summer only. It was all there, and it was all two lines long, and I laughed out loud maybe thirty times and had to stop reading twice. There is a couplet about the night I sleepwalked into the kitchen and tried to fry my pillow that should, by rights, be in a national archive somewhere.
Then I reached for the first notebook, the bottom one, the oldest, to see what she had written about the day I was born.
The first notebook does not start with me.
It starts two years before me, in a different handwriting, younger, more careful, and the first pages are couplets for a boy named Anup. My brother. He lived for three days in a hospital in winter, and I have known this fact my whole life the way you know a country's capital: one line, no geography. Nobody in our family ever said more than the fact.
But here were nine pages of him. A couplet for each day of the pregnancy's last month. A couplet for his face, "which had your father's forehead already, worried already." A couplet for his hand around her finger. And then a couplet, alone on its own page, dated four months after, which I will not fully repeat, because some lines belong to the person who paid for them. The second half of it said: "nothing written, nothing kept."
Nothing written, nothing kept.
I sat on her bed with the notebook and understood, at forty one, on moving day, why my chickenpox is in verse.
She rhymed my fevers because rhyme was the only container she trusted not to spill.
They had given her no records of Anup. This was the eighties, a government hospital; there was a birth certificate and a death certificate and between those two official facts, nothing, three whole days of a person, unrecorded. No photograph... She was twenty four.
And somewhere in that fourth month she seems to have made a decision with the full force of her stubbornness, the same stubbornness she later used on sweaters and school principals: whatever child came next would be written down. All of it. The boring days too. Especially the boring days. If the universe would not keep records, she would, in double lines, rhymed, because rhymed lines are easier to remember when notebooks burn or flood or get left behind, and she was the daughter of refugees and knew exactly how paper behaves in history.
My whole embarrassing documented childhood, the haircut couplets, the vegetable rhymes, every forced verse I had rolled my eyes at for decades, all of it was built on the un-mothered floor of grief. She was not writing poetry about her child. She was refusing, one couplet at a time, to let a second child pass through her hands undocumented.
The notebooks were never a baby book. They were a protest.
I did not tell her that night what I had read. I helped her wrap glasses in newspaper and we argued correctly about utensils. But before I flew back, I did something I had been circling for years.
I bought a school notebook from the shop downstairs, brown paper cover, from a stack of ten, and I wrote my first couplet on the first page. It is about her... obviously. It is about the way she stood in the empty flat on the last morning and thanked it, out loud, formally, like a guest leaving a wedding. My couplet is not good, exactly. I forced a rhyme. It runs in the family.
I write in it a few nights a week now, sitting up in bed, notebook on my knees, documenting her the way she documented me: the phone calls, the new flat, the war with the new neighbour over the corridor plants, her love, which at seventy still fits nothing smaller than two lines. She does not know yet. I suppose she will find it on a shelf someday, behind some tablecloth of mine, tied with string.
Nothing written, nothing kept, she wrote once, alone in the dark, twenty four years old.
Written, then. Kept.
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.