My Grandmother Memorized Poems She Couldn't Write Down
Her library lived entirely between her ears, catalogued by heart.
My grandmother could not read the word for rice, but she could recite four hundred lines of poetry without stopping for water.
I found this out when I was nine, during a power cut in Amritsar that swallowed the whole street. The inverter had died the week before and nobody had fixed it, so my grandmother lit the stub of a candle she kept in a steel tumbler, sat me down on the cot beside her, and began to speak in a voice I had never heard her use. It was lower than her kitchen voice. It had a metre in it, a rocking, like a train heard from two fields away.
She was reciting Heer... Not a verse of it. The thing itself, stanza after stanza, Waris Shah's lines pouring out of a woman who signed her pension papers with a thumbprint.
I remember the candle flame leaning every time she hit the end of a line, as if it were listening too.
She had been married at sixteen and schooled at no age whatsoever. Her father believed letters spoiled girls the way rain spoils salt. So her mother gave her the only inheritance that could not be confiscated, sold, or burned in 1947: poems. Wedding songs with seventeen verses. Mourning laments that named every kind of loss in order, husband, son, brother, harvest. Couplets for teasing a new bride. A long ballad about a boatman that I have never found in any book, and believe me, I have looked.
People talk about the oral tradition of poetry as if it were a museum exhibit, something behind glass with a little brass plaque. In our house it was just Bebe, shelling peas, running her library.
When I was nineteen and insufferable, home from college with a bag full of paperbacks, I decided to save her.
That was the word I actually used in my head. Save.
I sat across from her with a fresh notebook and said, "Bebe, recite slowly, I'm going to write everything down so it doesn't get lost."
She laughed so hard she had to put down her tea.
"Lost?" she said. "Puttar, paper is what gets lost. I have never once left myself on a bus."
But she humoured me. She always humoured me. For three summers I filled notebooks while she recited, and somewhere in the second summer I noticed the thing that changed how I understand poetry, memory, all of it.
The poems were never the same twice.
Not wrong, not forgotten. Different on purpose. When she recited the boatman ballad to me after my first heartbreak, the river in it ran slower and the boatman waited longer on the far bank. When she recited it at my cousin's wedding, the same river sparkled and the crossing took two lines instead of ten. I confronted her with my notebook like a little lawyer. "Last year you said the water was black. Now it's silver. Which is it?"
She looked at me the way you look at someone who has asked whether food is better than the recipe.
"The water is whatever the listener needs to cross," she said.
Paper keeps a poem the way a jar keeps a firefly: safe, visible, and slowly going out.
That was her whole poetics, delivered while picking stones out of lentils. A written poem is one animal stuffed and mounted. A remembered poem is the living herd.
I stopped transcribing after that. Or rather, I kept transcribing, but I stopped believing I was saving anything. I was just taking photographs of a dancer.
The Stroke
She was eighty-one when the stroke came, quiet as a thief who knows the house. It took the left side of her face first... then the names of things. She called the fridge "the cold cupboard." She called me by my father's name, then by her brother's name, the brother who never made it across in '47, and that one put my mother out of the room in tears.
But here is what the stroke could not find, no matter how it ransacked her: the poems.
In the hospital, with a tube in her arm and the smell of phenyl and marigolds fighting in the corridor, she could not tell you what day it was.
Then a nurse from Moga, homesick and humming, hummed the first bar of an old suhaag, and my grandmother, who had not completed a sentence in two days, sang the entire second verse. On key. All the ornaments in place.
The nurse cried.
The nurse, who did not know her, cried, and I stood there understanding for the first time that the poems were not stored in my grandmother's memory. They were stored deeper than memory, down where the body keeps walking and swallowing and loving. Doctors have a phrase for it, procedural memory, but Bebe would have said it plainer: the poems were in her bones, and bones are the last thing to forget.
She died on a Tuesday in March, between the milk delivery and the newspaper, which she would have found funny, the newspaper arriving for a woman who never read one.
The Inheritance
For a year I did nothing with the notebooks. Grief does that; it makes archivists of us, then locks the archive. When I finally opened them, I wrote about memory itself instead of around it, and the poem that came out was not hers and not mine but something in between, a rope bridge between two women, one of whom could not spell her own name and one of whom could spell everything except what mattered.
I posted my transcriptions of the boatman ballad, all four versions, contradictions intact, on a community wall for poets, with a note explaining that the variations were not errors. A woman from Ludhiana replied that her grandmother sang a fifth version where the boatman never comes at all, and the girl swims. We messaged for weeks. Somewhere there is a sixth version... There is always another version. That is the whole point of a herd.
Later I found profiles of writers nobody had heard yet, and I kept thinking: my grandmother was one of these, an unheard voice with an audience of grandchildren and pea pods, carrying a library that census forms recorded as "illiterate."
Illiterate. Four hundred lines without stopping for water.
Last month the power went out in my flat in Gurgaon, a proper old-fashioned blackout, and my daughter, who is six and afraid of exactly two things, dogs and darkness, started to whimper. I found a candle. I put it in a steel tumbler because that is apparently genetic. And I began the boatman ballad from the beginning, in a voice lower than my kitchen voice, with a rocking in it like a train heard from two fields away.
Halfway through... I got a line wrong. I know I got it wrong because none of Bebe's four versions had the boatman singing back to the river.
I did not correct it.
The water is whatever the listener needs to cross, and my daughter leaned toward the flame, mouth open, both fears forgotten, while somewhere in my bones a woman with a thumbprint signature shelved a new edition and smiled.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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