I Dedicated My First Book to the Wrong Parent
The one who stayed never asked why; that made it worse.
The dedication page of my first book is nine words long, and I have regretted seven of them for eleven years.
"For my father, who taught me to love words."
My father left when I was twelve. He taught me to love words the way a lightning strike teaches you to love electricity: briefly, spectacularly, and from a distance ever after. He had a leather satchel and a habit of reading Neruda out loud at the dinner table, and when he walked out one October morning he took the satchel, the Neruda, and roughly all of my mother's savings.
My mother taught me everything else. Which is to say: everything.
She worked the billing counter at a fabric shop for nineteen years. She packed my tiffin with the good pickle on exam days. When I was sixteen and announced I was going to be a poet, a sentence that in our neighbourhood ranked somewhere between "I am going to be an astronaut" and "I am going to be a problem," she did not laugh.
She bought me a table.
A wobbly, secondhand, laminate-peeling table, because she had read somewhere that writers need a table of their own, and she put it by the window that got morning light, and she never once put anything of hers on it.
She was at the book launch. Third row, marigold-coloured saree, sitting very straight the way she sits in banks and government offices, places where she believes posture is a form of documentation. She clapped at the right times. She took a photograph of me at the podium on her phone, slightly blurred, thumb in the corner, and made it her wallpaper, where it remains.
She bought eleven copies. Eleven. At full price, from the bookshop, refusing my box of author copies because "the shop man should also benefit."
And she never asked about the dedication.
Not that night... Not ever. She must have opened the book eleven times, because she inspected each copy for printing defects the way she inspected fabric, and eleven times she must have read "For my father, who taught me to love words," and eleven times she said nothing.
The one who stayed never asked why. That was the worst part.
An accusation I could have survived. Her silence was a room I had to live in.
Why I Did It
Here is the ugly arithmetic I have had eleven years to work out.
I dedicated the book to my father because he was the mystery, and writers are magpies for mystery. Absence is glamorous. Absence has a satchel and quotes Neruda. Presence, meanwhile, smells like the fabric shop and asks whether you have eaten. I mistook the wound for the muse. I thought the poems came from the hole he left, when actually the poems came from the table she bought, from the morning light she assigned me, from nineteen years at a billing counter converted, rupee by rupee, into my ridiculous permission to write.
There is a harder confession under that one. Some part of me was still performing for him. Somewhere out there, I imagined, he would walk into a bookshop, pick up my thin little volume, see his own ghost on the dedication page, and feel... what? Pride? Regret? He would know I had become the thing he play-acted at dinner. The dedication was not a gift to him.
It was bait.
He never bit.
To this day I do not know if he knows the book exists.
I once read an essay on why safe poems lose, about how we write around the true subject in careful circles, and I remember going cold at my desk, because my whole first book was that circle. Forty-one poems about a missing father. Zero about a present mother. The safest poems I ever wrote, disguised as brave ones.
The Second Book
It took me six years to write the next collection, and it began, embarrassingly, with an exercise. A single line from a prompt that started it all: "Write about a debt that cannot be repaid in the currency it was incurred in."
I wrote about the table.
Then the tiffin, the good pickle, the marigold saree, the eleven copies, the blurred photograph with the thumb in the corner. The poems arrived the way water arrives when a pipe finally bursts, which is to say all at once and ruining the flooring. For the first time I wrote toward the family I actually had instead of the one that left, and the strangest thing happened: the father poems got better too, once they were no longer carrying the whole book. Grief writes a decent poem. Gratitude, it turns out, writes a better one, because gratitude has details and grief mostly has weather.
The dedication took me longer than any poem in the collection. I must have drafted thirty versions. Grand ones, grovelling ones, one in Punjabi, one that was just her name. In the end I wrote:
"For my mother, who taught me everything else."
Anyone who had read the first book would understand. She had read the first book eleven times.
I could not wait for the launch. When the advance copy came, I took the train home on a Tuesday, told her it was a surprise inspection of her pickle stocks, and put the book in her hands in the kitchen, open to the page.
She read it... She read it again, I could tell, because her eyes made the trip twice.
Then she closed the book, looked at the cover for a while, and said, "The paper quality is better than the first one."
That was all... She turned back to the stove.
But I saw her hand, the one holding the book, and the hand would not put it down. She stirred the daal left-handed for the rest of the evening, and the book travelled the house with her like a passport, kitchen to balcony to the shelf by her bed, where it lives now, first from the left, jacket wrapped in the transparent plastic she saves from calendars.
We spend our first books paying debts to the people who broke us, and if we are lucky, our second ones thanking the people who swept up.
Last winter, sorting her almirah for the annual mothball ritual, I found the eleventh copy of my first book. Ten had gone to aunts and neighbours. The eleventh she had kept, and there was a bookmark in it. An old bus ticket, marking the dedication page.
On the margin, in her careful billing-counter handwriting, in pencil, so faint I had to take it to the window light, to the same morning light she had given my table all those years ago, she had written a single line. Not an accusation. Not forgiveness either, or not only forgiveness. Just the truest edit any writer has ever received.
"He taught you to love words. Theek hai. But who taught the words to love you back?"
I put the book exactly where I found it.
Some dedications you print. Some get pencilled in the margin by the one who stayed, eleven years late and right on time.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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