At fifteen I wrote poems, badly, and kept them in a school notebook under my mattress, which is where a fifteen year old hides things from a mother who absolutely knew.
At nineteen, home for a break from college, I took the notebook out to the terrace and burned it. Not in a dramatic way; page by page, with a lighter, over about twenty minutes, because the pages were thick and did not catch easily. I remember being extremely calm about it. I had a reason ready in case anyone came up: old school rubbish, cleaning out the almirah. Nobody came up.
What was in the poems was not the problem. The problem was the person who wrote them. He was sincere in a way I could no longer stand to look at. He rhymed things that should not have been rhymed, he used the word soul, and, worst of all, in one of them, he had written directly and without irony about wanting to be understood by his father. I had spent a year at college acquiring the tools to dismantle exactly that kind of person, and I used every one of them on a fifteen year old who could not answer back.
Here is what I did not foresee and what makes this worth writing down. The clearing-out worked. For about six years I was genuinely free of him. And then in my mid-twenties I started working with students of that age, and one of them — a boy who edited the college magazine and could not look at anyone while being praised — read me a poem in the corridor outside a classroom. It was not good. It had the same faults, the same reaching, the same lack of protection. I said, that is a real thing you have written, and I watched his face do something complicated, and on the train home I understood that I had just done for him a small thing I had refused to do for myself.
The thing I burned was not a set of bad poems. It was the only record of a person who was trying. I have no photographs of his handwriting. I do not know what he thought about anything, in his own voice, before he learned to be clever about it.
I am not going to turn this into a warning about being kind to your younger self, because I have read that piece and it is saccharine. The clearer thing I have is technical. Confidence is a set of tools, and tools can be pointed at yourself. At nineteen I was very good at pointing them inward and calling it taste. It took me half a decade to notice that the criticism had no other function — it did not make me a better writer, it did not make me better at anything. It only made me quieter.
One poem survived because it was in a different notebook, a school one, used for chemistry notes at the back. Four lines about a power cut. It is not good. I keep it in the drawer with the documents, and I do not read it as literature, I read it as a measurement: this is how much I was willing to lose in order to not be that boy again.
At thirty-five I can say, plainly, that he was more honest than I was for about ten years after. I burned him because he had not learned to hide.
A conversation, quietly.
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