At the end of every year my mother had a little ritual.
She would say “Well it looks I survived another year. So can you buy me a diary for next year?”
As she got more housebound with age, she would say “Don’t get one of those big expensive diaries. Get a small one. Not enough happens anymore in my life to fill a whole page.”
But she filled it anyway, painstakingly listing every phone phone call she had received that day and every phone call she had made. If the cook called in sick that was recorded as well alongside menus for birthday dinners and the like.
One of my last memories of my mother is of her sitting on her bed, propped up against her pillow, still trying to write in her diary with a shaky hand. The last couple of weeks of her life she did not have the strength to write. But after she was gone I opened the diary and saw she had already entered all the upcoming birthdays for that month, calls she never got to make.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata
My parents were not writers. But when they discovered I liked writing they encouraged me to keep a diary. They thought it would be a good exercise for the writing muscle. Writing in her diary was my mother’s ritual at the end of every day, almost like a way to put the day to bed before she went to bed herself. I was not as consistent; sometimes I would miss an entire week, but I tried.
Later I tried to keep a digital diary, a Word document for every year. But somehow it never matched the appeal of a physical diary. After February or March, the entries would become more sporadic. The document buried in my laptop did not tug at my conscience like the physical book’s empty pages. Writing on paper with real ink had the feel of a ritual of some import. The first few entries in long hand were always in my best schoolboy handwriting. Over time it became a scrawl, like a New Year’s resolution slowly unraveling.
At that time I thought in a moment of vainglorious delusion that my diary was meant to be a record for posterity, that long after I was gone, someone would read it as a chronicle of my times. When Anne Frank started her diary she wondered why anyone would ever be interested in the outpouring of a thirteen-year-old girl. History turned her journal into probably the most famous diary in the world. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about journaling that “the good writer seems to be writing about himself, but has his eye always on that thread of the Universe which runs through himself and all things.”
But when I look back at my old diaries I see no such thread. Instead I wonder why anyone would be interested in the minutia of my life. For example, on March 31 2018.
At home. Took nap. Got food from Chinese place. Got very dark and stormy. First big kalbaisakhi storm. Puppy climbed on lap and sat there. Heard Ajaymama died. Forget the great diarists like Samuel Pepys, Anais Nin or Virginia Woolf. This was not even Bridget Jones’ diary.
Writer Anthony Quinn wrote in an essay in The Guardian that the diary, “is the most private form of literary creation because you are both the author and (for the present at least) the sole reader.” Social media like Facebook purports to be a sort of diary as well but in reality they are curated snippets of the life you want other people to think you lead. The real diary is the black box of your life, to be opened by others only after you are gone.
When I read my diary entries from twenty years ago I wonder if that pretentious person was really me. Great events of historical importance find no mention in my diary. Instead, content in my bubble of self-centredness, I am busy noting what I cooked and haircuts,. But then as Quinn noted on the day Bastille fell in France, Louis XVI wrote in his diary “Rien” or “Nothing.”
My diary is mostly filled with details of little significance. Yet even at its most mundane a diary has something to tell us. The other day my sister and I were trying to remember which month we had bought some appliance years ago. The receipts were long lost. And the keeper of memories, my mother, was gone as well. But we had her diaries and we knew if we leafed through that year’s pages it would surely be recorded.
At that time we had teased her about the mundane things she found worth of noting in her diary. But as we came upon the entry, I realised, mother would have the last laugh. Even the most trivial notation in the diary is not without value because our lives, even for the most intellectual thinkers among us, are mostly full of such humble moments. The pages of a diary add up to a life, day by day.
I did not find the meaning of life in my mother’s diary. But in its little half-forgotten details I find a quiet familiar comfort that gives life meaning.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata for KALW