BackDiary of a teenage girl
Portrait of a schoolgirl from her diary found at a pavement book store in New Delhi
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Early one morning about a month ago, as my daughters and I waited at the bus stand for their school bus, we killed time by browsing through the books and magazines at our local pavement bookshop. On one of the many piles stacked with thrillers, romances and other best-sellers, I reached out for something that seemed a bit unusual and out of place there. A small brown diary, the cover faded and worn, one of those “dear diary" confessional varieties that come with a lock, now broken. The outer cover was printed with hearts in pale shades of pink, blue and green with the words “Happy", “Good" and “Smile" within each of them, as well as messages that one remembers from greeting cards—“Best Wishes"; “Remembering not griefs and tears But blessings of the bygone years". It was embellished by the writer with a blue ballpoint pen with three more hearts next to her own name.
I started to read this diary, half of its pages filled, trying hard to ignore my daughters, who had discovered their own treasure, a Chhota Bheem comic book, and were now urging me to buy it for them. Thankfully, their bus arrived just then. I returned to the bookseller and asked the price of the diary. He looked astonished, pointed out to me that it was a used notebook, a mistake that should not have been a part of the pile, baffled even as to what price to put to it. I insisted that this did not matter to me, and even offered to buy the Chhota Bheem book worth ₹ 70. Pacified, he threw in this old, second-hand notebook for ₹ 20.
This was my read on the way to the office that morning, but halfway through, I had to shut it. It was too depressing for words. The schoolgirl—the last page, marked “IMPT", had her practice signature for her class X board examinations—suffered from such low self-esteem that nothing seemed right in her life. So frustrated did she seem with her lot that it momentarily made one guilty for reading the most private thoughts of a stranger. So intensely did she feel her hurt that it made you want to reach out to assure her that this phase of life would pass, and hopefully without any major consequences —shake her even, to get her to see how silly it all was. It was astounding to realize these pages were probably the only companions to her pain; it seemed as if nobody, including her parents, realized what was running through her mind.
In the 50-odd pages that she writes here, she continues more or less in this vein, berating her friends for “using" her, “abandoning" her, not “caring" about her, “hating" her, “disliking" her, being “bugged of me", thinking “I am a jerk". She writes of her crush for a neighbourhood boy and why she wasn’t of his “standard" and so stood no chance, the pimples and skin tone that stood in the way of her happiness, the friends she was only “jhealofying", an impassioned plea for someone who could understand her: “I’m in need of friends. I don’t know what type of friends I want but someone who can listen to all my stupid talks. someone who feels good with me, someone who is loving & caring & someone whome I don’t care about. I mean someone who knows everything about me but still does not tease me or I don’t feel ajeeb with her. I need a true friend as soon as possible."
This is a girl who hangs out with a bunch of 8-10 children her age whose names feature with some regularity in these pages. She seems outwardly to be living a normal childhood, but is intensely lonely at the same time. A diary is the kind of confessional space where one has the freedom to be unabashedly self-obsessed, to indulge and wallow in self-pity. Yet, there is so much negativity on display here that the words almost start to appear fictional, so difficult is it to believe that the entire diary could feature only two happy moments.
At the same time, one can see that much of this is what a regular teenage life often includes: friends who distressingly start to realize that they don’t have much in common any more (“The diff b/w me & A is widening up day by day. I have stoped talking & now I am seeing she has also reduced the time. But never minds."); and friends who you will pour your heart out to, but who may quite often be unthinkingly insensitive and just plain mean in what they say to you, shaping the way you think of yourself (“A says that I need to do something about my pimples my skin my looks. I do care but I have a kind of let go types of attitude. She also says A does not like me just because of that. If I would have looked smart and georgeous he would have said something or the other good things about me as he is a flirt.")
As a teenager, the pressures of life appear huge, every small problem is magnified in one’s head, everything felt with the greatest of intensity. Here’s an entry concerning the same boy she has a crush on, to whom she could earlier not reveal her feelings for fear of rejection, but with whom she is finally on nodding terms at least: “It was my fault. I gave a terrible mid term, exam & the result came out to be 50%. I was crying in school. N told him but he did not understand. All bcos of this stupid midterm I may have spoilt my impression on him. God knows."
The entries start to lighten up somewhat once this boy starts to take an interest in her. This is Happy Moment 2: “A wanted to talk to me. Oh, my god I cant beleave it. It is actually true. According to T, A wants me to start friendship first. She also told me that today he was talking 70% about me. But what can he say about me. Also N told me that he wantd to be friends." A little later, a surprising display of calm nerves: “We don’t talk directly but we know each others feelings very clearly. He knows I like him & I know he does not care but does not mind becoming friends." Her last diary entry comes soon after this: “I have reduced my pimples, I have grown my nails long, trying to loose weight, look good, attractive. All this just for him. + studies too."
This diary was written in 2007. One can only hope that these subsequent eight years have been good to this girl, that these “bygone years" that she’s written about in her diary remain only as a memory of the kind of hormonal years all adults have gone through, where we were still finding ourselves, we seemed to have little control over our own lives, and friends and their opinions had an overly large influence over us.
This diary stunned me but perhaps this is what the growing-up years are all about, and I’d forgotten. And that is what is called a generation gap.
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