Sandip Roy: The real diary is the black box of your life

At the end of every year my mother had a little ritual.

She would say, “Well it looks like 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 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. At the beginning of every month she noted all the birthdays of various relatives and friends that month, a list that steadily shrank over the years.

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.

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. My father would get diaries and calendars as gifts and he would let me choose one for myself. My first diaries tended to have dull grey-blue covers with geometric designs and the names of cement companies. 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. It carried weight. The first few entries in longhand were always in my best schoolboy handwriting. Over time it became a scrawl, like a New Year’s resolution slowly unravelling.

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 13-year-old girl. History turned her journal into probably the most famous diary in the world. In India, H. Y. Sharada Prasad became a speech writer for prime ministers. But when his prison diary—written when he was in Mysore jail as a 19-year-old involved in the Quit India movement—was published as a book, historian Ramachandra Guha marvelled in a column that “the speeches that Sharada Prasad wrote for Indira and Rajiv Gandhi were of the moment—whereas the words he wrote for himself were quite often for all time.” That was probably because, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about journaling, “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. My diary entries offer no great insight into my life and times. Instead I wonder why anyone would be interested in the minutiae of my life. For example, on 31 March 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 Ajay mama died.”

Forget the great diarists like Samuel Pepys, Anaïs Nin or Virginia Woolf. This was not even Bridget Jones’s diary.

Writer Anthony Quinn once admitted in an essay in The Guardian that people thought it was “weirdly old-fashioned” that he kept a diary. He confessed he felt oddly furtive if even his wife found him writing his diary at the kitchen table, as if she had stumbled upon him doing something clandestine. The diary, he wrote, “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 anti-diaries. They are about performance, 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.

That is not to say it is the most reliable way to make sense of someone’s life, or even the most truthful. We change. And when I read my diary entries from 20 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 what haircuts I got. But then as Quinn noted on the day the Bastille fell in France, Louis XVI wrote in his diary “Rien” or “Nothing.”

In fact the mistake we make when we read a diary is to think of it as some secret portal into the innermost mind of the diarist, that because it is written for an audience of one, namely herself, it must somehow be the truest reflection of herself. But as Susan Sontag wrote in Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963, one is not documenting or expressing oneself more openly in a diary than one could do to another person, one is also creating oneself. “Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather—in many cases—offers an alternative to it.”

But my diary cannot even claim such grand aspirations. It is mostly filled with details of little significance. Yet even at its most mundane a diary has something to tell us. I once read Khada Bodi Thor by Kalyani Dutta, a Bengali book which included a housewife’s shopping lists from decades ago. She no doubt never imagined that it would one day merit publication in a book but those simple lists with the prices in annas and pice painted such a vivid picture of early 20th century domesticity that I felt I was looking into her kitchen. It was journaling at its most unselfconscious.

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.

Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against.

Sandip Roy (@sandipr) is a writer, journalist and radio host.