Dear Diary - Where Have You Gone?

“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining board, which I have padded with our dog’s blanket and the tea cozy.” 

With these first words of my favourite novel, I Capture the Castle, unlike any first words that I’d previously read — well, I should say at the time I read mostly heavy classics — I found a brand new meaning to literature. I stumbled upon it pretty late though. I guess most people I know had read it in their teens but I devoured it as an adult on my bus journeys to my third job at a corporate IT giant of a firm. I read it every morning. And then before bedtime. And then again with breakfast. It was an unstoppable urge to go back to Cassandra’s private journal with her whispering by your side, pouring her heart out in witty observations about her peculiar family but shrewdly reserving her own feelings to herself. Cassandra, the protagonist of the book, comes of age in this medium through her extraordinarily real, matter-of-fact voice. She brings beauty through her blithe words to mostly decrepit, decayed surroundings. And poverty. The novel is achingly poignant. It gives you a sense of the romance that is to unfold — and to get complex —  with the narrator falling deep into the thick of things by getting her own feelings intertwined in unrequited love.

It was something about the way Dodie Smith threw together a conventional story shuffled in bits of Cassandra’s written journal and her narration that gave it such an endearing appeal for me. Reading I Capture the Castle renewed a sporadic, heavily-inspired relationship with writing. Back then, I was not in the least pressed with work and I thought it’d be a good way to explore my own voice by keeping a journal. If nothing of consequence happened during the day, as is the norm with people in nine-to-five jobs, I’d sit outside, a small girl in the open, vast campus of Infosys and write my reflections on strangers —  characterizing maybe a bit too artificially their restrained smiles, grey suits and forced conversations. Going through my old journal now, ten years later, gives me the sense that I'm trespassing. Reading somebody else’s voice. Somebody who badly needs — how do I put it delicately — a chill pill. I get the sense that my cynicism, my cruel generalizations, my rushed-up feelings of false despair with humanity were meant for an audience. “What am I doing here? In this well of grey shirts casting a dark shadow on blank faces”, read my journal on a mid-March afternoon. I can only assume that I wrote these patchy, vague sentences to add a touch of poeticism but here’s the bummer. They didn't give me any insight on my life. They seemed to me scraps of writing borrowed from Ayn Rand, Franz Kafka, Kate Chopin and Emily Bronte but for the life of me, I couldn't place any fitting tragedies or massive heartbreaks at the time that would cause such a stir in feelings.

It kind of brings me right to the start. When I was a teen, I had one of those cute, pink electronic journals with icons and word limits. The idea was merely to summarize the occurrences of a day in sparse words and move forward to the next. For that reason, reading it later would probably be like wandering through a cryptic maze. I had to name-code everything — my crush at the time, close friends, arch enemies… I recall coming home and diving straight into it with a cup of tea and french fries, typing furiously 500 well-meaning characters, cataloguing my dog days almost as enthusiastically as my eventful ones. I kept it hidden for the longest time and when I moved back to India, it got shuffled among other life-altering possessions so it got left behind. I was all nerves for the longest time. What if someone read it? What if they figured out who my crush was and told him how psychotic I was to go on and on about his glasses and faded blue jeans? Well, I'm sure on reading it now, it wouldn't be half as scandalous as I made it out to be then. In fact, there’s a good chance that it’d seem trivial with its half-hearted Haiku of birds on window perches or dull rainy days or war logs with acne. It was a huge loss nevertheless for it seems to me that it has eroded away that significant period of adolescence, which unfortunately, can now only be salvaged in sudden bursts of memories.

I sometimes wonder what made me keep a diary then and what’s stopping me from keeping one now? It’d be great to start one today as it’ll exercise my writing muscles better. But it seems like such a redundant occupation. A bad investment of time. I mean I have a blog. Why would I pour myself out on pages that are not meant for a wide audience, right? In times when everything from no make-up selfies to reclusive vacation mornings are meant for wide screening, what purpose would a modest diary with a lock serve? Do I write it with half an eye on future prospects or do I share excerpts from it as I go along?

The beauty of keeping a diary seems lost on me today. Probably, it just seems like too much effort with other literary ambitions emerging to take their stake on my time. Even if I keep one, I think it’s going to be incredibly hard to write one without visualizing an imaginary audience for it in the future. Barring my teen diary that I have little reflection of, I think I've always written for someone — life lessons for the next gen, love letters to my future spouse, career advice for people in large firms, menstrual sanity guidelines for working women…

Even so, in the months to come, I'm going to take on the more complicated experiment of writing for nobody but myself. I am going to write one as a way of arresting memories, instead of resorting to photographs that seem far too posy to speak to me. I am going to write one as a way of finding myself. I am going to write a diary to the point of futility about observations to life as it happens. Hopefully, I’ll learn to tune out of myself and capture the colour of rain on cobbled lanes instead or document every little innocent remark my daughter and her friends make, like the time she told me how I should order food at a restaurant. (“Mommy, if it had a face, don’t eat it.”)

“Dear Diary, I don’t know what happened there. But I'm going to make up for lost time.”

Did you keep a diary as a teen? Do you think of your blog as a diary? I'd love to hear from you, readers.