For many Indian families, the end of the year is a time for reflection and rituals. For one writer, Sandip Roy, it was marked by his mother's humble request: a new diary. This simple annual tradition unfolded into a profound lesson about life, memory, and the quiet significance of the everyday.
The Ritual of Recording a Quiet Life
As his mother grew older and more housebound, her request for a diary became more modest. She asked for a small one, insisting that not enough happened in her life to fill a whole page. Yet, she filled it meticulously regardless. Her entries were a careful catalogue of daily life: every phone call made and received, notes about the cook calling in sick, menus for birthday dinners, and, most importantly, the birthdays of relatives and friends.
This list of birthdays, Roy notes, steadily shrank over the years. One of his last memories is of his mother, propped against a pillow, writing in her diary with a shaky hand. In her final weeks, she lacked the strength to write. But after she passed away, he discovered she had already entered all the upcoming birthdays for that month—calls she would never get to make.
From Paper to Pixel: The Lost Art of Journaling
Roy's parents were not writers, but when they saw his interest, they encouraged him to keep a diary as an exercise for the "writing muscle." His first diaries had dull grey-blue covers from cement companies. While his mother's evening diary entry was a ritual to "put the day to bed," Roy was less consistent.
He later attempted a digital diary, a Word document for each year. However, it lacked the tangible appeal of a physical book. Entries became sporadic after February or March. The digital file, buried in his laptop, did not tug at his conscience like the empty pages of a notebook. Writing with real ink felt like a ritual of import, carrying a certain weight.
In his youth, Roy harboured the vain thought that his diary would be a record for posterity, a chronicle of his times for future readers. He references historical diarists like Anne Frank and India's own H. Y. Sharada Prasad, whose prison diary from the Quit India movement was praised by historian Ramachandra Guha as containing words "for all time."
The Humble Truth in Everyday Scrawls
Looking back, Roy finds no such grand thread in his own journals. Instead of great insights, they contain mundane minutiae. He gives an example from 31 March 2018: "At home. Took nap. Got food from Chinese place... Heard Ajay mama died."
He contrasts the performative nature of social media—an "anti-diary"—with the true diary, which he calls the "black box of your life," to be opened only after you are gone. Yet, a diary is not always a perfectly truthful portal to the self. As Susan Sontag wrote in her journals, one is not just documenting life in a diary but often creating an alternative to it.
Roy finds greater resonance in the utterly unselfconscious record. He mentions reading Khada Bodi Thor by Kalyani Dutta, which included a Bengali housewife's old shopping lists with prices in annas and pice. Those simple lists painted a vivid picture of early 20th-century domestic life.
The Last Laugh and Lasting Comfort
The ultimate value of his mother's diary revealed itself practically. Years after buying an appliance, Roy and his sister could not remember the month. The receipts were lost, and the keeper of memories—their mother—was gone. But they knew her diary held the answer.
They found the entry, and Roy realised his mother had the last laugh. The very mundane details they once teased her for recording proved invaluable. He concludes that even the most trivial notation has value because our lives are largely composed of such humble moments. The pages of a diary, filled day by day, quietly add up to a life.
Roy did not find the abstract meaning of life in his mother's diary. Instead, he found a quiet, familiar comfort in its half-forgotten details—a comfort that, in itself, gives life meaning.
