A friend gave me a diary of a pharmaceutical company some twenty years back. With the passage of time, the black resin cover of the diary has become faded and the spine of the book damaged seriously. But, none of the pages have fallen out of the book.
Over the years, the diary has become a personal and family history book of sorts. All the members of my family including my wife, son and daughter have scribbled something in the book. Twenty years ago, there was only one telephone in my village. The telephone number was clearly written in the diary with the name of the owner in capital letters. Many years ago, my sister used to go to his house every Friday to receive my call from Dubai.
There are a couple of pages in the diary that were filled by my then school-going son. They were mostly about his WWE heroes. He and I used to watch WWE matches with religious fervor, while his mother always disapproved of the father-son duo spending hours together watching “sadistic acts” on TV. On the last two pages of the diary, there were many entries by me. Postal addresses of some book publishers, the names of books, a few lines from Jagjit Singh Gazal and the lyrics of a Hindi movie song by Talat Mehmood. A quote by Marilyn Monroe and a poem by Robert Frost were also written in one page.
While reading Frost’s poem the other day, I was reminded of the times when I scribbled the poem in my diary and had an inner satisfaction in knowing that, “I took the one less travelled by.” As I had not filled the personal profile like name, office, blood group, club, LIC policy number and allergies, my daughter had used the page to fill in her details such as the name of her school and the grade and division she was in at that time.
The last two pages were reserved for my wife. Recipes of mutton kurma and kadai chicken found their place in these pages. I also found details of how to prepare a face mask from left-over fruits. A few phone numbers I had written down had been cancelled out by drawing thick red lines through them. They had once belonged to the people whom I came to know through the years, but died recently.
Now, I do not write anything in my diary after the advent of the mobile phone. Neither does my wife nor daughter use the diary.
What is there to write when Facebook and WhatsApp do all the writing for you!
K M Divakaran
Email: divakarankm@gmail.com