The real diary is the black box of your life

Unlike social media, which holds curated snippets of the life you want others to think you lead, a good, old paper diary, to be opened by others after you are gone, records the mundane moments that give life meaning

- SANDIP ROY

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.