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<h1 class="left">At sixteen, I dug a mass grave for my girlhood.</h1>

<h1 class="left">In it, I massacred the many, yellowing, bodies in which I documented my early life, in their leather-bound, flimsy-clasped, pad-locked glory. Their death was not one that arose from any sudden, cold-blooded impulse. It was neatly calculated and packed into shame-sized paper shredders stolen from my father’s workspace for the elaborate ritual. Here, I sat with the guilt of my teenage, and its tantrums, and lit myself up with the ever-maddening hope of destroying (and preserving) my writing like that of someone who eventually attains posthumous fame.</h1>

<h1 class="right">Up until their untimely demise, I’d documented my every living, beating desire in diaries I’d collected from little stores, and sometimes, in an act of luxury, big stores. Growing up in the 2000s, an era of scrapbooking in glitter-Hello-Kitty contraptions and American pop culture pushing teenage girls and their private journals, writing in a diary was a rite of passage. I’d read the journal entries of famous dead people, and secretly foraged the breadths of not-so-famous-alive ones (my mother’s) and decided that my life too will be narrated by its giddy-headed protagonist.</h1>

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<h1 class="left">In an effort to keep these solely to myself, at least until I got so famous that my diaries would be published for the world to read, I stashed them in different corners of my too-lavender childhood room. When the creeping suspicion sprawled itself across my mind that perhaps my mother, or my sister, may come across these paper-traitors and access my innermost thoughts or, god forbid, learn about my having held hands with a boy under the school table, I disrupted the flow of the narrative by conveniently ripping out pages from my diary at random intervals, or when the story just got too juicy. These extracts were put to rest, in an undignified manner, to the whirring song of the exhaust-fan-and-paper-shredder in my bathroom a little after midnight.</h1>

<h1 class="right">However, I never fully destroyed my meticulous life writing. I clung to some strange belief that in the future, I would need to dissect my personhood between the ages of eleven and sixteen and share its minutest details with strangers on the internet.</h1>

<h1 class="right">A day like this one perhaps.</h1>

<h1 class="right">And so I read from what’s left, of half-ripped diaries, and belly-full of anxieties.</h1>

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<h1 class="left">8th October, 2012</h1>

<h1 class="left">“I’m never writing again, for whoever opens this journal. I suck at it.”</h1>

<h1 class="right">A rather brave proclamation, considering I’ve filled this particular book out to its bone. I’ll be the bearer of bad news anyway; I wrote again. It is still an agonising act that fills me with untimely dread and makes me retreat into a closed room in a cold sweat.</h1>

<h1 class="right">I may, however, suck a little less.</h1>

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<h1 class="left">9th March, 2010</h1>

<h1 class="left">“Dear Soul, Does a mother object if her child wore her earrings? Well mine did. I felt sad. I knew it was a mistake of mine too. I lost one pair. But never mind, I found it. (Actually Meena Didi helped). Mummy, I think, felt bad for shouting so much at me.”</h1>

<h1 class="right">And so it begins. My lifelong attempt at poking holes and filling them in, of unravelling an inexplicable kind of torment, that of a mother-daughter relationship. To this day, my mother’s words sting like no other. To this day, the only happiness I care about is my mother’s.</h1>

<h1 class="right">My mother’s adulthood has been lived solely for others, she has cut up pieces of herself and served it wilfully on a platter. I, on the other hand, have internalised the supposed ‘uncaring, unfeeling child’ accusation to the extent that my exes will nod their head in firm agreement to what my mother makes of me. A love ever so aggravating, coupled with guilt, squeezes itself out, pus-like, through the holes I’ve poked.</h1>

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<h1 class="left">21st May, 2010</h1>

<h1 class="left">“Today, daddy and mummy had a fight in the front room. I was so in tears. If anybody asks me why I am crying, even daddy, I have no guts to tell them why. So scared am I. Daddy called me and told me we are a happy family and so on. But I don’t believe him. So many times he has sworn upon me that I feel scared I will die!!”</h1>

<h1 class="left">“So scared am I”?</h1>

<h1 class="right">What am I, a goddamn child actor reading the stage script for The Sound of Music?</h1>

<h1 class="right">My parents’ relationship has long been the cause of all my concerns, and more conveniently, commitment issues. Throughout my childhood, long email trails were exchanged between the two parties for the voyeurism of the extended family, which went on to detail every unfortunate error committed by the other, to build a strong case at the divorce lawyer. Once I got my first email ID, I was added to the thread, newly privy to the misgivings of my parents’ private lives. After we’d made the rounds to the divorce lawyer, after I devoured copious amounts of bun-maska at an Irani cafe on the same road as consolation, after eavesdropping at their door to detect a change in decibels levels of a screaming match, they’d make up again, and I’d put together an elaborate ‘happy anniversary we are a happy family may your love live on’ greeting card with my younger sister. In this excerpt, I detect a trace of self-censorship, with the fear of someone coming across the diary and asking me that question I’m so afraid of answering. Though their relationship has changed for the better now, I wish my father were to ask me again. I’ve been practising my answer in my head for years.</h1>

<h1 class="right">I’ll tell them this time.</h1>

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<h1 class="left">6th April, 2011</h1>

<h1 class="left">“For our 4-day holiday from school, we went to Shahpur in Mumbai with Mr. and Mrs. Prana and Gauri. We had awesome fun. Mummy and daddy fought little but soon made up. On our way back we had some spicy pani puris, delisiaso!!! (Spanish word for delicious). But one issue. I am feeling very, verryyyyy worried and troubled. I don’t know whether I am correct in my findings but I know something’s wrong. It is very (don’t know what word to use). Enough for today! Goodnight, sweet dreams. I am off to sleep, khurrkhi!”</h1>

<h1 class="right">Let’s ignore the continued theme of unhappy home, shall we? We’ll also skip past my attempt at throwing misspelled Spanish into the mix, because I’m a woman of the world, and cringe as a concept doesn’t develop in your brain at that age. I suspect I remember what my ‘findings’ were. The love of my life had feelings for my best friend. Devastating, if you ask me.</h1>

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<h1 class="left">21st August, 2009</h1>

<h1 class="left">“Boring! Hi! I am beginning this diary today. How boring! I am writing this half crying. According to me, I am in the boringest place in the world. My father’s place in Kerala, called Muttapalam. There is not even a single person in this village who is decent. I’ve got nothing to do except eating, sleeping, studying and praying. This place is a must for me every summer. So can you imagine how boring two weeks of summer go.”</h1>

<h1 class="right">I attribute a fair bit of my writing career to the tremendous boredom I experienced every summer at my grandmother’s house. Dried wells and blazing temperatures left me little to do but read, journal, and count down the days until I could watch Dance India Dance every Friday on Zee TV. I lay on the couch all day long under the creaking ceiling fan that has not worked in a hundred, thousand lives, contorting my body towards the iron-grilled windows to maximize airflow. My grandmother (from my father’s side) napped on a hard bed in the room next door, taunted my mother, made a remark on my complexion that contrasted her rosy one, fed herself kanji, and hobbled about to inspect the house with her walking cane knocking against the tile, signalling her arrival. At night, she bolted the house shut, windows included, armed with her 5W LED torch. I was never truly fond of her, or the house.</h1>

<h1 class="right">In October last year, she breathed her last on the same bed, torch in hand. Of all the people at her bedside, she smiled the widest at me and said she remembers me, filtering through her now-limited memories.</h1>

<h1 class="right">I cried on the same couch that night, and the rickety ceiling fan joined me.</h1>

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<h1 class="left">10th September, 2012</h1>

<h1 class="left">“Sometimes, I feel so much anger. I want to scream. I want to pick up a plate and smash it on the ground. I’ve seen it happen before me and I have wondered how nice it would feel to do it.<Pages torn out>(contd) with a face full of rage and chase me around the place like a hunter. It made me want to die. I wanted to do so much but I controlled myself and thought it would be a good idea to record it in my diary.”</h1>

<h1 class="right">I don’t remember what I was referring to in this instance, but it was enough to make me very, very upset. I used to get angry a lot growing up, a definite poster child for closeted female rage, with an anger so anatomical that I’d claw the flesh of my palm in trembling, closed fists, and be sure to make a whole production of how nonchalantly I felt it. Anger was a sentiment reserved for (mostly male) grown-ups. Smashed ceramics and a broken tooth were indicators of it. When exhibited by a teenage girl, the emotion was ascribed to histrionics. And so, it curdled inside of me and grew to volcanic proportions.</h1>

<h1 class="right">I would love to smash a plate right about now. My hereditary anger issues remain mostly unchanged. At least I no longer try to appear apologetic.</h1>

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<h1 class="left">1st October, 2012</h1>

<h1 class="left">“There is a person I must tell you about, dear diary. It is a boy. His name, like me, starts with M. So I am going to call him M. M has hazel eyes and spiky straight hair and is my desk partner. He makes me laugh so much, I think he is one of the funniest people I know. But you won’t believe what happened. I had the weirdest dream about him. We were in a cave in Elephanta. He was walking ahead. Suddenly he grabbed my hand and pushed me against a stony wall. No one was around. He <scribbled out letters> me. Then he started <2 pages ripped out>. It felt so good. But now I am scared of writing more, so I cannot say. But hey, I have never had a boy who is more than a friend and I am fourteen. So I guess this is okay? Maybe one day I will tell mumma about it. SIGH! Who knows.”</h1>

<h1 class="right">(The pages were ripped out from this excerpt upon the boy in question having unceremoniously read my diary, denying any reciprocation of feelings, and throwing icy glances my way for the remainder of the school year.)</h1>

<h1 class="right">I had my first kiss at the grand old age of nineteen. I was terrified at the thought of it all, having lived most of my school life with a Head Girl badge on my tie, and a good girl stamp on my reputation. But I was, secretly, very guiltily, an avid reader of erotica, and the steamy 2-page bits of a novel where the protagonist foreplays up to a fuck, and I masturbated to pictures of women in lingerie besides an ‘ask the sex guru’ column of lifestyle magazines before I understood the concept of self-pleasure. The frequent sex dreams explain it. I was also very much, to misquote Katy Perry, living my best teenage dreams in my head.</h1>

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<h1 class="left">22nd December, 2014</h1>

<h1 class="left">“I can't be happier to bury my head in the sand, forget this year, rewind to two months back, delete that day clean from my memory. Or correct what happened on 2nd October. I wish the stupid girl would’ve called me at least.”</h1>

<h1 class="right">On the night of my sixteenth birthday, my best friend in all the world died by suicide.</h1>

<h1 class="right">I scoured the lengths of my diary to find more mentions, or thoughts, or feelings or any articulation of it at all. Not a trace of it exists. Writing about her, even in the ramblings of a “personal diary” always felt like a commercialization of the trauma and a disservice to her memory that breathed in my brain. In this particular excerpt, I see that I’m more grown, and have a greater grasp of the rules of punctuation. However, my usual cerebral facilities of blunt record-keeping lurk insidiously behind a veil of metaphors and poeticism.</h1>

<h1 class="right">For many years after, I despised the thought of celebrating a birthday. I’d immediately conjure up images of wailing ambulances, the staircase that led up to my friend’s bedroom, the onions lacing the breath of the psychiatrist my parents took me to shortly after, a white lace sweet sixteen dress soaking up a rainstorm, and snot.</h1>

<h1 class="left">With the years passing, birthdays have become easier and less muddled with teenage grief. I am now able to speak of how much she loved the colour purple, how she preferred her pani puri order more spicy than sweet, how we were safe keepers of each other’s journals, how she was the only one who was allowed to read my poetry, how she bought me a glorious, large, black book with a pen-clasp and year embossed in gold and beckoned me to write more.</h1>

<h1 class="left">And mostly, of how I got through this excerpt without crying.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">At the end of my dissection, I lay out the seven extensive diary-corpses I maintained who had been through war, and thought of the words of a Twitter user who boldly proclaimed that “teenage girls are braver than the troops.” In those years, I was, like many girls my age, unforgivingly cruel to myself. Depriving myself of things that brought joy felt like a revolt, and made me so different, and quirky, with a belief that self-awareness and hatred for myself (the most deplorable specimen of humankind as a teen girl) made it easier for people to pick me-choose-me-love me. This cruelty sat smugly alongside the pain I’d inflicted on others, by calling a friend a critical bitch, or telling her she looked slutty for showing too much skin, or announcing to my sister that I never loved her. I also see that my capacity for dramatising each life event to hyperbolic proportions is offset by a cool, collected ability to rationalise and make sense of the world. I hurt for my girlhood, while being filled with irrational hope for it.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">I’m glad I never destroyed all that remains of my teen spirit.</h1>

<h1 class="centre">If humanity is ever on the verge of doom, and we’re curating a time capsule to be left behind, the diary of a teenager should be the first to make the cut.</h1>

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