My Mother's Diary Was Mostly Grocery Lists
Between onions and milk, one line: 'tired, but nobody asks.'
Onions. Milk. Half a kilo of green chillies. And on the fourth line, in the same steady handwriting: tired, but nobody asks.
I found the notebooks six weeks after she died, when I finally forced myself to clear the steel cupboard. They were on the bottom shelf under the good tablecloths, eleven of them, tied together with the cloth string that used to come around sweet boxes, because my mother never threw away anything that could still hold something together. I assumed they were recipes. I sat down on her bed to flip through one and I did not get up for four hours.
They were lists. Thirty four years of lists.
School fees with the exact date paid. Tailor measurements for every school uniform I ever outgrew. Wedding gift accounts, given and received, so that no one could ever accuse her of forgetting a courtesy. Gas cylinder booking numbers. The milkman's monthly total, disputed twice, both times in her favour. If you wanted to reconstruct the running of one middle class household from 1987 onward, down to the last coriander bunch, it was all there, dated, totalled, underlined.
And in between, scattered like coins fallen into a drawer, were the other lines.
Under a Tuesday in 1994, between potatoes and washing soap: wore the blue sari today. Nobody noticed... It is my favourite one.
In 1999, beneath a long list for Diwali: S got his promotion. Made kheer, called everyone. My birthday was on the 8th... It went.
In 2003, a monsoon month, one line with no list attached at all, floating alone on the page: rain the whole day. I love rain. I cannot remember when I last told anyone that.
My mother wrote her autobiography one grocery list at a time, and I read it too late to answer a single line of it.
I used to see her writing, that is the thing. Every night after dinner she sat at the kitchen counter with a notebook while the pressure cooker cooled, and once, maybe ten years old, I asked her what she was writing. "Hisaab," she said. Accounts. And I nodded and went back to the television, satisfied for the next three decades that my mother's inner life was arithmetic.
She was doing accounts. She just was not counting money.
She was keeping a ledger of what it cost to be her, entered in the only book nobody would ever think to open, hidden in plain sight between the onions and the milk, the one place in that house that was entirely hers precisely because it looked like it belonged to everyone.
I read them in order. That was my mistake, or my penance, I still cannot decide which. Because reading in order means you watch the dates approach your own life, and then you meet yourself in your mother's margins.
The week I left for college: bought his train food, packed the pickle he likes in the steel dabba, the house is very quiet.
And then, four lines down, under curd: tired, but nobody asks.
The first time that sentence appears. I checked... September 2005. I was busy that month being homesick in a hostel, calling home to talk about myself.
The day of my wedding: everyone kept saying you must be so happy, and I was. Also my feet hurt from morning and I missed my own mother badly. Bought: nothing. Gave: everything.
I had to put the notebook down after that one and stand on the balcony for a while.
She hid her whole life between the onions and the milk, and we called it a shopping list because that was easier than asking.
Here is the regret, stated plainly, because I owe her plainness. I called her every Sunday for eighteen years, and I now know what I asked her, because it was always the same three questions. What did you cook. How is your knee. Did the maid come.
I never once asked what she wanted, or what she remembered, or whether anyone had noticed the blue sari. I mistook available for content. She always picked up on the second ring, so I assumed she was fine, the way you assume the light switch will work, right up until the evening it does not.
The cruellest discovery was that she was funny. Witheringly, privately funny. On a page from 2011: the new neighbour asked if I am bored at home all day. Told her I would think about it while making dinner for seven. And once, after a list of medicines with prices that made my chest hurt: doctor says I must reduce stress. Have added it to the list.
She was a writer.
That is the plain truth of it. No one told her, least of all her, and she would have waved the word away with a hand still smelling of ginger. But a woman who can put a whole marriage inside the sentence "Bought: nothing. Gave: everything" is a writer, full stop, and the world was simply never going to find out.
For a long time I could not write about any of it. I wrote around her instead, tidy little pieces about childhood kitchens that said nothing true. It took me two years to write about the grief instead of around it, and when I finally did, the poem was eleven lines long and nine of them were hers. I took her floating monsoon line, the one about rain, and built the poem underneath it like scaffolding under a balcony, and I posted it on a community wall for poets with my hands actually cold.
The responses undid me. Dozens of them, mostly women, saying the same thing in different handwriting. This is my mother. This is my grandmother. I checked her notebook after reading this, and hers says the same. One message I have kept: this is me. I am forty three and my diary is grocery lists and today I wrote one true line under the tomatoes because of your mother.
There are kitchens all over the world holding unread autobiographies. I know that now. Whole shelves of women filed under household expenses.
Her last notebook has nine blank pages at the end, which I find harder to look at than anything she wrote. The final list is dated three days before her heart stopped, and it is unfinished: curd, atta, ask R about the... and nothing. That is where it ends. I am R. I will never know what she wanted to ask me, and yes, I have noticed what it means that even her last unfinished sentence was reaching toward one of us.
Here is what I did with it. I bought the curd and the atta. I went to her kitchen, which is my kitchen now, and I cooked the full Sunday meal from memory, her way, the pickle in the steel dabba, and I set two plates, and I sat and ate and told the empty chair about my week, properly this time, the real version, and then I asked the chair how it was feeling, and I let the silence take as long as it needed...
And I keep a notebook of my own now, on the kitchen counter, where anyone could find it. Lists, mostly. But every list ends with one true line, because that is the whole inheritance, that is what she left me instead of jewellery.
Onions. Milk. Ma, I am asking now.
The list goes on.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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