Random Ramblings of a Reluctant Blogger

So it was that one fine day I was asked to clear  an old box which had materialised itself from the loft. The decree being _clear everything.

Thus an old box of memories was opened. There were quite a few grocery bills from the 70s,  couple of much-used geometry boxes with a few marbles in it, notebooks and broken carrom and chess pieces, some stamps (which once were a proud part of a collection), and  as I was segregating the ones to throw, which was quite a bit, I chanced upon my grandfather’s diary.

As a young kid I had  known  that he had kept the diary and I was always keen to know what he wrote in  it. And lo here it was. I recognized his handwriting and further confirming it was the page in which he had noted down all the birth dates, times and nakshtra of all family members. But what was shocking was that the diary was starting from May 9.

Those days the diary was  much in demand. Come new year everyone was asking for a diary and most of the time the unused diary would be used by us kids as a rough notebook the next year. I could not tell to which year the dairy belonged to,  but it was sure that pages from January to May 8 were neatly snipped off. The rest of the diary had nothing except for a few notes  of some cricket matches (the schedule of the West Indies India tour of 74-75) to be held, a few addresses and the dates of festivals which were to follow that year.

It was his diary, but not the one I sought. And the missing pages piqued my intrigue.

I promptly apprised my wife of this great discovery. The fact that the pages had gone missing had us  both thinking. It was suspicious for sure. 

As a kid living with uncles, aunts and cousins and visiting members, the inherent politics of the family,  the  friction, the fissures and the dynamics of relationships were alien to us. We learn all that as we grow up. So here  we were trying to figure out who would have torn the pages and why, based on recalling what we knew as children.  What could have been written in that which would have resulted in such an action? Why not take the whole diary itself? The subject matter provided enough food for thought. 

I tried to recall all I could to figure out the mystery of the  missing pages. The result  was that the spring cleaning had come to a halt. My wife however, grew wise to it, and ordered that I finish off the job as soon as I could.

There I was, again trying to clear off all the stuff, but my mind had locked on to the missing pages. Was there some allusion to some dark past in those pages which needed to be erased? Had a family black sheep been exposed? The answers weren’t forthcoming. I was, uninterestingly I might add,  rummaging through the remaining box, when I  chanced upon the missing pages. It had just fallen off from this old diary.

And it was blank!. Not so much as a dot on it. All the mysteries, the secrets and the intrigues that I had imagined vanished into thin air. Guess not everyone has a skeleton stumbling down from their family closet. The search for the other diary continues though.