Last week I discovered my mother’s notebooks. My mother died on 15 January. Sorting through her things just recently I discovered a bunch of notepads and diaries. The notebooks, frayed at the edges and brown with age, contain hand-written personal jottings and musings. But mostly they contain long quotes from a range of authors and poets. Over the decades, in her flowery handwriting, she painstakingly copied passages from Shakespeare, Rabindranath Tagore, Sukumar Ray, Rumi, Mahasweta Devi, WB Yeats, the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita, among many other texts.
Interspersed with household accounts, recipes and phone numbers, with spiritual quotations about the after-life just a page away from practical tips on how to make the best machcher jhol (fish curry), these lines seem to somehow explain how middle-class Indian women of my mother’s generation navigated and embraced change.
