Dear diary,                                                                 26 Jan 1992

Kashi,

My Diary, My Alter ego:

I am sorry, forgive me,
I told you,
I will be regular every month,
I will be loyal,
I will bare myself naked,
I will let it out,
I will not pretend,
I will pursue you till forever,
I will be a true friend,
I tried,
But I failed,
I fell back in the pit,
It is my fault,
But now I have to let you go,
For the last time,
My Diary, my alter ego,
I am sorry, forgive me.

With devotion,
Sukshma

***

About the Sukshma Series:

The Sukshma Series is a first-hand account of an educated woman of post-colonial India reflecting on how the social and political set-up of the country defined the status of an Indian woman.

The title of the poems is “Sukshma”, the title is very deliberate because Sukshma essentially means dormant energy and in the context of the central character’s feelings, it is quite pertinent. Sukshma is an educated middle-class house-wife in the 1980s in India. Sukshma maintains a personal diary in which she scribbles about her emotions, fears and anxieties in her life and expresses them only through the medium of poems. Evidently, her writing is mature and literary, but she is torn between the responsibilities of the household, family, children and the rigid social structures of the society that prohibit her aesthetic ability to write, so she keeps them private and writes very irregularly. Sukshma keeps her writing energy dormant and concealed from the rest of the society because she fears the aftermath of being deviant. Through her writing, she speaks volumes about her predicament as an Indian woman and reflects on the violence and horrors of her critical situation.

Previous poems in the series: Unturned, Kitchenette, Silk Veil, It is a good day, Ma, Witch of the night, Bangles, Violated, Running.

Photo by Zoran Borojevic on Unsplash