NaBloPoMo 2019: Day 1: My Mother's Diary

Looking for some paper to write my grocery list, I pull out a sheaf of papers I’ve saved for such use. The first sheets I see are pages torn out of a used diary. Used by my mother many years ago, to keep track of her daily expenses. I click a picture of one sheet and decide I’m going to start the National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) activity for 2019 with this. 

Kannada text.
Reads as Milk....54, Flowers ....20, From old newspapers and plastic items, 45 rupees is received

Looking at this page reminds me of how meticulous my mother used to be about keeping accounts and not wasting anything. It was probably a skill forced by circumstances – having to run a family of 8 with just one person earning cannot have been an easy task. Especially through the 60s, 70s, and 80s when private companies in the mining industry of Goa (where Appa worked) didn’t pay grand salaries.

So, Amma did all the work herself. For many years, she had no maid to help with the housework. She did all the washing, cleaning and cooking on her own, with brief breaks from the grind only for a few months after each of her 6 daughters was born. (Note to self: She didn’t grumble about having to do it all herself 😅)

She somehow found the time and energy to learn tailoring and would stitch all our clothes herself at home. Sometimes, before festivals, or once a year, a local tailor (I think his name was Sripad) would be hired to come to the house continuously for a few days to stitch dresses for us kids.

Later, when Appa retired from active work and started to go to work only 3 days a week, he set up a shop to generate the much-needed income. Sudarshan Stores started out as a bakery of sorts, then morphed into an all-in-one kind of store. At first, Amma would go to the shop only to allow Appa to come home and rest. But gradually, her innate qualities of attention to detail, being systematic, and astute business sense meant that she began to (wo)man the shop more and more often. She would let us consume some goodies from the shop when we asked (especially the soft drinks) but I’m quite sure she would have kept an account of it somewhere so that there would be no error in her record of the sales!

Staring at these diary pages with her handwriting, I smile as I recollect how they came to me. Last November my parents and sisters were getting ready to shift to a new home. By then, Amma’s health was declining and yet, she got me to go through all the materials in her cupboard, deciding what to keep and what to discard. These diary pages were obviously of no use, but as typical of her, she didn’t want the empty space to go waste. And so, she gave them to one of her daughters whom she believed would make good use of them. There – I’ve done justice to the faith Amma reposed in me. Not only did I make my grocery list using the diary pages, I even made a blog post with them!