Arriving at a new beginning
Updated On: 12 January, 2024 04:48 AM IST | Mumbai | Rosalyn D`mello
Seeing how I always chose to place faith in myself in trying times, I have zero regrets about how things have come to pass for me. Now, I’m in a place where I don’t feel the need to prove myself to anyone
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I am often afraid of the cringe factor that is inevitable when you read your own writing from centuries ago. Representation pic
It’s a very ghostly feeling to flip through the pages of an old diary whose existence you had completely erased from your consciousness and suddenly stumble upon a moment of clarity you’re surprised you had ever arrived upon. Each time I am home, whether in Mumbai or Goa, my mother is always after me to get rid of the fossils of my girlhood, adolescence and college years. I am always eager to acquiesce, but finding time feels challenging. Or perhaps I am always putting it off because I don’t feel ready to be haunted by the memories of those wonder years. I am often afraid of the cringe factor that is inevitable when you read your own writing from centuries ago and recognise traces of pretension or elements of your aspiration towards a certain style. I can usually tell who I was reading at the time, whose writing was influencing my own.
One of two diaries I found most recently had a cover with a calligraphic rendition of a poem I had written alongside a photograph of me. The poem had a self-affirming tone that reflected my desire to revel in my own beauty. At the time I had felt very proud about it, but now I would be hard-pressed to bandy it about. Still, it contained a delight in my body and its eccentricities that I clearly lost along the way. The first page of the diary had an excerpt—again in calligraphy—from Jack Kerouac’s Vanity of Duluoz. Flipping through it brought back vivid memories of reading the book at various spots at St. Xavier’s College during my second year as an undergraduate, when we were studying American literature. I continued browsing until I suddenly came upon an entry in which I wrote about how a moment which was then my present that felt like the beginning of my life. I mentioned how my then boyfriend had said that every beginning has a before. I mused about what mine might then have been. I felt struck by the naked enthusiasm in my observation. Reading it returned me to that feeling of being at the before of the beginning and I felt reunited with those vulnerable and raw fragments of myself.
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