Delhiwale: The year was 1983

A used diary from 1983 reveals a booklover's eclectic taste, filled with titles, opinions, and personal notes, showcasing their inner life.

A blue book is lying forlorn on the dusty floor. Here in a Delhi shop for used books. Turns out the book is not really a book.

On the top of the page, the diarist has jotted down in caps: “Writers have the last word; it is they—not dictators—who compose the history books.” (HT Photo)

It is somebody’s private diary, belonging to the year 1983. Every page is scribbled over in blue ink.

A more detailed investigation reveals it to be a thing even more extraordinary.

It is a booklover’s diary, jotted with hundreds of book titles; some of the titles are accompanied with the scribbler’s brief opinions about the books.

The diary does bear the person’s name but no point in sharing it publicly. Perhaps the diarist died, and the descendants accidentally gave away the handwritten diary while disposing what must have been a formidable book collection.

Whatever, just browsing the book titles listed in the diary gives a profound sense of the diarist’s inner life. Such a sophisticated and highbrow fellow! For one, the person’s taste for writers is international and eclectic: Tagore and Tom Stoppard, Thomas Mann and Faiz Ahmad Faiz. Sample the contents of a random page:

Vikram Seth’s From Heaven’s Lake

Norman Dixon’s On The Psychology of Military Incompetence

Joan Didion’s Salvador

Andrew Harvey’s A Journey in Ladakh

Being an annual diary, each of the 365 pages are printed with the dates of the Christian and Hindu calendar. Each page also bears an inspirational slogan in Hindi. The diarist though is exclusively an English language reader; all the books mentioned in the diary happen to be in English.

There is slightly more to the diary than details of books bought and read. The margins on some of the pages are scrawled with the phone numbers of diarist’s acquaintances. One page has the phone number of a city bookstore that no longer exists: Book Worm (the Connaught Place landmark shut down a long time ago).

The diary’s opening page, showing the list of year’s holidays, is crisscrossed with wavery lines in blue—perhaps the diarist was doodling away the empty hours that idle day (or night). On the top of the page, the diarist has jotted down in caps: “Writers have the last word; it is they—not dictators—who compose the history books.”

The diary is additionally fattened with very many chits, notes, bookmarks, receipts, envelopes and letters. They include poetry clippings scissored out from the pages of what appears to be New Yorker magazine. There is also the clip of a New Yorker Review of Books envelope bearing the diarist’s address. One of the many loose things crammed inside the diary is this reminder:

“Dear Sir,

This is to inform you that your subscription to The Marxist has expired. Kindly renew the same.”