“Find me when you have nowhere else to go”, says a buried part of your mind every time you cross the bridge from one door of your life to another; I am no different. The 10-year-old me would have found it all in its garden of imagination, my 20-year-old self finds its reach quite limiting. The garden, which once, was as big as I could run for, now had barbed wires and big walls at a distance. Every instance I find myself moving closer to the real world, I see these walls getting taller, the wires getting tougher and the space getting smaller.
When I passed my XII th Boards, these walls were not in sight; when I began travelling alone to the college, they were faint; when I began living alone - they were only a few miles away - still afar yet a lot closer. The buried parts of my mind that the world prefers to call ‘memories’ are right here and I feel threatened by these walls. What if the treasure is left on the other side? Or worse, what if I lose the better half it has? So, I created a ritual within this tireless everyday schedule to walk back into the garden and look for that buried part, find it because I have nowhere to go quite often this year.
There is a joy in dwelling in the past. That is perhaps why I wait for this hour of nostalgia every week. But this joy is incongruent to the often harsher, more mono-toned reality and consequentially, impermanent. The past remains though, be it buried in the garden of your imagination or compiled into one thick notebook lying hidden, somewhere around the bedroom and the old cupboard. When life comes to a standstill and when life and death become a part of the regular diction, as it has in the two years of the Covid-19 Pandemic, to look back into the ‘dusty diary’ has become a necessary joy to survive, however impermanent the joy’s nature may be.
This Chronicle Edition comes when our standstill life begins to return to the pre-covid bustling, in the capital, at least. When restrictions have eased but the eye still cautious maintains a six feet distance; my present self still looks forward to uncovering the chapters of my life that stay buried in some journal. I often wonder, does looking back at the past stop us from moving ahead? Two years ago, perhaps. Today? It is the reminiscence of the past that makes me want to look forward to an innocent future. A reminder that there was once a time when the garden had no boundaries; when there were no walls and 'barbed wire' was alien-diction; a reminder that perhaps, there is a gate here somewhere that shall one day take us beyond these walls that are closing in when reality would not be as grim & our imagination would not be as limited to the four walls of one room.
“Dear Dusty Diary, I shall find you again soon with a peculiar longing for the good memories and the bad since I truly have nowhere to go amidst these thick walls and barbed wires.", I tell myself and my companion through the thick and thin, my diary.
Dear Reader, Volume III of the Redstockings Chronicle that has been themed, “Dusty Diaries”, lets us into a world of imagination and a room of calm that all of us, at one point or the other, have longed for these few months. As the Covid-19 situation of the nation gets better, the transition from the closed walls to the open roads becomes bitter-sweet because the fear of the third wave of the virus lingers on. With the October Edition, the team wishes to smoothen this transition. Hence, giving the mind an intervention amidst the atrocities that continue throughout the world and hoping that the pandemic memories soon become a part of our dusty diaries. To be buried for good and referred to only when necessary.
Paromita Sarkar
Editor-in-Chief
The Redstockings Chronicle
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