Her eyes fell upon an old, dusty diary bound in soft leather, as she dove into the depths of her old bookshelf, in search of forgotten treasures from her childhood.
The year read '1978'.
The year both Garfield and Grease became known to the world.
Indira Gandhi got re-elected.
A Solidarity March for the Stonewall Riots.
Keith Moon died at just age 32.
And her mother, all of 20, gave birth for the first time.
That's all she really knew about that year.
Her fingers fumbled to open this time capsule and see what it held.

"List of Standard Phrases for Greetings Telegrams"

On the first page, scribbled in very familiar handwriting -

"Look to this day
For it is the very life of life
In its brief course lie all the verities and realities of your existence
The glory of action
The bliss of youth
The splendour of beauty
For yesterday is but a dream
and tomorrow morning merely a vision
But today well lived makes
every yesterday a dream of
happiness, and every tomorrow
a vision of hope.
Look well, therefore, to this day."

"Mamma, you were just twenty! And pregnant! In the 70s!" she exclaimed over the phone. "Would you mind if I read it now?"
Her mother's tired voice at the other end had a somewhat wistful edge to it when she said, "Go ahead, it's pretty banal anyway".
She swore she even heard a touch of joy in her voice.

Within the pages of that diary, was the life of a young woman thrown into circumstances she had no control over. Married at 18 to make way for her 4 sisters to also get married - a very Jane Austen-esque trope, except it was a South Indian family raised in a dusty little town in Rajasthan.
A woman who was still an idealistic, wide-eyed young girl, all of twenty, with hopes, dreams, in love. She had to pack up her life and dreams, move to Madurai with her husband, and start a life in a place she culturally hardly connected to.
Where the harshness of reality hadn't really hit her yet, and she was determined to take on the world.
Thinking of her mother, she wondered how many more brilliant young female minds like hers, had been silenced by the demands of gender roles through the centuries.

Of love letters and books

Within those pages, she discovered a woman who was not so different from her after all. A woman who loved books as much as she did.
A woman who was so much more than just her mother.
It was a window into the past, to a time when people wrote love letters, exchanged important news via telegram, and tailored their own clothes.
But what fascinated her the most was the way her mother effortlessly wove in her impressions of the various books she read, in between complaints and snippets from the day's routine. Compiled together, here's the best recommendations from that year -

Enid Blyton is an author all of us grew up with, one of colonialism's better gifts to us. The Mr. Twiddle series isn't something I've read before but it sounds like one of those endearing yet bumbling, clumsy characters she writes about.

P.G. Wodehouse is a treasure, and as she came across this passage, she couldn't help but smile. Her mother told her to read his books when she was in high school, and they got her through those years of teen angst, heartache and bullying.

The Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew - she started thinking of those times back in school when the librarian got tired of her because of how fast she'd devour the two books allowed per week and go back and ask her for more.

'The baby' here was her older brother. Apparently he used to yell a lot. She snickered as she thought of how she could now tell him HE was the annoying one, not her. And then thought back to when Nani would take her to the comic lending library in the summer vacations where she'd read comics to her heart's content.

She'd never read James Hadley Chase before - an addition to the to-be-read list?

Her eyes fell on a mention of the Amelia Jane series. Her first Amelia Jane was given to her as a prize in school. She remembers playing with her own toys, pretending they'd become real at night, weaving her own stories around them, making her Barbie date her teddy bear, and giving all of them names and backstories.

Mom referred to Dad as 'him', never taking his name.
Very classic Hindi movie of them. Hamaare 'woh'.
Though she often called him her darling, her love. She missed him terribly when they were apart, and they wrote to each other every single day. Letters, 'covers', she called them, based on whether they were inlands or envelopes. A fleeting glimpse into their romance all those years ago, when they'd write letters to each other while she was away at Nani's, pregnant.
Her pregnancy was terribly taxing on her physically, much more than it should've been, in the hot Rajasthan summer. She would find Bhaiya annoying, as such a young mom. But she loved him so much, and dedicated a beautiful poem to him. Years later, she would give him that same poem when he went away to college.

Closing the diary shut, she broke out of her daydreaming with a smile and picked up her phone. She began to wonder if, after all these years of thinking she's different; maybe she and her mother were more like each other than she imagined.
Her mother picked up the video call, smiling from miles away.
"Hi mamma," she said, smiling widely back.
"Happy birthday."

A selection from my own thoughts, written in third person. Dedicating this post to my mom; it's her birthday today, April 18. So grateful to her for introducing her love of books to me ever since I was a child, and encouraging my writing.