Over the next twelve years, this day has returned remorselessly, with the same shapes darkening to night in the frame of this window, except for that other—the empty skeleton of the twenty-storey building in the distance. These days a naked bulb hangs from a long wire in one of its upper rooms. Anima's eyes are fixed on its light when suddenly she arrives at a decision. I must stop writing my diary from today. Today is now. This minute. I must free myself of its shackles, from the rigid self-made rule that a few lines must be written every night. Drop a day and guilt takes away sleep. The oppression of it. Tired, bored, but you must write. Write. Who for? Who is going to read that drivel? People with children write in the hope that their children will read. Family history will live and grow. But who will read the daily notes of my life? Stop fooling yourself that you’re writing for yourself. Perhaps you did, in the beginning, to vomit the grief in your stomach. It was even a way to keep the conversation with Siddharth going. But when the sharp edge of grief had dulled, why then? The ego stepped in, didn’t it? You started pontificating on the political events of the day. You started reporting conversations overheard on your commute, with sociological analyses attached. Weren’t you secretly thinking that someone would discover your diaries decades after you were gone and exult in their revelations of life in these times? Like some latter-day Smritichitre?

Get over this foolish temptation of trying to forge a link with the future. Fifty years from now attention spans will have shrunk to zero and diaries written by some ancient woman about an ancient life might make no sense at all. Anima gets up and dispels the darkness of the room with a flick of a switch. She takes four long strides to the wooden wardrobe–cum–chest of drawers that Anna had had specially made for her as a wedding present. She opens the right bottom drawer, pulls out the secret drawer built into the back and draws out the twelve notebooks, all of the same size, resting within. They chronicle her life from the January of 1993.