The Blue Diary

I was fifteen when the thought of dying first crossed my mind. I don’t remember the exact reason, but I am pretty sure it was a repercussion of some insignificant incident. Living seemed worse than anything and dying seemed to me like the only respite. I remember crying all day in class.

“Drink water,” I heard a voice from behind. I turned back to find Raghav. I was a little taken aback at the unfamiliarity of the event, especially because the guy hardly spoke to anyone at school. Secondly, because I had not realized that he actually existed, until then! Raghav was not very social. He enjoyed being the introvert one. He never spoke to anyone, had no friends and no company to share laughs with. I don’t think I had ever seen him smiling even. His answers adhered strictly to the length of a “yes” or a “no”. Basically, he spoke in monosyllable.

A story needs a lot of details, right? So, the day Raghav spoke to me for the first time, was the very day we were assigned a science project in class together. I freaked out at the thought of having to deal with someone who hardly spoke. After my several attempts to change partner, the teacher turned a deaf ear to my pleas. I had no option but to deal with Raghav.

We met during school and did our science project together. Both of us wanted good grades and hence we had to work on it together, even if that meant keeping our differences aside. Strangely, partnering up didn’t turn out to be as painful as I presumed. I realized that behind the introverted façade, Raghav was a guy who carried around a lot of secrets. He would always keep a blue diary with him and wrote something whenever he got time. As time passed, we became good friends and started sharing things with each other. It was as if there was a growing fondness between us which was so organic that we didn’t even stop to notice. I gradually became detached from my girl gang. “Nini, you don’t spend any time with us.” I would often hear my friends complain. Yet I could never make them understand how much I liked being with Raghav. I agreed when someone called him a snob, but I couldn’t ignore that he was good for me. What merely started as friendly intimacy, soon turned into something very special. He did to me what Gerry did to Holly and what Coldplay songs did to the lyrics. Soon, Raghav become an extended part of my life; almost like a favourite couch where you can get the utmost comfort. Raghav’s way of living was different from the most of us. He lived with his mother as his father was an army officer. I realized that I was the only friend he had. Deep inside, I loved the feeling that I was the ‘chosen one’ in his life. In fact, for me, I had only Raghav. I met him like I met a lot of people. Not during autumn, or on all those days when I partied hard and there were no one to listen to my stories. He was not there when this broken soul needed a hug or when I was drunk and was being photographed by my friends. He was not there when this soul needed a friend to talk to or probably when she laughed too hard to be noticed among the crowd. He taught me little things in life and mostly to love the way people are. We spoke to each other about everything except for that one thing. Most of the times I caught him writing something in his curious little blue diary which he would refuse to show me. Although, keeping things bottled up was more of Raghav’s thing, I failed to let my guard down when it came to telling him how I felt about him. Most of the times he caught me gazing at him but I was quick to give him an excuse. This continued for a while until…

Raghav bore a colossal admirance towards the Indian Army. He always told me that he wanted to follow his father’s footsteps and join the Indian Army. I never took him seriously back then, but years back when I saw him in his army uniform, I knew it was not a dream. Raghav and I have been friends for a decade. We knew each other so well, yet I could never bring myself to confess my feelings for him. Like a friend, he thought, I loved him. He left, and I started teaching in a school. I would go to his house every day, and to all those places where we once visited. My days went by crying and getting lost in my own little world of nostalgia. I spent most of the time reliving old memories and crying my heart out. It’s like suddenly you wake up and reality hits you hard. Every single day. Eventually, I made it a habit of going to his house to keep myself updated about his return.

Two-and-a-half years had passed, and my anticipation snowballed into bleak agony. It was one of these days when I got the news of his arrival. Without delaying even by a heartbeat, I rushed to his house. I knew, this was it. All the years of anxious waiting had finally come to an end. I had to tell him how I felt. As I walked towards his house, I saw that a crowd had gathered outside. Then, I remember seeing his face. I could hardly remember anything that followed.

The next day, his mother came to my house and handed me a diary. I could hardly look up from the cover shrouding me. I had locked myself up inside the house, allowing access to nobody. “Beta, you have lost a friend.. but I have lost my son”, she brushed her fingers across my forehead in a kind gesture and trailed off.

“I am sorry,” I mumbled to myself as a teardrop escaped the corner of my left eye. Later, in the evening, I realized that the only thing I had of Raghav was the diary. I grabbed it and flipped through the pages. I realized it was the same diary I was denied a peer into a long time back. I unlocked the diary and on the very the first page, it read “I knew it was impossible to deal with someone who hardly spoke..”

“Like a friend, she thought I loved her.”, read the closing line. 

Written by Poonam Chatterjee

I am the 27 -year-old budding author, pet lover, and foodie. From a tender age of ten, I found my calling in the written word and since then, has been scribbling away my unconventional ideas, sometimes in the last pages of notebooks and sometimes on online blogs. Writing gives me happiness like no other thing.

Week 4, January 2021.