Coming from a publishing house with some prestige, crowned with a provocative though banal title and commended by Uday Prakash, this ‘diary’ seemed to promise a literary feast, if only minor, of the kind the writings of Marquis de Sade, Henry Miller, Anais Nin and Marguerite Duras offer. But it turned out to be the huff and froth of a frustrated, sick artist who has no idea of what a diary is, nor of how to write about art. He is obsessed with sex because he both craves and dreads it. The trite, uptight porn he punches out is his way of evading the call of Eros. The title of the original in Hindi uses the word mareez for him.
The Diary spans eleven years, beginning with 2008 and ending with 2018. It has eleven chapters. Our great-minded artist, who comes out as a wimp with a frayed and faded sensorium, writes in broad brushes and won’t stoop to mention days, weeks and months, or each of those particular years for that matter. The chapters indicate only the drift of the chronology, not the chronology. The period is obviously meant to anchor the rambling narrative in a frame of India’s recent past, but the frame turns out to be too feeble and blurry to hold anything. The lament on the dire conditions of the artists after 2008 doesn’t evolve into an analysis. The protagonist’s inhibitions seem to overwhelm the writer and paralyse him too.