The termites hadn’t gotten to them yet — 17 diaries of varying sizes, yellowed, tattered and comprising entries between the years 1980 and 1993. Its author, one of Assam’s most elusive writers, had died that year, and his daughter knew the diaries, written one page to a day, could potentially hold many answers. But there was a hurdle: the handwriting was simply incomprehensible. And this is what got Meenaxi Barkotoki on a quest to decipher the many diaries of her late father, the iconoclast Munin Barkotoki (1915-1993), famous for his contribution to Assamese literature as for his indecipherable handwriting.