On Looking Again #2: What the Photograph Kept

I don’t remember this moment.

Not really.

I know where we are. A guest house in Jaipur. On a trip with the extended family. December 2021. We are waiting in the reception area of a guest house for the rest of the family to come down. Dee is somewhere upstairs. We are waiting to go sightseeing.

Adu is not yet two.

That’s about all I know.

What I do have is this photograph.

For a few moments, it seems, we were the only two people in the world.

I don’t remember what made him laugh. I don’t remember what we talked about, if we talked at all. The photograph has kept none of that.

What it has kept is the smile.

The complete, reckless abandon of it.

I have looked at this photograph many times over the years. At first, I looked at him. Lately, I find myself looking at the space between us.

At the invisible thread that every parent spends years trying to strengthen and then, somehow, learning to loosen.

The photograph doesn’t know any of this, of course.

It knows nothing of school admissions, birthday parties, report cards, arguments, arrivals, departures. It knows nothing of the long work of becoming a person.

It only knows that on a winter morning in Jaipur, a little boy laughed and his father laughed back.

Perhaps that is why I keep taking photographs.

Not because they stop time.

They don’t.

But because every now and then, they return a small piece of it.

Long after the moment itself has gone where all moments go.