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.
On Looking Again #1: What I Thought Was Missing
The photographs are better than I remember.
That’s the first thing I notice.
For years, I carried around the memory of being disappointed by that morning. Dee and I had slipped out of our resort room in Kerala before sunrise, leaving Adu asleep, and walked towards the pool with my camera. I must have taken a hundred photographs, but this set was special. Dee sat by the pool while the world slowly emerged from the darkness. The light arrived exactly as it was supposed to. The reflections arrived. The stillness arrived.
Out of the hundred odd photographs, I remember liking very few of them.
Looking at this picture now, I find myself wondering what exactly I thought was missing.
Memory is strange that way. It preserves the dissatisfaction and discards the evidence.
Later that day, I wandered out of the resort and into the nearby village. I met people whose language I didn’t understand and who didn’t understand mine. We smiled, pointed, managed. I found small temples unmarked on Google maps and tour itineraries, though they were no less beautiful than their more famous cousins. By the time I returned, hot, sweaty and thoroughly lost, I felt richer than I had that morning.
Looking back now, I don’t think I was disappointed with the photographs at all.
I think I was beginning to outgrow a certain way of taking them.
The camera had spent years helping me collect beautiful sights. Around this time, I had begun asking it to help me discover something.
The village walk offered that more readily than the resort ever could.
And yet, years later, it is this photograph that has brought the whole day back.
Not the temples.
Not the lanes.
Not the conversations stitched together with gestures.
This one frame.
Perhaps that’s what photographs do best.
They wait quietly for memory to catch up.
Waiting Room, Planet Earth
11:18 AM.
Waiting for my turn with the doctor. Sitting in the lounge area at the Hospital.
(My Funny Valentine, Chet Baker) “Your looks are laughable, unphotographable, Yet you’re my favorite work of art…”
Reading the introduction to The Book of Disquiet on Kindle. Listening to my favourite songs playlist on my headphones. Looking around.
(We Have All the Time in the World, Louis Armstrong)
“We have all the time in the world, Time enough for life , To unfold…”
A lady on my left is on a video call with an old person. Or maybe with someone holding the phone for them. The old person is the patient. Oxygen mask. Tubes. All kinds of hospital paraphernalia. Then the camera moves and shows the rest of the room. Relatives sitting around with that peculiar silence hospitals produce. The kind where nobody knows what to say anymore but nobody wants to leave either.
On my right, a man scrolls through his recent calls.
(Aanewala Pal, Kishore Kumar)
“हो सके तो इसमें ज़िंदगी बिता दो, पल जो ये जानेवाला है…”
The first name is ‘Mullah Ji.’ The rest are Hindu names. I start wondering if the Mulla ji is this person’s godman of some sorts. Then he opens WhatsApp. Endless religious greetings. Folded hands. Flowers. Gods arriving every morning as forwarded messages.
(The Golden Boy, Parov Stelar)
“I’ve got this feeling inside my bones…”
There are people of all ages here. Most look anxious, tired, pensive. Some seem on the verge of crying. Children alone appear untouched by the atmosphere. They are laughing, running around, asking for chips and cold drinks. They don’t know yet what life eventually becomes.
(Cry Me a River, Dinah Washington)
“Now you say you’re lonely, You cried the long night through…”
Perhaps that’s why childhood matters so much. It may really be the only phase of life where we are protected from the knowledge of what awaits us later. Hospitals. Reports. Medicines. Parents growing old. Our own bodies quietly beginning to betray us.
(Up – Solo Piano Theme)
There are no lyrics here. Only that strange ache the piano carries. The feeling of remembering something while it is still happening.
An old lady sits beside me gingerly, as if sitting down is only slightly less painful than getting up will be. After a while, a man, her son, I assume, comes and holds her hand while helping her stand.
(Look at the Sky, Osman)
“Look at the sky, I’m still here…”
How much of life changes in this simple holding of hands.
She must have done this for him once. Crossing roads. Getting off buses. Walking through markets. Holding his tiny fingers through fevers and fairs and childhood fears. And now life has quietly reversed the whole thing.
I look around at old people who must have once been strikingly handsome or beautiful in their youth. People who must have once looked into mirrors with confidence. Strange how time slowly removes everything we once thought was permanent.
(We Are Nowhere, Bright Eyes)
“We are nowhere and it’s now…”
Then I see a young woman walking across the lounge with an older woman, perhaps her masi, and a younger girl who looked like her sister. She was so beautiful that I couldn’t stop looking at her. Not glamorous-beautiful. Something quieter. Almost painful to look at. Like one of those statues of Mother Mary you see in old churches, except alive. Her eyes looked washed clean. As if life had already rinsed away whatever innocence usually remains at that age.
And yet there was acceptance on her face too. A kind of exhausted peace.
(Primavera, Ludovico Einaudi)
Again no lyrics. Just that flowing piano making the whole lounge suddenly feel like one continuous human tide. People entering. Leaving. Waiting. Hoping.
And I wonder, is there any meaning to all this movement?
All these people gathered inside a building full of corridors and machines where perhaps, years ago, there were only fields and trees.
People trying to save lives.
Trying to return to the lives they had before illness interrupted them.
Trying to welcome new life into the world too.
Sometimes it feels like this hospital lounge is just a smaller version of earth itself.
And I can’t tell anymore whether I am part of this scene or merely observing it. Whether I’m an alien or an Earthling.
Perhaps both.
Perhaps someone else sitting here is also typing something into their phone notebook right now:
Saw a man today. Middle-aged, but young in mannerisms. Wearing headphones. Typing feverishly on his phone. Must be messaging someone.
(In My Life, The Beatles)
“Though I know I’ll never lose affection. For people and things that went before…”
11:48 AM.
Touched by light
Here’s to light. To hear it slowly shuffling across the room you are in, entering through the window like a stray bird with burning wings and giving everything it touches the gift of life. To feel it on your eyelashes, seeing the soul of the world with your eyes closed. To sit under a banyan tree and see it play hide and seek with shadow, its eternal friend. To being with light, as you look back at the years gone by and realize how it has always been about her. Or him, as you wait patiently by his side to open his eyes at the dawn of time. Yes, light can be a person too.
And yes, it can be you, too.
To be someone’s light. To see their eyes light up at your sight. Knowing that even after the shadow has consumed you, some part of your light will stay alive in them.
To be touched by light, to be alive, to be immortalized.
-Alok 16/04/24
To be at home
It is a feeling that doesn’t come easily.
I’ve changed many addresses throughout my life. Some, not how I would have liked to. Only a few have felt like home. And even in those few, this is a rare one.
I’m sitting, once again, at the dining table. Don’t know why I do most of my writing here instead of the dedicated (and expensive) study corner we got custom made! I have our main bookshelves in all their congested glory on one side, and the cabinet of curiosities i.e. dear wife’s crockery/knick knacks display on the other. Slightly further apart on the left and right are our son’s room and our bedroom respectively. And behind me is the living room. The one I’m looking at though is the guest cum study cum temple room where a pile of ‘sun dried’ clothes and books we got from the recent book fair and some winter blankets are lying on the bed in an exhibition of inter-species harmony that human beings should learn from.
It is not a pretty sight.
When I was growing up and as recently as a few years ago when we were thinking of moving into a bigger place than our previous address, I had this notion of creating a house with Scandinavian sparseness and Indian warmth. Had even thought of a term for it, ScandIndian. It was to be this large enough house with clean white walls, wooden flooring, subtle colors, Indian accents and not a thing out of its place.
This is not that house.
Not a single room here is good looking to speak of. There are crayon hieroglyphs on the wallpaper in the bedroom; the living room sofas are colonized by things that shouldn’t be on the sofas; the dining table is a visual depiction of the word chaos; the bookshelves store books and medicines; the child’s room is a museum of toys, the aangan is a gallery of dying plants, and the guest cum study cum temple room is well, the antithesis of my dreamy ScandIndian aesthetic.
And yet, this is the one that feels most like home.
This is the one where our newborn crossed the threshold from hospital to home; this is the one with all the fights and sulks and not-talking-to-you but still-caring-for-you happens; this is the one where just a few hours ago the three of us were dancing on a medley of Punjabi, Hindi pop, and Tamil songs; the one with all the yet to read books, yet to play games, and yet to dream, dreams; the one we all come back to wherever we have been.
This is home.
This is a feeling that has not come easily to me.
I’m home.
-Alok, 02/03/24
2022
It comes unannounced.
You are sitting a slight distance away from your wife and your son.
She’s talking about her day, some experience in the crowd, while your toddler is trying his best to squeeze out the juice from a 200ml pack and ruin his clothes and the floor...and suddenly, it washes over you.
It comes in the form of an artist you just discovered, in the last two minutes of a TV series you just finished watching, a song that touched something inside that zombie heart of yours.
It comes unannounced when you talk to an old friend who casually reminds you how far you have come…how far.
You wonder how all the billion moments you have lived have contributed to this very moment, that despite everything, yes, every damn thing that life threw at you, you are sitting here, on the sofa, listening to your wife talking about her day while your son is trying to squeeze the juice out of a 200ml pack and ruin his clothes.
You wonder, you smile a faint smile, and you say a silent thanks.
Gratitude.