“India is still hard for you isn’t it?” Stan asked rhetorically, from behind the computer screen.
I knew he was sifting through our photos of Rajasthan with a nostalgia that will continue to elude me. The photos have barely seen light of day since we returned seven years ago. Seven years... I breathed a deep lung full of air, remained where I was flopped on the lounge, and allowed several heartbeats to pulse through me, before I whispered back “Yes.” almost inaudibly.
I know I will always have difficulty looking through those photos of India. They represent the last days, the halcyon days. A time when we were all happy. When we were all well. When we were all still alive.
Its complicated. I never had time to process what we experienced in India. The woman I was, who experienced India, doesn’t exist anymore. I don't know what to think about the squalor or the beauty. The history, the dust, the begging, the colour, the smells. The aching poverty. The cremations. Especially the cremations. I thought I understood.
I had no idea.
Stan took a photo of me on a rooftop in Jodhpur, smiling back at the camera, so sweetly unaware of the days ahead when my life would unravel. I can’t bear to look at it. My insouciance nauseates me now. Six weeks after that photo was taken, my life cleaved in two.
Stan took
this photo of me too, in Agra at the Fort. The warm light slanting in
through the gritty haze of the late afternoon. The day is fresh in my
memory. The pervasive smell of wood fires. The Taj, barely visible from
the terrace, squirrels darting across stone paths and scampering up the
trees. The local women happily posing for us in their colourful saris. I
was always at my happiest, in a foreign country, with my camera slung
across my shoulder.
I remember the click of Stan’s shutter. I heard him take this photo.
I came across it today, unexpectedly. Stan had left it in a folder he created and romantically named “Alison in Wonderlands”. I look upon the photo now, with a sadness that did not exist that day. I look at myself in the centre of this image with a strange detachment. And I unfairly attribute the loneliness and loss I feel now, to that wonderful timeless afternoon.
