Popagandhi

We’ve set up a little office in one of the most expensive rooms here on Sudder Street (800 rupees; A/C, marbled bathroom floor, huge, bright room), basically waiting it out for something to happen (like for Canon to send the cameras over from Delhi) before we can move out into the field. With our PowerBooks set up next to each other, iPods, hard disks, speakers, cameras, cables lying around, I can actually feel like I’m doing proper work. Every night after Alejandra goes back to her room I go to work on some case studies from earlier shoots. This line of work is truly heartbreaking - I have to arrange the images and writing by their respective diseases: leprosy, HIV, tubercolosis. Husbands who gave their wives HIV. 7 year olds who can’t see. Then I go to bed and literally dream about the horrendously long queue for Bangladeshi visas.

Things are finally getting started so we might start moving off soon. There’s something about those fleeting, transient alliances which form while you’re on the road, allied through nothing else but by being at the same place at the same time, liking the same music but not the same food: you miss them when you go. I like to believe they distill your friendships down to the level of the most basic; when you have to pratically live out there with them there is no time for niceties. The ones you hit it off with, you will perenially keep arranging to meet in a third, neutral country, taking on another form of friendship altogether. I will miss our trio when we leave; I will miss this life of being on the road when I return to school. But not as much as how much I miss you.