Popagandhi

Then and now: I picked up photography the moment I knew I was going to India. How could I not? It had been my dream to go since I was a child — I knew I could not give up the opportunity of a lifetime, that there would be more photos than there would be stories to tell, in such an insanely photogenic place. Somebody handed me a Canon EOS 33 with a 50mm lens, many rolls of Tri-X film and said: just shoot. Sunil Singh and his friends, age 14, brought us around their ‘hood. Tollygunge, Kolkata. We walked everywhere in the blazing sun. We walked and walked and walked past train tracks, through the shanty towns, knocking on the doors of Sunil’s aunts for a drink, smiling at construction workers, smiling at hawkers, trying in converse in broken Bengali with anyone who would listen. I remember being awed by what I was doing, even though I didn’t know what I was doing. I saw things that awed me, overwhelmed me, things that made me feel. Kolkata does that to all of us, I think. I was deliriously happy. I must have been 18 then, at a low point in my life when I needed saving: from a certain failed relationship, from mediocrity, from dashed dreams. That afternoon, I popped in the Tri-X, set the camera to “P”, not knowing what I was doing — I merely wanted to concentrate on how I would remember that afternoon. Like that. We wandered around the slums. Naked children came padding out from their dilapidating thatch huts with dirt all over their bodies. I did not avert my eyes for the first time, I learned to meet the gaze of the little boy who had nothing. I refused to take a photo of that merely to glorify their lack; I did not want to take a photo for the sake of taking it, and to this day I still cannot bring myself to raise my camera at sights like families showering or defecating in the open at the town pumps just for the sake of it. I decided to let other photographers photograph India The Spiritual and India The Poor; to let other writers write that. I wanted my India to be as I saw it: a wonderful country with a million stories to tell. I was hooked. I’ve been back five times since for about 2-3 months each time, the latter 2 times for “work”, which now happens to be what I did that afternoon. I began in Bengal — and I continue to return to Bengal, both sides of it.

It was fitting that my first ‘real’ assignment would take place in Bengal, though on the other side. The moment the plane landed in Dhaka we were driven to Sirajganj, which I once called Middle of Bloody Nowhere, which would be our base for the next week’s work. With no prior experience in photojournalism I was suddenly expected to interview and photograph leprosy patients with their toes falling off, and lympathic filariasis sufferers (elephantiasis) with their engorged calves. I jumped into it with delight, figuring the look calm but paddle wildly beneath approach would be best. It worked. Every day the organization’s driver took us in an air-conditioned car to “the field” — the villages and hospitals of Sirajganj, Rongpur, Bogra, Syedpur. The brief: to produce interviews and photographs for the British developmental organization’s Christmas appeal for funds, with a focus on the microfinancing they were doing for flood victims and recovered patients. We were paid obscenely for a country that was so obscenely poor, but there I learned from the best, and there I learned the trick that would work for me for years to come: listen to people, be aware of your surroundings, speak their language or at least try. You can be the best damned photographer or writer in the world, technically, but out in the field if you’re an arrogant know-it-all who won’t listen and who doesn’t love people, you won’t last very long. I had the worst dysentery of my life and I had the best epiphany of my life. On the drive ‘home’ to Sirajganj from Nilphamari, a journey lasting 8 hours, I woke up to Ornob’s beautiful song: shey je boshe aachhe eka eka/ rongeen shopno taar bunte/ shey je cheye aachhe bhoraa chokhe/ jaanalaar phaake megh dhorte. She’s sitting there… beside the window catching clouds.

I rubbed my eyes, and saw this view. Every time I click my shutter, I still think of that afternoon in Tollygunge, Kolkata, of Sunil Singh and his friends, of that dinky little EOS 33 with Tri-X — how almost everything I do now is to replicate that same happiness I felt one Tollygunge afternoon in the December of 2004. In photography and in everything else.

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