Photographs

| 5 MINUTE READ | Reclaiming the unforgotten

2024

The fairy lights from the living room balcony deck continue out into the eastern seaboard skyline.

It is a weekend evening. I am sitting with my wife and friends, one of whom I have known since childhood. We are sipping beers, looking down at the lawn and pool. She says it feels like a resort. I understand what she means – the aura of luxury was something removed from the homes we lived out our early lives in. With old friends, some nostalgia is inevitable. The forgetting of where we are and the returning to what we were. I feel the buoyancy of being unmoored by time.

The conversation veers to memories of my brother. Another friend asks to see his picture. I feel unprepared for this. Like stepping out of an airport into a new city, realizing it is much colder than imagined and visualizing the jacket left behind. Nobody has asked to see my brother’s picture for a while. In a house full of books & papers, stationery & cutlery, clothes & bags, old letters & broken hardware – that I don’t have a ready picture of his feels like a small betrayal.

I walk to the library and scour over the pictures interspersed between our books. I know there is one there. I find it and take it to her. It is a faded picture of him holding my hand. He was two years and some. I was one. At that age all children look approximately the same. This is an apology of a picture.

-x-

2023

Patterns recur to tell us something.  

I am sitting across the table from a healer. This was from a few weeks earlier. She is exploring for unresolved knots from my past that may be reverberating into the quotidian challenges of my present. She asks about my brother. How do I remember and celebrate him? I tell her how much I love him and how entirely I have erased him from my home. She says spirits need the nourishment of connection. Asks me to place his pictures in our prayer room and on my bedside table. I imagine my brother more tuned into subtle silent intentions and not caught up by such overt gestures. But the idea sticks in my head.

And now this.

I want to ask my mother to share whatever albums she has with his pictures, but I stop. He died when he was twenty-five. It was three decades ago, but that is no time for a mother. When I arrived home that night, she was distraught at the idea that his body would be cremated the next day. She cut a small patch of hair from his head and kept it with her. It was against custom and she had to part with it the next day. The body must be burnt entirely to free the spirit from clinging to it. Everything moves on. The immediacy of our burdens, however overpowering, end up being consumed by time and our own forgetting. Except for mothers.      

-x-

1994

We had gone out together for dinner a few months before he died. All four of us. I remember how special it felt. Our childhood pictures were mainly of the three of us. My father’s time was overwhelmed by the demands imposed on him by his work.

The restaurant had a photographer who took Polaroid pictures of guests at their tables. We had one taken. I took it home and slipped it beneath the glass on the counter adjoining our dining table. I would look at it closely. It wasn’t just a picture. It felt more like a revelation.    

On the day my brother died, I remember noticing he had worn my favourite black trousers. And the picture of the four of us was missing. It was not the time to search for and reclaim a missing photograph. But even amidst all that surrounded me, I could not help wonder what became of that picture.   

I left town soon after the cremation. We sold our home and factory. Our belongings were packed and moved to Vadodara. They were piled in a corner of the new factory warehouse. Along with four decades of correspondence files, engineering drawings and calculations, contract documents, technical literature and commercial agreements. After a few months, an office circular was issued for everyone to claim the things they needed within a week, after which the rest would be burnt and disposed. A lot of our old photographs and personal effects got consumed by that bonfire.

I don’t know if this is an accurate representation of what happened. This is the story I pieced together years later. There were too many things going on then. My father was reviving a company in ruins, nursing a wife who was broken, grieving over a son who would never return and comforting another who was lost. Old pictures were loose ends. At that time, almost everything was.  

-x-

2024

I return to work the next week. A bunch of papers and files from home are sitting on my desk. My mother has been cleaning and these are for me to sort through. I see a used train ticket. A grocery bill for almond milk and honey. An expired warranty letter for a refrigerator. I need to get more organized. I put them aside, to look at another time.

Two days later, I receive a note from a friend with a 9677 word piece written by the sports writer Gideon Haigh, that he wants me to read. It is a requiem to his younger brother Jaz, who died almost four decades ago. I usually reserve my mornings for deep work. But today, I put it aside and begin reading this.

I pause midway through this hypnotic piece and turn to the pile of files I need to sort. There is a spiral bound album at the bottom. I intuitively reach out to it, place it on my desk and open it. In page after page are pictures of my brother. Seeing me cut my first birthday cake. Us in Kashmir in the mid-70s, sitting on horses. At a fancy dress competition during my grandmothers 60^th birthday. Him dressed as a girl and me as an Arab. His photographs are like a dream within a dream. A faint signal arriving from another realm.

I return to reading about Jaz. Sibling love is a raw, beautiful thing. An instinctive and unpretentious union. I sense a rise of neurological activity in my body. An additional film of fluid collects in my eyes. There are no tears, but I feel vulnerable and open. I find a picture of my brother to share with my friend. It is from the late 80s when he was still in his teens. Before depression encircled his mind and medication cast itself into his body. He is looking deadpan at the camera, his hands resting on a plate with some food still on it. I look at his face, searching for myself in it. He had tender, surrendering eyes.

I thank her for asking for his picture and share this. Tell her I am reclaiming him back into my life.