My Best Photographs

Some of my best photographs are the ones I've missed taking. Top among these is one of N--small frame, all of 5 years old, in jeans  and a thick blue pullover, shoulder length hair and normally pleasant expression replaced by obstinate lines as she looked at me defiantly--arms folded over 4 plump puppies hugged to her heart, trying not to let go as they wriggled. Then slowly the dawn of a sheepish smile, and all the while the utter bliss in the eyes.

As a dog lover, I did understand her feelings and was glad too to see her love for animals; but these were street dogs(pups) and I had been worried that their mother may bite N. So when I didn't allow her to go out, she had quietly slipped out and......

Fifteen years down the line, God knows where and how those dogs are, but in my mind they are still snuggled in my 5 turned 22 year old's arms.

Early morning in Hyderabad, 24 years ago, we were walking back to our hotel when we spotted four men getting off their cycles. Lungis folded knee length, large towels tied like baskets on their heads....Even as we watched they swarmed up to a bill board and loosening it, brought it down on the road. Intrigued we stopped to watch. And how we rued our camera less state as those men swung the huge board onto their towel wrapped heads, gracefully climbed onto their cycles and pedalled away calmly on that empty road, quite unaware that their beautifully synchronised act would forever live in my mind.

Going back from Ooty to Coimbatore, our car turned a corner and we suddenly came across the most ramshackle dwelling with an old man sitting in the warm sunlight, surrounded by the most amazing roses on bushes around him...and then we were gone.

A long summer road and heavily laden gul-mohur trees on either side, making a canopy for us as we sped by....A surreal effect, as if we were in a painting.

The alarm on my little one's tiny face when served a cauliflower subzi. She had confused it with  the mogra which grew abundantly in my mother's garden!!

Another missed photograph-- the astonishment on our pup's face as the ice-cube he was chasing suddenly melted, and his frantic searching.

And how can I ever forget the hailstones that burst over Bhilwara, covering terraces and roads almost instantaneously with their sago white roundness? Our normally dreary brown landscape was transformed into a fairy tale. And our 4 year old enjoyed  ' climbing the mountain' of hailstones on the terrace until it melted a few days later.

Not a single photograph in the album but all of them stored in my mind, forever.