f2: 1/50
“. . . some of the drab little photographs, if stared at long enough, begin to speak to us.” (~ Janet Malcolm, “Still Pictures”)
Ma would be 103 on Sunday, April 14th.
That’s incomprehensible to me. It is simply a number, and I can’t imagine a connection with that human who gave me life. She died 35 years ago.
I came across this Kodak Brownie snapshot in my inherited disheveled photo albums the other day. I had seen it many times before. I had, oddly, never seen the photograph in it its entirety. It is a snapshot of my mother’s entire immediate family in the late 1940s.
The baby on its side in the center of the circle is my sister, Swapna, probably a few months old in the fall of 1946, pre-Independence. Who was the photographer? Could’ve been my father. The reason for my hesitancy to situate him as the witness to this clannish scene is that he boarded one of the “Victory” ships mass-produced during World War II at US shipbuilding sites. After the war, they became the freighters that doubled up for cargo and human transport (since commercial passenger liners were non-existent in the aftermath of the war).
The freighter was “Bates Victory” and my father, age 29, boarded it with a passport that was marked for "British subject by birth" (this was still 10 months before Indian Independence) with four other passengers and the crew, at Calcutta Harbor on 7 November 1946 ( when my sister was four months old) and traveled for two and half months (yes, that's right, 2.5 months via Colombo, back up to Bombay, Karachi, the Suez, to Aden). He had a 30-day transit stamp for Palestine from the British Foreign Office since it was British territory. Bates Victory rounded the Cape of Good Hope, up to Spain and Marseilles, to Southampton and then the weeks-long last leg across the Atlantic, dropping down to the Caribbean and then up the Gulf Stream to Boston Harbor, where he disembarked on Jan. 14th, 1947.
My mother lived with Didi, my sister, in a small cottage in Thakurpukur, a sleepy locality in what was greater Calcutta, and is today a densely populated area on NH 117, less than 3.5 miles from where I grew up in Behala.
In the photograph, from the left foreground is Boromashi (my mother’s oldest sister), then 24. She was very stylish, and the photograph doesn’t lie. She has a silk blouse and strappy sandals. Next to her is Didu (my grandmother), widowed at 32 and 46 years old in 1946. The only male in the frame is Mama (my uncle), who was born posthumously and is 15 in the photograph. Next to him is my Chotomashi (my mother’s youngest sister) who is 20 in the photograph. Between them in the background is a wicker cradle.
And then Ma. 25. She’d lost her first-born Reena Archana in 1944, I think. This was never discussed when I was growing up.
With the shutter open for a fiftieth of a second, the photographer has given me a gift of a lifetime.
(Photograph courtesy of author. All Rights Reserved)