When Ike hit Galveston last year, my parents were living there. The entierity of their possesions were in the house that they owned there. My mom's wedding saris. My sisters old toys (which my mom had somehow managed to hold on to through the litany of moves that we'd made) The photographs of a life lived across many decades, a couple of centuries and across several countries. They were all washed away by Ike.

Maybe a slight exagerration as some of the photographs did survive. And when my mom came to visit over Christmas, she brought along all the photos that survived so I could scan them. This was not just the sum total of our family life recorded but also family life before I arrived on the scene, before my parents got married, before my mom hit puberty.

Going through the photos, all the very old ones where my grandparents look vibrant and young and where my parents look vibrant and very young, they're all posed. They don't capture anything except some event, some gathering of people. There isn't a hint of the wider world outside that photo. There isn't a hint of anything beyond those people. No scenery. No house. Only faces and bodies.
Until my cousin sent me the picture above, of his father, my uncle, my mom's brother, wandering through what looks like a field of wheat, the part in his hair obscured by a errant blade of wheat, the forest off in the distance, dark and scary. It looks vaguely like my uncle today  though it could be any one of his brothers. I love this picture, for everything that it is, despite the fact that its badly out of focus. Photographs don't look like this, at least from this period.
My grandfather on my mom's side was a district court judge. A highly respectable position. And he was respected more than the position. The rule was that a district court judge  could only live in one district for two years, before you were transferred, lest you be corrupted by the court clientele. So every two years, the family, ever growing would pack up and move house. They lived all over Kerala, from the backwaters to the urban centers, and my mom still talks about those days longingly.
I suspect that the photograph is from those times, wandering around Kerala, and here is my uncle wandering around where ever they had settled for the two years.
There is something Satyajit Ray-ish about this photo, a view of an India before I was born, that I have never seen or experienced. Its like all the stories I have heard and have never heard. Its the india Satyajit Ray as able to capture but an India which is missing from almost all the photos I've seen. Its the India beyond my family growing up, but the same india that they inhabited. The India of their troubles and tribulations.
The photos reminds me of the India that I am chasing, have been chasing since I started wandering back to India during college. I've seen it in my cousins and in the jumble of city after city, town after town that is India. And every once in a while, I see it in the photos that tumble out of long forgotten photo albums, of the India I wish to know, to illuminate the life I currently inhabit.