Memory capsulė

Fifteen years after her father’s passing, DIVYA BALAKRISHNAN reflects on how the photographs he took have become her lodestar, reshaping her understanding of perception and presence

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The night before I left Bengaluru to start my job in Mumbai, I hovered by the corner cupboard in my living room, pretending I had a reason to be there instead of in bed. Prying open the doors, I reached for the photo albums stacked inside. I didn't need to see them, I’ve memorised every image. But it’s a habit I can't shake, like checking my phone when I wake up.

The photos, clicked by my father, capture my family at our candid best: me rolling on the floor of a department store mid-tantrum. My amma in the kitchen, wearing a blue nightie and sporting her famous murrikyal (Malayalam for ‘fierce glare’, one I have inherited), wielding an appai (utensil) in protest against being photographed. My brother perched on a hospital bed, holding up a freshly fractured arm from some misadventure. Walls, chairs, his offices, my plushies—my father feverishly documented the mundane fragments of life no one else would think to hold on to.

Nostalgia is a strange thing. It creeps in quietly, settling in the spaces between memory and longing. Moments that can't be relived but can be revisted. To me, a photo is nostalgia made tangible

Back then, the pictures seemed unremarkable, a waste of film, but now I cherish them. Those photos weren't about perfection or preservation; they were about perspective. My father’s perspective.