Photographs & Memories

- Sumana Roy

 

“WHEN WAS THIS, MA?” There is no response. It’s not because she’s trying to remember. It’s the guilt of not being able to remember. I know that face.

I turn the page. It’s not the page of a book— those are light and easy to turn, easy enough for even a breeze to move. These pages are heavy, thicker than chart paper. They are the pages of my parents’ old photo album. Unlike the pages of a book, they are black in colour—greyish black, as if all the light has been eaten by the photos, leaving them bereft of light. The pages, therefore, are not light. I know I’m repeating myself. That might be because I’ve already begun metaphorizing them. I have started seeing in them the weight of time, their resistance to being moved.

On the next page is a photo of my mother with her friends. Two of them— Kumkum mashi [aunt in Bengali]; the name of the second I can’t remember. “Is this Annapurna mashi?” I ask Ma.

Ma takes the album from my hands and brings it close to her face, as if this proximity created by space would help her reach closer to where she wants to be in time. “I wonder where Annapurna is now,” she says.

She can’t say the same about Kumkum mashi. We know where she is now.

Beyond our reach, beyond the reach of a camera, where most things in life are now kept trapped, for fear of them being taken away from us. In the brackets that hold the span of our mortal lives when we consign them to the strange code we’ve invented to denote our time on earth, Kumkum mashi’s had been closed, some time in the 1980s, when I was in school.