This photo series captures the faces of the many people I have met over the past decade. These are random mosquito shots capturing an array of diverse expressions. The pulse of the series is the tinge of dreamy hope hidden either in their bright smiles or hearty guffaws or their meditative musings of the soul set on moving further in life. What is strikingly evident in each expression is their zeal to go through existence. From blurred and stark to mundane specks of reality, the transition is impactful.
Homecoming– A visit to the Hill Chapel (Ross Hill) in Visakhapatnam covering my dear friend, Manogya, a being of beautiful pulsating energy.
Iridescence- is the glowing, shifting, colorful quality of a rainbow.
Discovery – find unexpectedly or during a search.
My camera captures her mid-existence, negotiating the inadequacies of life. The candid nature of the image speaks volumes about the subject, Serena Vardhan. There is a bohemian sense to her, a bold streak as if she does not belong to this world.
“Jag mujhpe lagaye pabandi,
Mein hoon hi nahi is duniya ki.”
“The world constricts me,
I don’t belong from here.”
Effervescence- giving off bubbles; fizzy.
Light, frothy, easy, dancy being.
“Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought….”
-Daffodils by William Wordsworth.
Innocence- Sundari, the little girl, is a Personification of childlike, sprightly innocence. I had chanced upon her on the stately streets of Amritsar (a city at crossroads, at once nostalgic, paying grand tributes to a glorious past and gift wrapped in urbanization and industrialization).
We sighted each other around the corner of the Harmandir Sahib. Trotting towards me, Sundari gazed longingly at the camera, looking at me wide-eyed; she says,
“Didi aap photo loge mera.”
“ Will you please take my photo?”
Dream- the colors of black and white, a distorted arrangement, a past sighing, a present glaring, and a future dreaming.
This photograph was taken while the sun shone brightly upon us in Visakhapatnam.
“The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”
– Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost.
Exhilaration- glee, elation, euphoria, exaltation, delight.
Somehow she seems like a fountain, sprinkling the loudest laughs. The candid, at best, deconstructs her, revealing, layer by layer, her essence, what in dance is referred to as rasa. Lost to the rhythm of euphoria, here you see my sister, Tasneem, arrested by the camera’s penetrating gaze.
Rasa- essence, juice, taste
She arose from a state of gold and embraced rubies, big and small. The contours of her face gave her a distinct definition. Oh, you’d feel like running your fingers…
Over the past few years, a deep sense of connection, a Deja vu, an empathy of sorts with women (gone and present) has settled in the very center of my being. She, Shabrina Ashraf, a dear friend, symbolizes the wild woman archetype. The camera has captured this hypnotic and freeing essence within her.
Wild Woman Archetype-
‘How does Wild woman affect women?’ Clarissa Pinkola Estes asks in Woman Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype.
The answer isn’t easy because how does one possibly define a wild woman? Is one to associate wild to its modern definition or its ancient meaning. Clarissa Pinkola Estes would disagree with the contemporary context of wild, meaning bad, evil, uncivilized, uncouth, subscribing to bad, not nice, crossing set boundaries. The ancient reference, on the other hand, is that of evolving as a courageous, wild woman in the midst of natural habitat, a natural existence. This is the original meaning, where one cannot fathom differentiating the woman and the wild woman, where these separate identities are, in fact, one.
In the world of today, the streaks of a wild woman can be felt in all women. These streaks resemble the visual of an electric current causing a sort of tingling. You sight the presence of a feminine wildness in brief vignettes: in her talk, in her gesture, in her anxiety, in her anger, in her worried self, in her stance, in mundane, almost always overlooked things. I see it in my Lakshmi Amma, the woman who uses her hands to mix her food. The movements of her hands, cupping, squeezing, and pressing the rice on her palm, to make it into a ball and tossing it inside the mouth, invokes an alien sensation of wanting to do just that. The act questions the pretense or garb of the civilized lot. The subtle wilderness attached to it is at once hope-filled, liberating, and soul-stirring. I had once asked her, if not this life, which one do you dream of! She says, “this is the life I know, I have lived it, I am living it….”
For like Clarissa Pinkola Estes opines, “The wild nature carries the bundles for healing; she carries everything a woman needs to be and know. She carries the medicine for all things. She carries stories and dreams and words and songs and signs and symbols. She is both vehicle and destination.”
And to snatch away the Bread of Dreams (Amrita Pritam) would make her a shell of her actual self. It would compromise her to ‘feeling extraordinarily dry, fatigued, frail, depressed, confused, gagged, muzzled, unaroused. To feeling frightened, halt or weak, without inspiration, without animation, without soulfulness, without meaning, shame-bearing, chronically fuming, volatile, stuck, uncreative, compressed, crazed….’
La Que Sabe- (the One Who Knows), La Loba (the wolf woman), Rio Abajo Rio (the river beneath the river), La Mujer Grande (the Great Woman), Luz del abismo (the light from the abyss), La Huesera (the bone woman).
– Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ ‘Woman Who Run With the Wolves
I have seen her in my mind’s eyes innumerable times, sewing abstract images of wolves moaning, groaning, making love, hunting, nurturing, tending to, and finally leading. Her artistic flexibility, her elasticity of soul has sealed the La Que Sabe, the One Who Knows. In her heart of hearts where her soul resides, restless, in desperate need of liberation, I imagine her breaking away and running wild and free from the roles of a Daughter, Sister, Sister-in-law, Wife, Mother, Aunt, Mother-In-Law, Grandmother, and transcending into the spirit of a wolf, where she embraces her true self, in the depth of the desert.
The camera sees my grandmother, the woman whose razor-sharp focus pierces the gadget in hand. The compact composure pricked bit by bit to reveal a nursing hope for wild salvation, a salvation where one necessarily does not have to sacrifice her spirit and in that emancipate oneself from one’s own essence of wildness.
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