A Funny Photo-Shoot

Today I went to visit a Very Old Person. She is confined to her room and therefore can’t go to the bank to collect her pension. So she has to fill up a form requesting that the pension be delivered to her. The form requires her photograph, which is where I came in. With a song on my lips and my Canon slung on my shoulder, I went to this old, old lady’s old, old house in Golpark. For it is not every day that you get to do a photo-shoot of your great-grandfather’s sister-in-law.

Mrs. Chatterjee is a strange and cantankerous lady with aristocratic airs (she was the daughter of a zamindar), and enough idiosyncrasies to fuel a lively family discussion for a whole evening. Once, with a huge bunch of bananas, she caught a train from Madras to Chengalpet. The train reached the terminus, but she remained seated. The train turned back, reached Madras and had again started for Chengalpet when she remarked to co-passengers that the station names all seemed familiar. She claims it was an innocent mistake, but to this day, no one in our family is entirely convinced that she didn’t do it for fun. Or waza waza, as they say in Japan.

Anyhow, I landed up this morning, chit-chatted about obscure and distant family members over a cup of tea, and took the photos. She was delighted at being able to view the photos immediately on the LCD, and this delighted me in turn. I’ve been using a digital camera for years and I still find it wonderful and incredible that you can twist a dial and see a picture you took a few seconds back. But these days, even people who you wouldn’t think had ever seen a digicam in their lives seem to treat the magical phenomena of instant playback and the LCD with a remarkable degree of matter-of-factness. It has robbed me of one of the simple joys of life.

You go to the Sunderbans and take a nice photo of fishermen with their day’s haul, and you go show it to them expecting them to fall over themselves in amazement, and they’re like, “yeah, what?” Most disheartening. When I went to Dharamsala, only the very old and the very young monks would be interested in seeing how the picture came out. The rest probably owned DSLRs themselves.

But this lady, I am happy to report, had all the right expressions of wide-eyed wonder and the comments about how fast technology is advancing. Incredibly (for women, and especially old women, are very hard to satisfy where their own photos are concerned), she was very pleased with the way the pictures came out. I liked her biscuits too, and ate several of them. All in all, a good day’s work.