I noticed how my father gently stroked certain photographs – mostly of his mother’s – as if his entire being subsided in the gentleness of his touch. Intermittently he would rub his dotted cheeks, his eyes, his forehead somehow trying to shred away whatever the images were making him feel, and what we knew he was terrible at hiding. In moments, I noticed that he too was mourning. That he too feared the idea of never knowing his mother fully. And only recently did I realise how sitting with the family album alone could also be a sign of bereavement, or even misery, as goes the unsaid notion in my family. Someone who is absent or who has been lost, one tends to find their essence in these old photographs. Photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch us like the delayed rays of a star.(1) Engaging with them solitarily would be as if one is unable to live in the present, and is captivated by their loss. Looking at a photograph long enough, this way becomes almost an act of self-imprisonment. Perhaps with the company of the others, it was easier for them to remember the dead, and yet keep a sense of the present, making sure every member of the family is keeping afloat.

Meanwhile, Maa began by looking at her wedding album, which said ‘Sweet Memories’ on its maroon-velvety front, held together with strands of transparent tape and loosened stitches. Ecstatically, as always, she would introduce me to each and every relative, highlighting key instances of her wedding and allowing me to almost virtually become a part of the day that certainly changed her life.

Afterwards, she continued her engagement with an unnamed album, measuring exactly 6inches by 4inches, possibly the smallest of all, which at a first glance covered no significant occasion or gathering, and consisted of ordinary photographs put together from seemingly unrelated events of the family. I wondered how this came about as Maa intensely went over and over this album.

Her presence now appeared more internal than before, and her voice felt too far away. In the secrecy of this album, stacked underneath the socially acceptable photographs, in one of the sections was kept an intimate portrait of the couple sitting on a small boat in the middle of a lake. It showed Maa holding my father imitating a kiss on his cheeks. Her eyes closed, fingers interlocked, and arms gently resting around my father’s shoulder. My father looking straight into the camera, smiling. The mountains safeguarding at the back. Pulling the photograph out, she gave a quick look at it, and before discreetly sliding it back under the photograph from the same event, only renditioned un-kissed, she mumbled in a now gravitated tone, “…this is something else!” and wanted to move on. As if she completely refused to identify herself with the woman in the photograph. Perhaps her role as a mother, with me being next to her stopped her from recognising her own intimacies. Hesitatingly, she allowed me to glance over, and only briefly breaking down the indelible norms of an ideal maternal figure and the heavy pillars of patriarchy.

It was only now when I realized the album in question was originally meant to be a record of my parents’ first ever getaway after their wedding: The Honeymoon Diary! It was curious to know how an album which was initially intended to record the warmth and togetherness of a newly married couple over time gets transformed, suffused and devoured by the photographs of other members of the family. And how the now apparent honeymoon album ended up including photos of her in-laws, her children, of ritual and devotional gatherings for family’s good fortune, and from other small events? Maybe for this very reason, couples at the first place after their wedding venture out to the higher altitudes or travel somewhere away from the domestic space, closer to nature where familial norms of relationship, intimacy, and closeness wouldn’t suffice, and love perhaps would make more sense amidst strangers.

The role of a maternal figure and in general, the subsumed place assigned to women in society is further validated by how the photographs are arranged in afamily album: directing which photos to be placed on top and are allowed the scrutiny of others, and which ones are needed to be tucked away in the privacy of acceptable behaviour within the family structure? Regulating us on how should one express love, and to whom one should be seen openly loving. Further upholding the outlined position of mothers, wives, and daughters in the hierarchy of a household. Possibly, for this very reason, I too, over the years have kept secret the photos of my own love affairs, hidden in-between the pages of books, buried under cushions & beddings, and in many other recesses of my apartment. Most often it was the photographs of my mother holding a child - me or my elder brother, or she posed in the formality of an Indian wife and a daughter-in-law, which were ubiquitous on the surface. Although it is only in the netherworld of the photo album, where I could – in parts – witness my mother before being confined to anything else, as a woman, as a friend, as an individual un-mothered.In certain moments that we spent with the family photographs, I observed my parents’ reactions from afar, objectively, viewed them with a sense of subtle detachment and sometimes devoid of any burden of familial relations. In these brief moments we stood together, closer, at the liminality where I became a little less of their son, and possibly they, a little less of my progenitors.