Notes from my rear-view mirror
Posted on | October 17, 2009 | 51 Comments
Paradise in those days of bruised scabby knees and wild hair was set in red laterite country. It had grandmothers who moved around in an ether of Ayurvedic oils handing out admonitions and sweat-meats with equal ease. The main citizens of this nation were a mob of tanned and rowdy cousins who would crawl out of the woodwork the minute we city-dwellers landed. Within the next few weeks we’d map every nook and cranny of the wild farmlands to the last earthworm and the last dragonfly (Dragonflies were particularly useful as these when tied with a string on their tails could be used as backhoes for picking up stones.) Our feet would tear fields and playgrounds to shreds as a determined sun watched on while vaporizing an occasional itinerant cloud.
…..and what you see above is a piece of that paradise. If it was a human this photo will be eligible to purchase and consume alcoholic beverages by this year. It doesn’t know what it is missing. But you know. You are looking for 72 virgins, swaying palms and cool emerald water that are notable by their absence in my dated version of paradise. Instead what you see on either side of the mud road are rice fields getting roasted in ample solar radiation typical of April in South India. A river which could’ve salvaged the otherwise dry and dusty frame hides a couple of hundred meters behind me, the photographer.
I took the picture with my trusted Yashica. A few of my cousins and my sister are in the photo. The two men in lungi are passersby. The photo has been tickled a bit by my funny photoshop bone. I couldn’t help but contribute to the mutilation of the photo already warped by time, weather, scanning conditions and a 13 year old amateur camera aficionado (I bet you just calculated my age.) The only person untouched in the picture is the man wearing thoppikuda (thoppi= hat, kuda = umbrella.) It is my homage to an extinct age when thoppikudas could travel inconspicuously in public without eliciting puzzled glances and when I was at an age, like the one perfectly summed up in this song,
It was always summer and the future called
We were ready for adventures and we wanted them all
And there was so much left to dream
And so much time to make it real
Earlier in the day this song (or rather the refrain, I do not know any song beyond their chorus) was making rounds in my brain. Sung by the beefy bard of modern rock ballads a line from it was adopted by automakers world wide and affixed on many rear-view mirrors. The automakers might claim it was the other way around. But I wouldn’t doubt the ingenuity of bards of any kind, from anywhere, whether from New World or Old Country.
I’ve unstuck a line from the lyrics and have pasted it on the photo. The rest of it is here.
..There are times I think I see him peeling out of the dark
I think he’s right behind me now and he’s gaining ground
But it was long ago and it was far away, oh God it seems so very far
And if life is just a highway, then the soul is just a car
And objects in the rear view mirror may appear closer than they are
And objects in the rear view mirror may appear closer than they are
Like Kenny in the song this photo has a cousin of mine who is with us no more (you can only see his brown legs, not his face) and there are times I think I see him peeling out of the dark…..I am thirteen again and it is summer blazing up in the lost paddy fields in far-off Malabar.
Paradise Geo-coded: the exact location where the picture was taken two decades ago
Comments
51 Responses to “Notes from my rear-view mirror”
Leave a Reply
November 24th, 2009 @ 1:54 PM
Been planning to email both of you for a long long time *two guilty faces*, but … *even guiltier two faces*….. *guiltiest two faces*.
I do prefer the original picture over the photo-shopped one, especially since all the photographs from my childhood (80s) I own have a similar colour washed look and is a good indicator (and far memory pointers) to that particular time span.