While finishing up the household chores on a lazy Sunday, my eyes grasped the attention of a dusty cupboard near the study table. It remains unnoticed most of the times, so I thought of opening it up and give my hands on it. Of course the spider webs were welcoming at the first glance. I wore a mask and started my personal expedition. Old books of father, his clothes and lots of fresh unused utensils huddled up. I gave it a dust free wave and rubs of my rag and noticed an album at a dark corner. I took it out and opened the first few pages to see some of the moments of my childhood which were cherishing. After a while of digging into it, I was called for other unfinished chores at my room. I had a habit of taking things too deeply, for some it could be nothing but for some it really means. I was a part of the second tribe, cognitively challenging to some people. As a result, the impression of those photographs made my perspective more overwhelming.
Remembering that small instance down the cupboard, I thought to myself that nothing can quite fit in to the hollow spaces that a photograph occupies. Unlike any other digital medium or sighted experience a photograph reaches out and grabs one singular moment in time and space and holds it for us to look at. Taken within a sequence of infinite moments, once a photo is clicked, it gives out the perpetual moment of time, hereby standing completely for itself; one singular frame. When I went through that photos which was a part of that album buried somewhere inside the cupboard, I see a photo of myself or a moment that I was a part of. I reflect on it and try to recall what it was like to be in that moment. I feel a certain form of nostalgia that is almost tangible. I miss it and want to go back to the moment that the photograph was captured but perhaps when I experience this, it is not exactly the moment in photograph I long to go back but the moment in general. Perhaps I was longing for what the photo reminds me of right now, what it taunts me about the freshness of memories to which was somewhere a part of me. That photos showed me what it was like to exist in one frame of time and to be completely present and be able to witness all the bijou details in a given scene of my life. To be detached enough from oneself and the constant happenings around me, to see how things might actually be and how things could actually be. With such reverie in my mind, I asked some questions to myself that what could it be right now if this present moment be a photograph What would it look like or be? Would I look back at it sometime at the future and miss it and wish I was back here? With such absurd questions spinning back and forth in my mind, I held myself back to the pages of the album. With every old photographs turned by I wish to tell myself to look around and take in all the details of this present moment and marvel at the scene to which I am a part of; allowing it to stand for itself because with or without a photograph, every moments has its own singular frame to be remembered and we don’t always need a photograph to feel what it makes me feel. Finishing off gazing each memory, I closed the album and kept it where it belonged. Partly at the now cleaned cupboard but wholly in my heart.
