All memory is imagination.
All photographs are premonitions.
I dream you backward into the future.
When I got access to my first camera, I was a growing teenager. I took a selfie with a digital camera and was astonished at the sight of my own nose. I did not know it looked this large and distinctive, not ugly, but undeniable. On hearing my complaints, my father advised me to drink a glass of milk every day and the bump in my nose would go away. A trick, yes, but also a covenant: this nose was my inheritance. My Daadi had the longest nose I had ever seen, so did my uncles, so did my grandfather,my grandparents and so did my dad. I was often told how much I looked like him, largely because of the eyes and nose. During his funeral, struck by grief, all I could focus on was his nose, the same ridge, the same angle. In death, it was the only part of him that looked alive.
In the wake of the grief, I scour the old albums and find my hands on a washed-out, dusty blue album filled with photographs taken by my grandfather and father. The pages smelled like dust and camphor. As I sifted through them, carefully caressing every face, Barthes’ words haunted me: photographs are testimony to what “has been” and what will be. Evidence, but also relics for the future. When my grandfather and father took these pictures, they could not have known I’d be staring back decades later, tracing their features like a verdict. The photograph knew me before I knew it. I stare at these images, my grandfather, just a man laughing with friends; my father, a boy, not yet my father, not yet dead, great-grandparents with their oblivious stare at someone they will never meet. The act of looking is so frustrating, by looking at these photos, I try to conjure up an image of them that I believe I had but the photographs replace memory. You ascend, reascend, this hill of knowledge, to look at the photograph and find their complete essence but the effort remains futile but this Sisyphean urge to persevere remains. Although every year brings another fold, and every fold, every fade brings the slow annihilation, another crease in my own memory, before it crumples completely.
Grief swells. It says: “Here is an image of someone you loved/knew/saw. They are right here and yet they are not. At Least not in the way you knew it.” Yes, the photograph is a reminder of what “has been.” The paradox sustains itself; photography is an act of creation and yet its subjects are always dying. I can imagine a time when they existed, how they looked, how they scrunch their nose, yet this is a door that only opens one way. I call and nobody answers.
Is this the liminality of memory? In one picture, my grandmother stands in the courtyard of our home, an outside of the inside, a literal threshold. And I stand in the liminal space between present and past. In this act of noticing, I also begin to see how my grandmother, even though visible, is still unseen. My father, my grandfather– the creators of images. My grandmother– always the subject, never the seer. Always existing in a role, as a wife, as a mother, even in photographs. Is this too, a part of the lineage? Not just the features but also the roles we are supposed to fit into. Even in memory, or the mimicry of it, her agency remains a silent omission. Did she ever crave this urge to freeze time? To manifest her visions into another subject? What would she have captured, erased or kept?
The photograph pulls me into this space, where it becomes not just a colonizer of memory, but a collaborator in loss. There is so much power that comes with looking at a photograph. I hold knowledge the subjects never had: this little boy will suffer through cancer years later, this woman’s husband will pass away years before her own demise. In the frame, everyone will become a ghost; that the nose we share will outlive us all. I become the omnipresent observer, their future clear before my eyes while the subjects remain oblivious to it. It was often overheard in the culture I come from– to capture a face in a photograph is blasphemy, a mimicry of God’s creation. Are these images of the dead, then, failed resurrections? The camera cannot grant life; only a trace with substance, a chalked out representation.
I revisit the photos again and again.They now sit in this space; between my memory and back of my iphone case. Barthes said memory needs an image. I disagree: it needs a body. Through me, these subjects live. This nose, too, becomes a relic. But how long until the image empties? the photograph that merges past, present, and future. How many times can I look before the threshold collapses, before this shrine to arrested time becomes just paper, just light, just a nose in a mirror?
Mehak Khurshied is a writer from Poonch, Jammu and Kashmir. Her work revolves around the themes of identity, nostalgia, grief and the ever-altering idea of home. She likes to call her writing a constant dissipation of self. Her work has been featured in Muse India, The Chakkar, The Aleph Review, The Monograph Magazine, Verse of Silence and elsewhere.
