Visual Narrative: My Shoebox of Photographs

If I were to pack a bunch of things for my future self, who, if one day, woke up with no memory of her favourite things, what would I want by my side?

In Three Men in a Boat, author Jerome K. Jerome writes, in sentences as long as a whole page if I may add, about a short trip with his friends and his dog, Montmorency. Almost three chapters in, the men discard a couple of lists they make of things to carry in order to survive a short camping trip, before one of them says, “You know we are on a wrong track altogether. We must not think of the things we could do with, but only of the things that we can’t do without.”

Among other little things, I’ll have a shoebox of photographs. One, of the people I most love and care about, of course. But it’ll also hold reminders of the everyday everything.

You see, I carry with me an immense amount of anticipatory grief, and I have a near-compulsive need to take pictures, in part, to reassure myself that I’m not alone, and, in part, to remember that beauty exists, even in the ordinary. I’m somewhat grateful for 2025 and phones with cameras. Because if the day ever comes when I forget how to look up and see the cotton candy clouds, or when crowns of trees gently leave space for each other, or miss the way a little flower brightens an auto rickshaw, I’ll have a way back.

Here are some things I’d want to be reminded of, to know there’s beauty in the world that surrounds me, there’s hope in the everyday mundane, and that curiosity has brought us this far, and it’ll keep us going! To put a long story short, these photographs are memories I’m leaving for the future me, I’d want her to know that some there was some sunlight filtering through tea and falling on her mehndi when she needed it most, and a bowl of cut-up fruits helped her manage extreme pain, sleeping dogs by the beachside, and flowers. There are lots and lots of flowers.