The secret element in black and white pictures is the lack of colour. Don't roll your eyes just yet. Give me a second.
Photographs are meant to capture, for posterity, a particular moment. But looking over that moment afterwards, colour photos don't leave any room for nostalgia to play out its bit. In a b&w, we can imagine the near-white dress as being a cloudy cream chiffon, and the greyish face as being a beautiful golden-brown. Our imagination does the Photoshop-ing. And the imagination, no matter whose it is, is good at that sort of thing. Better, I dare say, than Adobe.
A colour photo is horribly real. Who on earth wants to remember that first date as the itchy, hot, awkward, altogether silly thing it was ? They looked nice, in the dress and the suit, they had their best smiles on, everything else we can imagine into place.

Globalisation is a funny thing.

It gives us Italian seasoning from Fabindia, and Assam tea from Twinings Of London.

He wasn't born of his own will. But then, nobody is. Some two people, for one reason or another, reach into the recesses of the world waiting for life, and pulled out a baby, squawling and resisting into the world, so they could grow up with it. Then they sent it to school, decided where he would go, what he would do. When he reached teenage, he found out that he didn't have to do all those things, and promptly didn't. Just like everyone else. But he didn't feel strongly about it, and in this atleast he was a bit different. He didn't care at all, he stopped caring when at 14 they told him he couldn't go out for something- it was something as small as a movie or dinner- and instead of saying I will go, like some healthy competitive spirit, he said Not like it Matters, like a defeatist loser instead. Right then, they could've told you what he was going to turn out as. His parents could've known if they'd just been looking, but Are you Smarter Than A Fifth-Grader was on. He didn't stop asking after that, like the Buddha or something, but when the answer was yes, he went unexcitedly, and when the answer was no, he stayed, also unexcitedly, maybe even slightly glum, at first.
As days went by, they decided his asking for less and less things meant that he was turning into one of those anti-social types and repressing his natural self, so they started sending him out perforce to do things, meet people, socialize. He didn't say anything, he just went. Went quietly and came back quietly, hardly anyone noticing him, noone remembering him. He didn't know how to socialize. If someone had told him what to do exactly and when, he might have. They let him wing it, and he didn't. He just felt tired all the time, weary of everything, weary of not caring and of feeling bad that he did not care, and bad that it hurt people around him, and sad all the time. weary of everything. At school he had a friend or two. They talked of things, avoided talking about themselves much because they thought it might repulse each other. They needn't have feared it, they couldn't have talked of themselves even had they wanted to- they wouldn't have known what to say. And it wasn't as though there was much anyway. The days rolled by, the clouds rolled by, the cars rolled by, each having as little effect on his consciousness as a bad metaphor on someone taking dope. Far from mattering, he probably didn't even notice.
He applied to college because everyone went to college. He tried for the best because his parents were normal, nice, competitive people. They wanted him to do the best he could. He wanteda girlfriend. From what he'd heard of them, he thought one might understand his problem and snap him out of it. He didn't get one, maybe because of the antisocial thing, maybe because he didn't know any who'd ever noticed him, maybe because there was something else wrong. Aura or some shit like that. Anyway, he didn't get one, so he just sat around hoping that like in the movies, one might fall on his head or in front of a car nearby when he was walking on the street. None ever did. He thought that might be because the people who got together that way were completely incompatible and didn't want to meet each other in any way whatsoever. They were telling Love that they could handle their own lives, thank you, and it had to prove them wrong, two at one go. He, on the other hand, was begging Love to interfere. Or Hormones, at least. He'd admitted their power, so they had no more use for him. Ironic. He did go to college. You find all sorts of freaks at college, he'd heard. He went out with four that he'd seen giving him looks. He did things, tried things that were supposed to be fun. They weren't, but he didn't care about that either. All of his girlfriends broke up with him because they thought him cold and unfeeling, though he was ok in every other way. They just couldn't see inside his head. He studied pretty well, passed out, got a standard job. His parents were terribly proud of him. They stuck up their noses at the doom-prophets. He met another girl. This one loved him without wanting to get inside his head. He married her because she loved him, because she insisted and overcame his scruples. He tried adventure sports. Travelled. Was involved in a bad road accident which he didn't engineer, although later some people wondered. He went to work every day, came home at seven every night, she made lunch, he made dinner, they got their own breakfasts. He cleaned, she shopped. They worked it all out. One July morning, he went to work, came home, walked into the kitchen, washed his lunchbox, took out a will he'd made and had attested by two coworkers at lunch, put it on the table under a paper-weight, wrote a suicide note on a paper he left on the hall table, went into the living room and checked if there was anything good on tv. There wasn't, as usual, so he cooked dinner, then took out the sleeping pills from the bathroom cupboard, leaving two behind for his wife to take that night, went into the bedroom, and swallowed them down with the glass of water he'd kept on the bedside table.
His wife came in. She threw her keys on the table, saw the note, picked it up and read it. Then she read the will beneath it. He'd left everything to her. The note said- I'm killing myself. I'm sorry girl, but I was just so bored. With love, Your husband, John. She nodded once, then went into the next room and called the police. It all went off without incident.

"Do you know what you remind me of ?"
She shook her head slightly and continued to look at him.
He watched her a moment, watched her watch him, and continued- "When I was young, I took a walk one saturday flea-market morning. I liked getting antiques, then. Funny, isn't it ? Back then, I loved tradition and heritage and antiques, the whole caboodle as though it were my whole reason for living. Now, when i ought to be romanticizing about the olden days, I can't stand the sight of anything less than forty years younger than me... Yes, so. I was going in and out examining these antiques as though I was some kind of goddam expert, when in one of these runs-of-the-mill, I saw this pot. "
"I remind you of a pot ?", curling into a smile.
" Yes, this particular one- a cooking pot, with some kind of pattern- oddly enough, not floral- on it. and it was old. Looked very... worn. Not, you understand, broken or cracked or in bad shape, just worn. As though it had been used, for long years. And you didn't mind, because it wasn't a very beautiful pot. Not delicate or pretty or gold-leaf-expensive. Just old and kind of plain, and happy with all that. A contented pot."
He stopped, ran his fingers through his beard, raised his chin, looking at the panelling above her head now, then lowered it again slightly and went on.
"I couldn't afford it."

My home ?

It will be... on the downs. Great, green rolling downs, with the rare wild outcrop of dark rock rearing up out of it. On the top of one of those hillocks, I will build a house. A mad house. A house of stone, of smooth blue-grey stone, with soaring ceilings and vast windows. It will need central heating, but it will not have it. It will have big, warm, downy blankets instead.

The rooms will continue the madness. One will be warm. Warm, with a dark, polished wood floor, and deep red and flame-coloured besides, and a fireplace with a chimney and everything. This room will have photographs. Three at most. Three large photographs of the people I would like to remember or think of. Comfortable armchair, sofa and a rug on the floor. A mattress in the corner you can flop tiredly down on.

The upstairs room will be dark green, like thoughtful fir woods, with light only coming from the small, gable window with a deep window-seat. A high bed, with slim bedposts from which sheer white curtains billow out like clouds, and white sheets. And a room leading off this one will be the library, with floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with books, books that I like, and that like me. And some that don't like me at all.

The main room - drawing-room-with-no-guests-to-come-spoil-it, will have vast windows of huge single pieces of glass, so that you forget they are there, and it seems that you are sitting on the downs themselves, and it will face west, so that all afternoon, the warm sun will filter in lazily and make comfortable the little spots where I like to curl up.

There will be a large and fancy kitchen- fancy not in trappings, but in state-of-the-art-ness, which will enable me to eat very well by cooking very little. Otherwise, it will be a cheerful sort of room. Yellow, perhaps, though not too yellow. I am not a yellow person.

And there will be one more room, aside from bathrooms and closet and similar necessary-but-not-really-to-be-noticed places. It will be very small. A small room, packed into the space left in space by the assortment of other rooms to ensure that the whole thing stands. A little room, with a slanting ceiling, and nothing in it at all. One fairly small, plain window. Nothing else. The floor, walls, everything will be of the same blue-grey stone outside. I might put in a mat to sit on in the winters. But nothing else.

There will be no road reaching directly to it. The road stops off a hillock away, and you can take a fairly convenient path, over that hillock and down through the dale and on a bit and there you are. Meanwhile, I won't have to hear the car-sounds because of the wind that will blow wildly about my house ineffectually trying to blow the anomaly away. Sitting inside you think you can hear the sea, the elements, angry at you, furious, but they cannot get inside.

Of course, sometimes I will wish that I had made it by the sea instead, and sometimes I will wish it had been in the mountains, and sometimes I will wish it had looked like those conventionally delightful looking little houses, with the tiled roofs and honeysuckle around the door, and so on and so on. But most of the time I will delight in it. And annoying people who are my closest neighbours will come and visit, thinking me lonely and odd and in need of normalising company, and I will be glad about that too, because it will be a delight such as never was to slam the door behind them when they leave. And them thinking it was just the nasty wind.

river

I have braced myself. I have struck my root strong, an immovable rock in the current, because they told me that there would be strong tides and floodwaters trying to rush me away, and break me and upend me. They who have seen, or who make me believe they have seen the source and the shore, the icy wellspring and the vast open end, have told me. So I have stood firm in the flow. But you have climbed aboard that boat, and you have gripped the small oar tight, and you have eased her out. Pushing off from the little stone jetty, you have eased her out into the current, into the stream of life. And it may be that the torrents will come. It may be that the torrents will come and the rain will pour down and the river will rise in fury against us. And I with my roots in the heart of the earth will withstand it, as should be. And you, my friend ? You in the boat that bobs up and down, you whom the gale can cast, helpless, into the whirlpools and drown ? And in the waters you traverse, sharp rocks may rise up from out of the once-friendly water and smile their jagged, wicked grins in the horror of the night... But then my soul too may be broken. But yours in a hundred more ways as you travel the current and harness its will to carry you on. Mine, perhaps, is vulnerable only to myself, that my own regret may rot me. For that too is a greivous weakness.
But in the other times, in the calm times, perhaps your joy will be greater, to compensate for greater sorrows ? You may dip your oar into the current and go to places that I shall never see- such places !- Places beyond the reach of my mind, and you will see them and know them and delight in all that there is in the world to be known. And I, standing in my place in the river, will hear it gurgle around me, gurgle delightedly, like the laugh of a baby, and feel the filtering sunlight around me, and know all about these little bits of home. I will have to know them and love them, for it is from them that I will have to glean my wisdom. For if I cannot be great, and cannot be brave, I can at least, be wise ?
But though everything may be different, and nothing as it now is, in the times when you pass my little spot again, come and spend a little while, will you ? For at least there is this much alike in us- that we both stepped out into the current, to face life as it came winding our way. And so the coming and going and understanding of that river is in both our minds. And it always will be. And if there should be a storm, and you close by, come and lay anchor to me, and I will hold you. If ever I can, as long as I am able, I will.

It is Madras heat. Incisive, precise, ruthless like an angered accountant. Every spot, every dot of the baking earth is cut by searing yellow-white sun. Glancing off the cars and glass and buildings, burning, withering the plants brown, the people black. Black and hard and accountant-like, like itself. God Makes Man In His Own Image. Cruelly the sun-god smiles. You can see him if you are brave or foolish. If you can look up into that blinding brightness, you can see him. Small and neat and precise, neatly combed mustache, beady, narrowly focussed eyes, always calculating, always open and alert, flicking quickly over you and that around you and that in which you are standing. And he is summing his figures and he is deciding that you are not worth it, and he is flicking his attention away, because he has many appointments today and you are not included in his itinerary for today and so you are unwelcome. But he has been kind and he has seen you because it is part of the Tradition to be kind and accommodate, even if he does not like it very much, not very much at all. Then he is thinking about something else, studying something else, so that you are able to drag your eyes away from his clever, sharp eyes and look at the rest of him. He is dressed for the part, dressed in his shining golden sun-suit, because how disappointing he would be to his workers if he wore more efficient and comfortable modern clothing. An ornate gold breastplate, and a golden belt, and a great curved sword of terribly shining silver steel and gemstones, and a crisp white mundu with zari border- a kashava mundu, that most regal of clothes for the Southern man. Though of course, this is no man.

Then his shiny dark brown skin, polished and dark like rosewood. His broad, shoulders, his imposing height, and his quiet, plain, tightly disciplined face like a massive black polished rock, and as inscrutable. He looking west now, he is turning west, imperial even in the unostentatious manner of his movement. And he is changing. He is becoming what he must be to shine down as Imperial Sun God on the Western lands, and He is going to his charge, striding away there. He does not seem that big, but He is covering many hundreds of miles in his stride, He is going away, His burning, searing presence is leaving...

And the twilight comes, and the night follows it quickly, and I have not moved. The night wind has blown through the trees to ease the hot torture of my body, but I stand still and watch the place where he has vanished, for now that I have seen Him, I have changed... I have joined them now, and though I may be burned, although my skin may burn and my eyes be blinded by his Power and his Light, I am a Child of the Day now, my adoration shall never cease, my adoration will live until I cease, until I am ever Free, until I am free from the slavery of worshipping Him...

I Worship Him.