On a mountain road, a nomad family once passed me with their mules. The mother never slowed. She had walked that road all her life, and one more stranger at its edge was nothing to her. But one of the girls turned back. Only for a moment. A small smile over her shoulder and then the bend took her.
I don’t know her name. I never will. I still think of her.
I have never been able to explain properly why I carry a camera. People assume it is about pictures. Some days, I assume so too. The truth is quieter and a little embarrassing. I carry it the way some people carry prayer beads. Not to show anyone. Just to keep my hands and my mind in one place.
It began as a hobby, I suppose. Somewhere along the way it became something I need. On days when the world is too loud, I walk. A lane. A riverbank. A railway platform. A village path that goes nowhere in particular. I don’t always raise the camera. Often I just stand there, waiting, without knowing what for.
That waiting is the part I love most, though I could never say so at a dinner table. It is the only time my mind goes still. The noise falls away. What remains is looking. Not at things, exactly. Looking for the second when something ordinary becomes unbearably human.
A child dressed as a Goddess, forgetting it all, to eat. A man standing perfectly still while a train thunders past him. An old woman letting cigarette smoke out, slowly into the night, as if releasing something she had held for years. Nothing remarkable. That is exactly what undoes me.
I have stood in many holy places with a camera. The marble edge of a gurdwara’s pool. A ghat on the Ganga. A small dargah in the hills. I am not sure I prayed in any of them, not the way the people around me did. And yet I have never felt closer to whatever God is than in those minutes of silent watching. The light did not ask which faith the place belonged to. Neither did the faces. Somewhere along the way, I stopped asking too.
What I look for, if I am honest, is not beauty. It is truth that nobody announced. The lines around old eyes. A hand that has worked the same field for sixty years. A glance toward something outside the frame that I will never see. I can’t know those stories. I don’t try to. I only want to be near them for a moment and not get in the way.
Once, a woman rowing her boat past me saw me lift the camera. She did not turn away. She did not smile for it either. She looked straight into my lens and held my gaze. We shared no language. We would never meet again. For a breath, we were not strangers. She was trusting me with that look and I felt the weight of it. I pressed the shutter gently, the way you close a door on someone sleeping.”
Sometimes it is hard to bear. I once stood at a cremation ghat while the pyres burned and ash drifted over the river and a dog wandered among the marigolds as if nothing in the world had happened. On another day, in a smoky kitchen up in the hills, I watched a little girl eat beside a cooking fire. The same orange flame. Warming her instead of consuming someone. I didn’t know what to do with that. I still don’t. I only know I couldn’t look away from either.
I fail far more often than I succeed. The light is wrong, or I am too slow, or a face turns away, and rightly so. Not everyone wants to be seen. I have learned to lower the camera and simply nod. Many evenings I come home with nothing on the card. I used to think those days were wasted. Now I think they are the ones that keep me honest. Prayer is not measured by its answers.
And some moments I miss for a better reason. The light is so soft, or a face so lost in its own thoughts, that I forget I am holding a camera at all. I just stand there, in a kind of trance, watching. By the time I remember, it is gone. Those are the pictures I never took. Strangely, they are the ones I remember most clearly.
There is a girl at a dargah in the hills whose eyes said more than she ever did. I photographed her for years. Every time I look at those frames, they ask me something, and I have no answer.
When the moment does come, it never comes with warning. A head turns. A cloud opens. A hand settles on a shoulder. My finger moves almost before I decide. The sound is small and dry. And for a fraction of a second, time, which spares no one, agrees to wait.
The girl on the mountain road will grow old. The train will reach wherever it was going. The smoke will vanish into the dark. But inside that one frame, none of it has happened yet. Everything is still warm.
I think that is why it feels sacred to me. Not because the pictures are good. Many of them aren’t. It is because each one is my small way of saying thank you. To a stranger. To a place. To the light that fell that way, once, and never again. Every frame is a little altar I raise for a second, to someone who will never know it exists.
Many of them sit unseen in old folders. That doesn’t trouble me. It is enough that I was there, paying attention, when the world chose to show something real.
The mules went round the bend long ago. The girl is grown now, somewhere far away.
But I still have her smile.
