Photograph

There is a scene in a Hindi movie that I remember. The suicidal hero talks about his previous love to a random stranger he met on a train. She convinces him that he would feel better if he took a photograph of his former love and burned it prior to flushing it down the toilet. After draining the remnants of the photograph, said hero flashes a brilliant smile and proclaims to the woman how fantastic that crazy act made him feel. Watching that scene in that little house in Mysore, I never thought that years later I would try to enact something equally ridiculous in real life and the tragic unfunny outcomes it had.

Because when you are with someone for the better part of a digital decade, you don’t just have a few photographs conveniently placed with matchsticks adjacent for that burning ritual. You have albums and photos strewn over a digital wasteland of Google albums, hard drives, pen drives, phones and emails. And trust me, deleting a picture from a computer, is not as satisfying as burning one up.

My digital clean-up was such an extensive activity. It started off with me carefully selecting pictures of her and us from albums and patiently deleting them to avoid loss of photos of friends. However this sieve-through process had the additional disadvantage of forcing me to relive those long-gone happy memories and watch the smiles, hugs, laughter and happiness that seemingly dissipated from my life.

10 minutes of painstaking and pain taking effort later, I told myself- screw it and then began the bulk deleting process. Whole albums, folders, digital albums found themselves being gobbled up by my digital recycle bin as I went on a virtual spring cleaning session. Months later after all was said and done and the court finally snapped all residual ties, I still kept finding images in places I least expected. In my office laptop, in my computer at my home, synchronized Picasa albums in phones. I kept deleting them, without a second thought as I feared the consequences of ripping through the scabs of an ugly but healing wound.

Then in the month of December, during a visit home, I came across a photo album in my cupboard.Blue with an oval cut-out in front, to show a smiling happy and thinner me, the album lay in the shelf. I opened the album to realize that this was the album of my 18th birthday. Beside me was the woman who I adored and lovingly called my sister and in front of me was the woman, who I didn't adore yet and I had no idea would become my wife. Surrounding me, were friends - new ones and old who joined in the celebration and force fed me buttery cake.

In each photo were friends and loved ones, most of whom are not in touch with me any more. And in the midst of it all was me enjoying what was a delightful birthday. I sat gazing at the smiling visages, reliving that heavenly day aptly spent in a restaurant named Ambrosia. It was a beautiful birthday and the 10 birthdays that have spanned the decade in between had not yielded one with such beautiful memories. However when I was done reminiscing over them, I couldn't make myself tear and throw it all away.

Because It is really easy to destroy and rip things apart and run away from things that hurt and it’s really hard to find something you really care about to hold on to. Through my overzealous action of erasing her from my life, I had wiped out the better parts of a decade of my life. Gone with all the evidence of her, was unfortunately the existence of me. Pictures of friends, loved ones and pets, all now just reference points in the unreliable and ever fading repositories of my brain.

I looked back at the last image of me in that album. It had me posing, with a ridiculous cone shaped hat outside the restaurant surrounded by friends and smiling with not a single care in the world. By my side, she stood wiping her eye unaware that the photograph was being clicked by the woman who few years later was forced to sever all ties with me. I didn't know then that the woman by my side would marry me years later. I didn't know then that that beautiful wedding would end as horribly as it did. All I know now is that the smiling chap in the photo was happy and blissfully unaware of all the machinations that were sent in motion. It was his innocence that I wanted to hold on to, not having any left in my life. So I dusted that blue album and returned it to its rightful place in my shelf.