
An Indian Love Story
For this ongoing project, I chose to focus on my parents, who have been married for almost five decades, as a way of exploring the landscape of a long-term relationship. I’m at a juncture in my own life where I am about to embark on a similar commitment and this has cast my parents in a new light – I see them now, not just instinctively as my maa and baba, but as individuals in a relationship, as a man and a woman with their own past andtheir own stories, yet existing as something more than their separate identities.
Intimacy in a place like India is about familiarity and anticipation, and I am struck when I look at my parents from my new perspective by the gentleness with which they work together, how their long experience of intimacy and unspoken gestures colours their daily life. I have tried to capture the rhythm of their home and their partnership, and how those forty plus years have made two people into one entity – this idea of Mr and Mrs Das.
- Baba meticulously sorts out his paper work
- At the crack of dawn, baba goes out to pluck flowers for the deities.
- My parents house
- Morning walk
- sundays in an ashram.
- local market
- The morning ritual – freshly brewed tea
- Tea, Britannia Marie biscuit and the morning newspaper
- Baba likes to keep his car sparklingly clean
- Always making sure the mechanic is doing the job right.
- picking flowers for puja
- Baba isn’t the average asian man – he always helps Maa in kitchen
- Their two dogs keep them occupied all day
- Helping Baba choose his new spectacles
- Baba still prefers typing
- My parents are hoarders – that television is atleast 25 years old.
- Maa’s only choice of cream – Pond’s cold cream
- Waiting for morning tea
- Local jeweller in Malaysia
- Window shopping in Kuala Lumpur
- Maa is taking the photos to share it with her sister.
- Baba takes down notes of the different kinds of Chinese tea in Kuala Lumpur.
- Result of the first portrait session after their wedding, from the first page of the wedding album of my parents, Samiran and Purnima.
- Family photo, 1978
- Maa, Baba and my nephew Kabir