the diaspora paradox

By Cileme Venkateswar (she/her)

When I went to India this past summer, I arrived armed with two film cameras, three rolls of NZ-bought film, and two years worth of selfreflective, cultural identity soul searching. I was determined that, somehow, I would capture the secret in my photos. The secret, the answer, the missing piece, the special ingredient—whatever mysterious, elusive part of me that was from here, that recognised, responded, and yearned for this place. I was adamant that it would show up through the lens.

I burned through my NZ-bought rolls quickly and sought to find some more, but as it turns out, film is hard to come by in India these days. Amma (my mum) and I trekked all over the city to get our hands on some, eventually finding a couple of hole-in-the-wall camera shops in a crowded side gullys. It was this film that I used carefully, sparingly, searching desperately for something with my glasses pressed up against the viewfinder. I dragged Amma through my childhood Calcutta haunts, trying to immortalise a feeling that would slip away before I could understand what it was. Only, when we returned to New Zealand and I finally got the rolls developed, the film we’d bought turned out to be expired. Most of my photos from a once in a lifetime trip to the Sundarbans were indecipherable. I cried myself to sleep, terrified that the rolls still sitting on my dressing table waiting to get developed were just as useless. That all these places and people I had sought to preserve were gone, as though losing the photos had destroyed any chance of finding myself through them.

But, unlike the Sundarbans photos, this film wasn’t underexposed beyond the point of no return. In fact, damage or age to the film instead made it exactly what I hadn’t known I was looking for. The photos were caught between my 25-year-old eye, looking at a city woven into the fabric of who I was, and an echo of what it had once been to me, a child all those years ago. Maybe even what it had been before that.

The photos were a little faded. The underexposure obscured clarity, and dulled bright and vivid colours a little, like a fog creeping in from the edges. But it also smoothed out some of the wrinkled faces, the crumbling buildings, and the cracking paint that had reminded me of how much time had passed. I was 25 and taking photos that captured how some of these people and places had looked to me at 11, at 7. Somehow, between my eye, the viewfinder, the lens, and the film, the mystery of this place that I’d never fully understood reemerged in photo form—the family home that always felt larger than life, the train tracks that would go on forever, the people whose gorgeous clothes and weathered skin and street-side card games made me want to write endless stories about them. ✦

Alongside my own photos, my mother— a better photographer by far—was taking photos of the same places, the same people. When she got them developed, it took me a while to realise that they were from the same trip. The black and white, the grain, and Amma’s eye for shapes and shadows created a beautiful timelessness to her photographs. When I looked at them in comparison to my own, I realised that, in essence, they were the same. My collection was caught between my child and present selves. Hers seemed caught between her present self and the person she was when this city had been her home, her stomping ground. When these haunts were hers.

Putting these two sets together created a curious kind of paradox. Though taken on the same day, each echoed back to a different time, a different glimpse of the city and how the two of us fit into it. Placing them side-by-side almost felt like a double exposure, a glitch in time. It captured diaspora in a way words never could—the simultaneity of belonging and non-belonging, of memory and history, of intrinsic familiarity and isolating alienation. The diaspora paradox.

On its own, the black and white photo in this set feels timeless. Maybe it’s from sometime in the early 70s, as my mum crosses the railway tracks, running late for school.

Maybe it’s not from my mum’s life at all. With the vendor looking out at the train tracks, you can almost forget the photographer is there and that you’re watching this moment through another person and their camera.

The vendor looks at me, smiles, and waves as my finger presses the shutter button. The moment becomes flooded with colour and movement. It’s here and now, and looking right at us.

One of my favourite quotes is from an essay by Seo-Young Chu: "Looking into the past, we find history already gazing back at us."

Nothing felt more paradoxical than staring at myself in a photo that looked like it was from some timeless, decades-past point in history. I remembered being there that day, on the street. But in photo form, it was as though I’d time travelled into my mother’s youth, or swapped places with her for a second.

It was also as though Calcutta and Amma’s Canon AE-1 were snagging my attention to say, “You’re looking for that part of you? It’s right here, it’s always been there, and always will be (if you look at the right angle).”