Exhibition Catalog: 95 Mani Villa by Zishaan Akbar Latif

A dedication by

Zishaan Akbar Latif

Produced by

Designed by Ayesha Aggarwal Printed by spenta multimedia isbn 978-93-83999-01-9

Presents

by Zishaan Akbar Latif 20th June, 2014 - 19th July, 2014 curated by amit mehra

Essays by Ranjit Hoskote and VEEranganakumari Solanki

introduction TARQ is pleased to announce the publication of this catalogue accompanying the exhibition “95 Mani Villa” that features essays by Ranjit Hoskote and Veeranganakumari Solanki.

The exhibition is one that revolves around ideas of the family, nostalgia, time and an almost impossible search for truth. In their essays, both writers explore different facets of the installation, be it the quest to bridge generational gaps, or the wider context in which the strong-willed Parsis like Dhanji Anklesaria have made their mark on society as a whole.

However, what strikes one most about Zishaan’s photographs is that he has managed to beautifully capture the passion and the essence of a hugely influential person in his life. It is this ability to capture the fleeting moments shared with a loved one that undeniably translates into an emotionally gripping, and acutely aware series of images that leave the viewer nearly speechless.

At TARQ, we are thrilled to celebrate and engage with photography that is able to document in such vivid tones the unique, personal, relationship between grandfather and grandson.

- Hena Kapadia Gallery Director

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95 Mani Villa 95 Mani Villa is now locked and guarded by Dhanji’s family and wellwishers. His phone, his lifeline to the world outside, gathers dust.

Mani Villa is a silent witness to the life of the Anklesarias and the complex patriarch Dhanji. A man with feisty morals, fervent faith, principled pride and perplexing love for his family – that was my nana.

Dhanji Anklesaria, had lived all of his 90 years in Jhansi. Jhansi beyond the railway station, is a small sleepy town with a grand history. It was always a big shift after living in Delhi and Mumbai, a big change of space and attitude whenever I would visit my grandparents. It was laid-back.

It was unlearning the hustle.

During my frequent visits, I secretly dug for beautiful things that Mani Villa has preserved – cards, old photographs reminding us of the numerous live musicians from around the city and country at Mani Villa.

Today his harmonium is a bitter sweet reminder of the self-taught musician aficionado who had brought greats like Bismillah Khan, Parveen Sultana, Halim Jaffer, Sitara Devi, Jagjit Singh and several others to the music lovers of Jhansi!

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Mostly, I spent time with him in silence, because in this silence came his best moments when he surrendered himself to music. He would sing Indian classical ragas to himself which would resonate throughout the house.

Often I tried probing into memories that he did not want to revisit, like the unhappiness with his son and his daughter, both of whom married against his wishes. It was unacceptable and unforgivable after all he had the reputation of having high ethical standards and unfailingly took on authorities if he felt they were wrong and now his children had broken the moral code. Life did not go on and while he yearned for his children, his pride and ego refused to bend or break.

Time played the great healer and his two grand children, (my sister and me!) did melt his heart in the summer of 1987 and Mani Villa was full of life again!

Mani, my grandmother died of cancer just months before their 50th wedding anniversary in 2002 leaving Nana sad, questioning life and its ways. The loneliness and responsibility that followed, the distance between his only son Farokh and himself, his growing years took its toll on his health but not his spirit.

Being a photographer, I was observant and would find myself absorbing moments, metaphorically representative of my grand-father’s state of being at that moment in his life, alone, lonely, yet independent and stubborn.

He finally did let go after he had met his family members including his son. He peacefully drifted away into the nether world in the afternoon of 7th December 2012, in his sleep. He left behind a legacy of a simple but principled life.

The final few months of 2012 had been the most difficult for him; he longed for his family and often feared for them when they travelled.

His health deteriorated and he was under close and constant observation by family and friends.

Gallant, his constant four-legged companion over the last decade was lost and lonely. He missed his friend, his master of the shuffling walk and sonorous voice so much that just nine months later, he passed away.

His grave rests at Mani Villa peacefully.

Nana was extremely independent. When he fell sick, it was not his sickness that caused him pain but the loss of his independence, freedom of movement. Being self sufficient, he disliked asking for help even when we wanted to make him comfortable. With age we realise that an individual’s idea of freedom and independence changes. But we don’t realise that there is a common thread – the ability to make that choice on our own, knowing the consequences, as long as our decisions do not harm another individual that is real freedom. We take this for granted.

I learnt this from Nana.

The most admirable quality that I learnt from my grandfather was his faith. It was unshakable. It was powerful. Something I still struggle with.

It’s very easy to become cynical when things don’t go our way. It’s very easy to stop believing, rather than focusing and being persistent. Like they say, faith can move mountains – Dhanji Anklesaria moved many in his adventurous 90 years!

- Zishaan Akbar Latif and Janki Mehta

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autumn of the patriarch: Reflections around Zishaan Akbar Latif’s 95 Mani Villa “Here I am, an old man in a dry month, Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.”

- T S Eliot, ‘Gerontion’

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We discover the subject of Zishaan Akbar Latif’s 95 Mani Villa by indirections, as we look along the distance of darkened corridors or discover objects picked out as though by torchlight in the depths of night. In a pool of light, an old man sits in the sudreh and kusti that identify him as a Zoroastrian, looking up a book, making a telephone call, or adjusting a mosquito net that holds him as though it were a placenta. The camera continues its exploration of the high-ceilinged, cavernous home and its tangled garden, which form the patriarch’s dominion. Although Zishaan’s medium is still photography, the effect of his procedures conveys a documentary logic of track and pan, in which the camera ranges

across its chosen topography, pausing to extract key moments from the flux of time.

The chiaroscuro emphases of this suite of black-and-white photographs draw to our attention a series of objects, figures and experiences: a harmonium, redolent of the music that once wafted through this house; the garlanded portrait of a lady (we realize she was the wife of the patriarch) and an image of Zarathustra; a bathroom cabinet, swung open to reveal a collection of perfumes, aftershaves and medicines; an exquisite tea set in a crockery cabinet; a German Shepherd who stays close to his master; and, in startling close-up, his master’s weathered hands and mottled skin, the face of a man entrenched in solitude, surrounded by the residues of the nearly ninety years he has spent on the planet. The viewer cannot always discern his response to the experience of being photographed: sometimes, he appears to take pleasure in being the focus of portraiture; at other times, his hands raised in defiance of the lens, he resists the image-maker.

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It is time to name this enigmatic figure. This is Dhanji Anklesaria, retired railway superintendent, at home in his bungalow in the historic town of Jhansi, in south-western Uttar Pradesh. He is Zishaan’s grandfather. While the photograph always takes the present for its defining tense, the passage of time obliges us to correct our accounts. He was Zishaan’s grandfather. 95 Mani Villa is the testimony of a grandson in search of his grandfather, in search of the vital impulses of the older man’s life. It was begun in August 2010, when Dhanji was 89 and Zishaan 26, and continued until Dhanji passed away in December 2012 (by this time, Dhanji’s wife of nearly five decades, Mani, had already passed away, but his fiercely independent spirit would not permit him to move to Delhi or Bombay, to live with his children; his only companion was Gallant, his faithful German Shepherd, who outlived him by only nine months). Through this period, the two men spent extended periods of time together, each getting the measure of the other, each trying to understand the other’s tastes, perspectives and concerns.

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As we allow ourselves to be drawn into the magnetic field that these photographs exert, we become palpably aware of the intensity of the encounter between grandfather and grandson. 95 Mani Villa records some of the outcomes of this process, exploring an ancestral home that was also a lifeworld: an island with its own specific history, which the photographer knew from his mother, Dhanji’s daughter; and forms of navigation, which he had to discover for himself. We are drawn into the emotional complexity of a situation in which the photographer is both participant and observer, the classical dilemma of the anthropologist compounded here by the deeply personal nature of the participation and the freight of affect that this involves. The photographer has had to watch himself, move by move, in his attempt to overcome the intimate sense of exile that follows a family schism. Dwell, if you will, on the words for ‘island’ in Latin, in Italian: insula, isola. These words offer us instruction, leading us etymologically to the conditions of insularity and isolation. Zishaan’s memoir, composed in images,

offers itself as a way of addressing these conditions and the silence between generations, which attends them. ◆ Like Eliot’s “old man in a dry month” from ‘Gerontion’, the protagonist of 95 Mani Villa is an authoritarian figure who has embraced solitude as a response to the collapse of the worldview and the codes he has cherished. The same unswerving commitment to ethical conduct that won Dhanji Anklesaria a sterling professional reputation in the railways would translate, in his personal life, as a rigid insistence on preserving his Zoroastrian faith and Parsi ethnicity from outside influences. This complex figure, negotiating among his own diverse preferences, had no hesitation in inviting Muslim and Hindu exponents of Indian classical music into his home, but the thought of his children marrying outside the Parsi fold was unthinkable to him.

The prevalent historical narrative about the arrival of the Parsis in India suggests that they are descended from Zoroastrians who fled Iran after its conquest by the forces of Islam in the 7th century AD, to escape persecution and forced conversion. The record shows that Islam was, during the first hundred years of its presence in Iran, a ‘garrison religion’ (to adapt the historian [2] Karen Armstrong’s usage). Its forces maintained themselves by levying a poll tax on the local people; and since Muslims could not be taxed in this manner, conversion was, in fact, discouraged during this period. It seems more likely that the ancestors of the Parsis were Zoroastrian refugees who migrated from Iran under pressure between the 8th and the 10th centuries, as the Abbasid Caliphate began to unravel, with internecine warfare dividing the ruling family into rival camps. As various princes fought each other for the Caliphal throne, they raised the funds for their campaigns through extortion rather than taxation. The Zoroastrians, many of them merchants, farmers and artisans, were especially

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vulnerable; they were obliged to emigrate to a country where they could lead their lives in secure conditions. Gujarat, under the stable Rashtrakuta ascendancy, was the obvious choice. There had been Zoroastrian settlements on India’s western coast since the 1st century BC, when Persians had arrived as weavers and traders along the Silk Route. They had flourished under the Satavahana Empire and the Indo-Scythian satrapies, and participated in the confluence of Persian and Indian religious and cultural energies.

The newly arrived Zoroastrians from the Abbasid Caliphate (we could describe them as the ‘proto-Parsis’) found their place in a kaleidoscope of ethnicities, alongside groups that had migrated to the west coast from Kashmir, Baluchistan, Mithila, the Arab peninsula and the Red Sea region.

The proto-Parsis settled in the villages of Gujarat, soon adopting the local language, costume and customs, while retaining their religious identity. Skilled craftspeople and adroit merchants, who excelled at their work while largely remaining politically neutral,

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they prospered under a succession of regimes over a thousandyear period. The definitive moment in their social history came in the 17th century, with the advent of the British trading mission in Mughal Gujarat’s most important city, the international port of Surat. From this point on, they made rapid advances: supporting the British in various roles, they had begun, by the late 19th century, to adopt European-style education and a Westernised lifestyle.

Many Parsis accompanied the British East India Company when it shifted its commercial base from Surat to Bombay early in the 18th century. They contributed to the economy as shipbuilders, artisans, brokers, intermediaries, bankers, and later and most famously as [3] opium, silk and tea merchants in the China trade.

It was in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, too, that increasing communal self-consciousness in the face of British suzerainty, Christian proselytization and Orientalist inquiry prompted all religious groups in the Indian subcontinent – Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Parsis and Sikhs among them – to define themselves less

through the traditional realities of confluence and more through the claim to an abstract, hard-edged uniqueness. Thus the Parsis, for instance, began to underplay the millennium they had spent in India and, instead, to foreground their connection with Persia and their status as privileged immigrants, neutral to the demands of local strife but dedicated to the greater good. Even as the Parsi elite extended its support to progressive causes, public benefaction and civic institutions, it crafted an ideology of exclusivity for the community. From this perspective, Hinduism came to be regarded as a source of native inflections that would distort and diminish the purity of the Persian legacy while Islam came to be identified as the cause of the historical trauma of diaspora and displacement [4] that the Parsis had suffered.

Such, in brief, was the legacy that Dhanji Anklesaria inherited and which formed the intuitive basis of the cultural habitus within which he led his life. Imagine his shock, consequently, when his daughter, who was studying at the Sophia College, fell in love

with a young man who happened to be a Muslim of Hyderabadi heritage. The patriarch could not abide this; the couple were sought to be separated, but love prevailed. Banished from the parental presence, they were able to embark on a reconciliation only years later, when their daughter, Seher, was six and their son, Zishaan, was three. This is the conflict, and its aftermath, which is delineated in subtle tones in 95 Mani Villa. The residues of melancholia are wistfully marked out for the viewer who is less a visitor [5] and more a trespasser here. ◆ Zishaan’s photographic memoir of his grandfather, his attempt to bridge the silence between the generations and grasp the visceral reality of the older man’s experience, all the years of his life that the younger man knew only at second hand, from the hushed annals of family folklore, appeals to me in deep and powerful ways. It haunts me; it has haunted me since the day I first came

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across it, some years ago, as an entry in the photo-essay section of the annual photojournalism competition of the Media Foundation of India.

How well I know this figure and this situation, I found myself saying under my breath. My father had parted ways with his father early, and relations between them continued to be frosty for many years. My grandfather, proud heir to a long line of feudal landowners, ruled his family with an iron hand. He was also a covenanted officer, a member of that privileged class of Indians who had sworn fealty to the Crown and played a pivotal role in the functioning of the British colonial regime. As Chief Mechanical Engineer of the Madras & Southern Maratha Railway, he would often range across the peninsula from Madras to Vijaywada, Mangalore and Castle Rock on the border with Portuguese Goa, his sumptuously appointed ‘saloon’ car attached to any train on any line that he wished to inspect or monitor. Devoted to his work, he yet managed to indulge his taste for classical music, play

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a variety of instruments, collect books and antique artefacts.

My first proper meeting with my grandfather took place shortly after I had turned ten, during a summer that my mother and I spent with my grandparents, as envoys of reconciliation. Visiting him in Kundapur, where he had settled down (and which, in colonial style, he referred to as ‘Coondapore’; how well I remember that place name written on envelopes and inland letters in his spidery hand), I wandered around his bungalow, spent time in his garden, entered the sanctum where he kept a mass of junk as well as beautiful scientific instruments, some of his own devising, and his collection of books, and made friends with his Spitz, delightfully called Sonny Boy. He taught me to play chess, gave me a set of finely carved wooden French chess pieces that I treasure, and talked to me on a range of subjects from the visionary fiction of H G Wells to the practice of hydroponics. In getting to know him, I was getting to know an important part of myself, where I came from, and what ancestral impulses I carried

within me. I can well imagine that Zishaan was inspired by a similar quest for belonging, recognition, re-cognition. ◆ The grandfather and the grandson could not have made more dissimilar journeys to the point at which they met and encountered each other most substantially, during 2010-2012. Zishaan studied at St Columba’s School in New Delhi before moving to Bombay to study commerce at Sydenham College. Restless and convinced that his true interests lay, not in accountancy, but in the more mercurial if more precarious field of creative expression, he seemed ready to gravitate towards a career in advertising when his sister Seher, a casting director, suggested a move towards photography. Zishaan apprenticed himself informally to a relative, Adeel Halim, who was a photo-grapher and would soon join the Reuters agency; under Halim’s tutelage, Zishaan wandered across Bombay, honing his ability to frame reality through the eye of the

photographer. Later, he trained with the photographer Rohinton Mehta, a stern taskmaster who put him through the discipline of working with an analogue camera, introducing him to the formative value of restraint, forgotten in the epoch of undemanding digital photography. Over 2006-2008, Zishaan travelled across the country, working on the photographic records accompanying the annual reports of the House of Tata, immersing himself in the expanse of the country that, growing up in the metropolitan centres, he had known of only at a remove and through images [6] and narratives.

By contrast, Dhanji Anklesaria was firmly anchored in Jhansi, having been born and raised there, and having worked there all his life. His location in this northerly outpost came about, however, through a history of migration. His father ran away from his family in Pune as a boy, and settled down in Jhansi; he made a place for himself in the local Parsi community, and married into it. His son, Dhanji, would widen the family’s affiliations in Jhansi.

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He inherited his father’s membership in Jhansi’s Parsi community while also playing a lively role in the community associated with the railways, his professional environment, and in the town’s circle of connoisseurs of Hindustani classical music, among whom he refined his artistic interests.

India during the 1928, 1932 and 1936 Olympic Games. Dhyan Chand and Roop Singh were part of Dhanji Anklesaria’s personal mythology, his sense of place.

The railways and the armed forces were vital to Jhansi’s strategic importance. Indelibly associated with the events of the Great Revolt of 1857, Jhansi became a crucial staging point in the mobilizations of Empire; the movements of artillery and troops between Jabalpur in the Central Provinces and Agra in the United Provinces were routed through this town. Like all such strategic nodes, it attracted a heterogeneous population, who contributed to its music, its sports culture, and its institutions of education.

It was Jhansi that produced Dhyan Chand and his brother Roop Singh, who were among the titans of India’s hockey scene during the first half of the 20th century, its golden era. They were key members of the team that won the hockey gold model for

Dhanji’s rigidity as a religious subjectivity stands in high contrast to his polyglot and sophisticated taste as a votary of music.

Mani Villa was a centre for baithaks ; a self-taught musician who played the sitar, the tabla and the harmonium, Dhanji would often accompany the distinguished exponents whom he would invite to perform in Jhansi, among them the instrumental maestros Bismillah Khan and Abdul Halim Jaffer Khan, the vocalists Jagjit Singh and Parveen Sultana, and the Kathak danseuse Sitara Devi.

This account helps explode another prevalent myth about the Parsis, which emerges from the same circumstances in which India’s religious communities redefined themselves culturally and ideologically during the 19th century: that the Parsis worship at

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the altar of Western classical music and opera, and have no affinity with Hindustani classical music, perceived to be ‘native’. This myth continues to circulate, despite the distinguished contributions of such Parsi musicians as Pandit Feroze Dastur of the Kirana gharana and Pandit Jal Balaporia of the Gwalior gharana.

In this context, we would be well advised to recall the pioneering efforts of the Parsi Gayan Uttejak Mandali (The Parsi Society for the Promotion of Music), founded in Bombay in 1870 by K N Kabraji, editor of the reformist newspaper Rast Goftar.

The Mandali hosted classes in Hindustani classical music by the Khan brothers, who had established Bombay’s only indigenous gharana, the Bhendi Bazaar gharana. It also held elaborate performances including the most astonishingly diverse and transcultural musical offerings from India, West Asia, Europe and North America. As urbanist and music historian Naresh Fernandes observes of one of the Mandali’s jalsas, “The programme included a Negro Minstrelsy tune (sung in Burmese),

a khayal (accompanied by the piano) and a choral rendition of Raga Jhinjhoti (backed by the organ master of St Thomas Cathedral).” Kabraji, like Jamshedji Framji Madan, pioneer of the Parsi theatre, was a leading figure in the inventive, robustly vernacularized cosmopolitanism that circulated from Bombay across central and northern India to Calcutta during the late 19th century, including within its ambit not only Parsis but members of all [7] religious groupings.

This is why it would be a mistake to regard Dhanji Anklesaria only as a figure of Parsi orthodoxy. Alongside that legacy, within the complex sensibility of the patriarch, we must place the legacy of Kabraji’s vigorously transcultural Mandali, looking to the gharanas and gayakis of Hindustani music as well as to the musical cultures and political contexts of other continents. Dhanji’s musical affiliations offer vivid evidence of the cosmopolitanism of the small town, far away from the big cities and their natural arrogance.

Too many of us who grow up in India’s big cities come to believe

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that the metropolis is the only real locus of transformative experience, a crucible of fantasy and a guarantee of sophistication.

In actuality, the metropolis is often rivalled and outdone by the railway junction town, the cantonment, the district headquarters, the hill station, the university town, and the industrial township.

These seemingly peripheral locations are often centres in their own right; long before the advent of television, they enjoyed their own independent access to global modernity, and to discussions both national and international. In charting the cosmopolitanism of the so-called small towns of India, we must recall the milieux of the club, the reading circle, the home movie screening, the library, the dramatics society, and the radio station.

We must retrieve the lost maps that show the superseded trajectories of modernity: the railway routes of the British Raj and the princely states, which carried princes and labourers, painters and musicians, civil servants and agitators across South Asia; the dotted lines marking aerodromes that served as fuelling stops

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for transcontinental flights in the days before the jet engine was invented; the supply lines along which materiel and personnel were ferried during real wars and imagined revolts. The towns and cities that glow across these maps propose a new atlas of memory, desire, accomplishment and belonging: among them Hubli, Miraj, Mussorie, Kanpur, Guntur, Baroda, Kota, and Jhansi.

In provoking these reflections, Zishaan Akbar Latif’s work not only memorializes his grandfather but also invites us to retrieve those lost parts of our dynamic cultural selfhood towards which we have developed an amnesia, either by committing ourselves to chimerical genres of nationalism that flatten all detail and paradox, or by convincing ourselves that the colonial period was a time of loss and waste, and that all cultural experimentation is the prerogative of the postcolonial.

- Ranjit Hoskote (Bombay: June 2014)

Notes 1. T S Eliot, Selected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1965), p. 31.

5. The artist, in conversation with the author (Bombay: 22 May 2014).

2. See Karen Armstrong, Islam (New York: Modern Library), pp. 27-32.

6. The artist, in conversation with the author (Bombay: 22 May 2014).

3. This section of the present essay incorporates some material from

7. See Naresh Fernandes, City Adrift: A Short Biography of Bombay

Ranjit Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala

(New Delhi: Aleph Book Company, 2013), pp. 65-66.

(Bombay: Eminence Designs & New Delhi: National Gallery of Modern Art, 2005), pp. 14-15.

4. For a substantial account of the changing self-definition, internal debates, relationship to Empire and nationalism, and the progressive role of the Parsi community in the late colonial period, see Eckehard Kulke, The Parsees in India: A Minority as Agent of Social Change (New Delhi: Vikas, 1978).

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95 Mani villa - Generations in Time Generations are created when time presents itself with age.

Experiences are narrated, lives are relived and life cycles itself back to youth around the world through precious relationships owned by grandchildren and grandparents with each other.

For the older generation of the two, grandchildren are the vital links of happiness, who help in stretching the third generation’s life catapult to the hilt. The manner in which this catapult releases itself (when a generation passes away) is what one experiences through Zishaan Akbar Latif’s photographs at ‘95 Mani Villa’.

“I feel a strange similarity with my grandfather in my approach to life, attitude and principles, which I only realised in retrospect.

He in his last years became a really concerned and cool grandfather – revelling in successes and proudly proclaiming triumphs to all and sundry!” narrates Zishaan while fondly remembering his maternal grandfather, Dhanji Anklesaria.

Dhanji Anklesaria lived in Jhansi at ‘95 Mani Villa’ – named after his wife, and Zishaan’s late grandmother Mani. This exhibition, though a tribute to the artist’s grandfather, bears a silent thread of belonging to his grandmother. Shadows of Mani lurk all through the exhibition, from the title, into the pictures and photographs and a lineage of Dhanji’s devotional love for Mani.

Mani, was more than a wife to Dhanji – she was his life companion, home and heart and ‘a perfect foil for an iron man’; and her passing away left him frail but resolute. He continued to live alone at ’95 Mani Villa’. Having left this world when Zishaan was still a young boy, all Mani left behind for him were residues of memory through photographs, objects and stories narrated by his Nana Dhanji, who was born in Jhansi, lived in Jhansi and as per his rooted strong willed determination breathed his last in Jhansi at ninety years.

For the artist, who grew up in the fast paced bustle of India’s biggest metropolises – Bombay and Delhi – going to historic

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Jhansi to meet his grandfather was similar to a time-travel where life seemed to wait for incidents and memories to catch up with future generations. Time had a virtue of patience here and it stood still to allow narratives to rewind in the large old fashioned garden at Mani Villa. Nana Dhanji’s stories reminded Zishaan of old black and white films, with the protagonists being his grandparents and their side-kicks being their friends and dogs.

Fleeting moments of gatherings at various angles of perspective are witnessed through the artist’s photographs. The photographs are a time-warp that one encounters through a cinematic experience created by Zishaan. A video in a repetitive loop keeps alive the moments of Nana Dhanji, which cannot be frozen in a single frame. While going through the artist’s captured memories, one feels akin to an intruder not meant to be there in these privately shared family moments. Yet, one cannot help but explore a sense of recognition, special bonding and understanding through the remarkable resemblance of a relationship that almost all of us

have shared at some point of time with a grandparent. Zishaan’s works satiate the curiosity and joys of looking at family gatherings and uncensored get-togethers of a Parsi family where emotions, morals, feelings and rules are appreciated at extreme levels; and honour and pride stand the test of time.

Nana Dhanji, an avid patron of music, was also very principled in his dealings. A higher level of thought and appreciation of life seemed to have been allotted to him. Hailing from an older generation of thought and strong beliefs, he was highly respected by people in the town. Zishaan narrates that for Nana Dhanji, “there were no shades of grey – it was either black or white.” With time tested experiences, he was subtle, kind and subdued with age, but yet strong and sure. When his only precious and nurtured daughter chose to get married to a man outside the Parsi community, it came as a blow to him. To uphold his beliefs he completely disapproved of this arrangement… but what did ease this iron wall of emotion was the advent of his grandchildren. Nana Dhanji,

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like a lot of our grandfathers, was a task master for his children – his son and daughter. However, for his grandchildren all rules were (of course) quite conveniently adjusted against unspoken conspiracies about parental rules and principles. The understanding between grandfather and grandson skipped an entire parent generation sandwiched in between the two extremes of time, rules, faith and personal understanding.

When Nana Dhanji passed away, he left Zishaan alone with the jewels of hobbies, tales and memories. Gallant his faithful German -shepherd succumbed to loneliness and familiar surroundings became unfamiliar. He had stood by his master through happy moments and sad, and had put up with division of attention when family members decided to visit. He followed his master a few months after he had left. The shadows and missing details of some frames allot a space for fading memories in this rapidly paced world. There are desperate attempts to grasp and not to let

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go‌but the empty spaces will always prevail. Webs of time and dust weave these memories deeper into the residues of the past.

The photographs take us from joyous celebrations to sudden pangs of loss and emptiness. Empty cots, shaving cabinets and pictures without people weigh down emotions. Voices echo through inscribed notes accompanying the photographs, which are the only etchings to carry voices of these souls into the future.

The understanding of this relationship between grandparents and grandchildren is something that cuts across any form of difference – age, gender, nationality or language.

A melting pot of understanding, the intimacy of these captured memories, loss and a universal persona of grandparents, reveals a unique truth about relationships of generations in time, which will never wrinkle.

- Veeranganakumari Solanki

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