The Stranger in the Photos is Me

Every family has that one person who will make you awkwardly pose in front of the statue, force you to smile until your face hurts, and take your picture, but not without the gaze of tourists penetrating through you. But that is the end of the embarrassment. That person will then edit, print, and make large and laborious albums of those pictures, which makes the awkwardness worth it.

Years later, when you’re flipping through the album at night, you’ll say, “Oh my god, I remember that!” Remembering turns into rehappening: you feel grateful that you have the chance to unpack those memories and squirm at those stories.

Research says you do not remember your life before the age of four. However, thanks to my mother, the photographer of our family, I have an album of 100 pages with 600 photographs to refer to. These pictures refresh my memory, making the first quadrennial of my life vivid. Now, I know my favorite toys, I know what I ate, who my friends were, and how I dressed for school. I know I loved eating mini goldfish and had a wacky hair day at Goddard School. I know everything.

After a phase from 3rd to 9th grade, where I grew extremely rebellious against my mother’s obsession with taking pictures, I realized it was contagious. My camera roll now has 3000 pictures of not myself, but people and places around me, and I think it is fair to mention this phone is just five months old. But these pictures aren’t random bursts—they are crafted, carefully edited, and positioned according to the Rule of Thirds. It was last summer that I finally took full custody of my mother’s Olympus camera (who buys an Olympus when you have a Canon? Anyway, that’s beside the point).

As I better understood the art of photography and slowly became a menace to my sister–my dedicated model paid with the promise of ‘no tattling to Mumma’–I began recreating pictures. There is a photograph of me, clutching my sister when I am five and she is two in front of our toy kitchen. I am wearing a floral shirt and my sister, a pink one with no pants (literally, no pants). You can see the fluorescent yellow knobs of our play kitchen, which, at the time, was taller than both of us. But that isn’t the end; the picture lives on. We lived in the same house for 13 years, so I recreated that picture two more times, once when we were ten and seven, and I didn’t know we were going to leave our home by the time we took the next picture, when we were sixteen and thirteen. I’m not sure why I kept recreating that picture; maybe it was to track my sister’s height.

But the hereditary obsession is not just with taking pictures and showing them off. One of my biggest fears is that the people I love will change; change in a way that makes a surge of horror run through my veins. But that’s the beauty of pictures. Even though people in it change, the picture never does. They are like a movie flashed on a wall, hanging in space with no connection to time. It is impossible to step out of them or get back in.

Another reason I take so many pictures is so that when I’m old and alone, in my cozy lit- tle apartment by the sea, I can look back to the time when I went on a trail with my best friend. There is one picture that I cannot stop going back to. It has been plastered on every single social media profile; it has been cropped, rotated, recolored, brightened, and saturated. Ironically, I didn’t pose for this picture. No one asked me to smile for it. It just happened. Perhaps the reason I cannot stop admiring the picture is that it is so utterly representative of me. This is the me-est me you can ever capture. The half-clipped hair with one strand falling out, the black glasses, the Speedo flip flops, the fluorescent synthetic shorts (an emphasis on the thread dropping out and publicly visible), all in contrast with the short red t-shirt. And I am leaning against the wall on one leg. But most importantly, the book. I was reading Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. Disclaimer: I boast about being a reader but didn’t read this book until this summer, which I believe is a subject of shame. One of the most intriguing parts of this photograph is how the book is floating (credit to my friend for noticing this). But anyway, there I am, always ready with a book in case there is an emergency. That emergency usually refers to waiting. Waiting corrodes my brain. It seeps into my body and stays.

It was a mundane day: July 28th, 10:48 AM. My mother dragged me and my sister to the DMV to get her learner’s license. Not even a driver’s license. Learner’s.

When I examined that photograph to find the “hidden meaning,” it reminded me of the Depression’s most famous picture, “The Migrant Mother,” one which I had analyzed in an 8th grade history class. What that represents is nowhere close to my picture but lies on similar trajectories. It represents the effect of heavy change, something that is not only hard to embrace but also grueling to come to terms with. To understand the lens through which I see my picture, you have to know my story. That’s the downside of photographs that aren’t yours: you don’t know the story behind them.

I have lived in India nearly my whole life until recently, when my family relocated. When I first moved here,, I did not know anyone. I spent most of my time engrossed in books and assembling Ikea furniture. As I assimilated into the world around me, I found myself in a place where I felt so utterly different. I felt lost but restrained from losing myself. To date, even though I made a lot of friends, I feel different. I often think what no one else is thinking. I stand alone at times, and to be honest, I prefer that. There is a void within me that cannot be understood by anyone. I want to give up that void. I know I can, but I won’t. Because the day I do, I will lose myself, and never meet the old lady by the sea, reminiscing the time she went on a trail with her best friend.

To stand by myself, even when the world around me turns hazy with change, taught me the importance of courage. Courage isn’t always a matter of yes or no. It is the ability to stand rooted in the thought of what tomorrow holds.