{"id":2142,"date":"2018-12-28T20:42:46","date_gmt":"2018-12-28T15:12:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/museumofmaterialmemory.com\/?p=2142"},"modified":"2018-12-28T20:44:32","modified_gmt":"2018-12-28T15:14:32","slug":"a-whiff-of-ittar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/museumofmaterialmemory.com\/a-whiff-of-ittar\/","title":{"rendered":"A whiff of ittar"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

TEXT BY SONA SINGH
PHOTOGRAPHS BY AANCHAL MALHOTRA
Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nonly memory I have of mama<\/em>, my\ngrandmother, Chandrika Devi, is an old photograph of hers, taken at the time\nshe was dying. In 1968, no one in the immediate family owned a camera and\nsomebody was sent over to summon a photographer from the nearby town, to take a\npicture of the dying woman, as was the custom in those times. This only picture\nof hers, with paan<\/em>-stained mouth, is\nsimilar to another photograph of my great-grandfather, also during his last\nhours, which indicates two things: that people in my family loved paan<\/em>, and that families which could not\nafford a camera and wanted to keep something of their loved one as a keepsake,\nresorted to this practice of having photos taken of the dying during their last\nmoments. For those were times when owning a camera was a luxury and people went\nto studios to get photographs clicked. Such morbid photos of those long gone,\nwith eyes half closed, near death are still found hanging on the walls of homes\nor in old photo albums. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Later,\nwhen my uncle, Panna Lal, got a job in the allied services, he bought a camera\nafter saving up for months and with it, he clicked a lot of photos of my\ngrandfather. It is known that my uncle loved photography but his wife, my aunt Manju,\nsays that when my grandmother died, they could not reach the village in time to\nsee the last rites being performed, and hence the only living memory of hers\nbecame that last dying photograph. That Panna Lal became such an avid\nphotographer later, could have been a direct result of the fact that he could not\nsee his mother towards the end, and hence vowed to click as many photos of his father\nto keep, if only, for posterity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While growing up, I would often look at this grainy, old black and white photograph of my mama, Chandrika Devi, that hung somewhere on the walls of my ancestral house in Pagra, a village in North Bihar, and would wonder what she had been like. She died at the age of 42, a year after the marriage of her eldest son, Panna Lal to Manju. The marriage of her only daughter, Neelam, a few years earlier, had not yet led to any children and hence, she died without seeing any grandchildren at all. My father, Sunil, the youngest of her three children, was merely 14 years old at the time of her death, and hence, perhaps most affected by her early demise.

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