By: Ganesh Saili
Occasionally, my taking pictures sees me travelling to different parts of the country. One time, wandering around the Sun Temple in Konark, I saw a photographer with old film or analogue cameras dangling around his neck much in the manner of our netas wearing their marigold garlands.
How on earth did he use these? Where did he find the film? Or for that matter, where would they be processed?
I tried to strike up a conversation, but he gave me a withering glance: ‘Mobilewala photographer hai kya?’ Before I could as much as open my mouth, he took off, followed by a gaggle of tourists, much in the manner of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Intrigued, I followed discreetly.
Pic courtesy: the late Agnom Teenup
‘Smile,’ he intoned to his customers, whipping out a smartphone from his hip pocket to finish the task. Clever man! The moment of Truth dawns – all those weather-beaten cameras were just decoys, or window dressing to attract the crowds.
Mouth agape, I stood there, like a meteor-hit dinosaur.
‘These days at wedding receptions,’ a former student of mine, now a celebrated event manager, confides in me: ‘clients think it’s normal to have a battery of twenty or thirty photographers to cover a single wedding.’
‘It looks good!’ they tell her.
It was not always so. I remember Hari Singh Ghansola, our station’s celebrated photographer, who etched his way into history by having one too many at Dipendra Bhandari’s cocktails. Then he set out with the wedding party. He was all over the place: scampering up the hillside; hanging from the low-slung branches, or lying flat on the ground to get a unique angle of the procession as it wound its way across the Mall Road, past Library before descending into Happy Valley.
‘How were the pictures?’ I later asked a fellow guest.
‘Pictures? What pictures? He forgot to load the film.’
A similar tale comes from the Parsonage – home to the celebrated actor Victor Banerjee. And lest this tale get too long in the telling, suffice it to say: boy meets girl, they fall in love, but parents disapprove. And what-do-we-have? It’s the perfect recipe for a runaway wedding as Victor threaded the film into the sprocket. He looked at his watch. Yes! There was enough time to expose thirty-six pictures.
‘Ganesh! Please could you drop this spool off at Thukral’s Studio?’ he asked me. I did so dutifully and on my way home I picked up the results. Or so I thought. ‘Where are the prints?’ I asked with trepidation, afraid Victor would be cross with me. And you’re right, he was, but only with himself – he had forgotten to double-check if the film had loaded properly. Result: no pictures! Only blank negatives.
‘What do we do now?’ he asks me.
‘What do you mean we?’ I said, passing him a felt-tipped pen. “Write something nice on the negatives.”
It must be said, it looked cute, a yard of celluloid stretched across the bridal pillows with the legend: ‘Happy Wedding pictures. 1992!’
A dear friend, Abu, who lived on the hillside in the 1970s – a scion of a family from the north – recalls the photographer at his wedding. He had decided to buck the trend and get married and settle down, despite the fierce opposition of his all-powerful matriarch. She had issued instructions to all and sundry – instructions that no one dared ignore in the days of the infamous Emergency – unequivocally forbidding such a union.
‘What a simpleton he was!’ chuckles Abu remembering the photographer as he looks back through the veil of the years. ‘Didn’t have a clue of what he was getting into.’ When it finally dawned on him that the pictures he was taking could trigger a political storm in Uttar Pradesh, he started to sob and wail.
‘How were the pictures?’ I ask.
‘Oh! They were great! Pictures of the floor, the ceiling, the furniture and the windows too… everything else but the two of us,’ he chuckles forty years later, patting one of his grandchildren on the head.
Now who said that truth is stranger than fiction?
Mussoorie-born Ganesh Saili was home-grown in the hills and belongs to those select few whose words are illustrated by their pictures. Author of two dozen books; some translated into twenty languages, his work has found recognition worldwide.
