How I learned photography
By Goirick Brahmachari
(1)
It was not the light
or the absence of it.
Not even the white that
washed our faces on that cold
December marble-stoned morning.
It was a burqa.
A woman in black,
hair wrapped in a hijab
that made us realise that black is as pure
as white.
(2)
A yellow sun melts in through the jafri
into a dark room at Tughlakabad,
flitters over a lonesome child’s grave
streaming yellow rays of a cold sun
in slow motion, over the dead and onto the stones.
And everything, everything else turns black.
(3)
When the ghost caught me at Nizamuddin,
there was no looking back. I escaped time
to find myself sitting over the ruins of an untraceable monument.
The guard says he sleeps without fear every night.
I look slowly through the pillars, then through the window
allowing more light, as if my eyes were a camera.
And the dawn wears a dusk.
And the shadows disappear.
A few dead nights in peer’s eyes.
Now I float like white smoke
from a burning incense stick
in black stone walls of Firoz Shah Kotla.
[Pic-credit: Goirick Brahmachari. The picture will be used as a poster for his upcoming documentary, Dilli Dur Ast, which is at a post-production stage. The docu would be released in 2016.]
Author:
Goirick Brahmachari is a writer based in New Delhi, India. He hails from Silchar, Assam. His first volume of poetry, For the Love of Pork, is forthcoming from Les Editions du Zaporogue, Denmark.
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