My father Subir Chaudhuri with a cat. Bombay. Circa 1968
Image & Text contributed by Chirodeep Chaudhuri, Mumbai
Most family albums are unremarkable, but, nostalgia as we know, can be a tricky customer. As a photographer, and more so as an editor-of-photography, the exercise of going through a family album can be testing, and fraught with danger – too many pictures there which “could have been better”.
When I was growing up, our home too had several photo albums – the ones with black pages and deckle-edged black and white photos affixed with photo corners. One afternoon, in Calcutta (now Kolkata), my mother and I began organising the albums sticking back some photos that had come loose. There we were pouring over pictures of what could best be called a rather haphazardly maintained record of the last two generations of my family’s middle-class existence.
And then I found this picture that made me stop.
It was a picture of my father, my baba, Subir Chaudhuri aged 26, or 27. Studying that picture carefully, the crumpled white kurta-pyjama told me that it was perhaps shot early in the morning. There is also an unmistakable hint of sleep still hanging over the young man as he sits cross-legged, looking down towards a cat which is lazily rubbing itself against the front leg of an easy-chair.
The print had yellowed and was damaged; a ball-point pen gash (most likely done by a very young me) sits agonisingly in the centre of the frame. Each time, I have looked at this picture, since making the discovery; I have always wished I was the photographer. I remember thinking, my father was not a bad looking chap. My father had begun working at Philips (formally known as Koninklijke Philips N.V. / Royal Philips) in Calcutta in 1964 in the company’s Head Office and soon, in 1966, the Head Office shifted to Bombay and as part of that transition, he too moved to Bombay (now Mumbai). There is also a pamphlet my mother, Kanika, has kept safely, where you see him featured as a model for a Philips Double Beam Oscilloscope. Baba always gets embarrassed when I probe to ask him about that incident about how he came to model for that advertisement.
But he smiled when I showed him this picture with the cat. I expected memories to flood over him but there was no more than a trickle. He remembered that the picture was shot sometime around 1969-70 by his friend, Dipankar Basu or Dipankar Kaka as we kids called him. They were all bachelors then, young Bengali boys, who had found themselves together through coincidence far away from home, during the industrial boom, sharing a small 1-BHK flat in Navjivan Society in the eastern suburb of Chembur in Bombay. Initially, my father stayed in this flat alone as the lone tenant. Some months later Dipankar kaka was looking for accommodation and so moved in with my father. Dipankar was baba’s close friend, Soumitri Sen‘s friend. They were both textile people who had moved to the city as it was then the textile hub. Many of these men who lived with Baba, were not his friends ; they were people he came in contact with in Bombay.
Baba recalls “It was a Sunday morning. That cat used to sometimes come in from the balcony of our flat whenever the door was left open,” he told me. Though not much else of that ground floor house can be seen in this picture there are details of my life in that house – our home – outside the frame of the image which return to memory each time I see this picture. It’s the house I spent the first 18 years of my life. I remember that chair vaguely. Those floor tiles, strangely a particular chipped one I remember most vividly, maybe because so much time was spent on that living room floor drawing or else playing with friends during my summer vacations. As a photographer, I am bowled over by the beauty with which the languorous quality of a holiday morning has been recorded, quite inadvertently, by the photographer. “Dipankar had only an amateur’s interest in photography”, says Soumitri Sen or Shomu Kaka, who was also part of their group.
Picture making involves decision making…many small decisions made in quick succession. And so, I have often wondered what may have been going on in Dipankar Kaka’s head when he shot this picture. Firstly, I can’t understand what an amateur would be doing fiddling with a camera at home early in the morning. It’s such an unusual moment, a candid one in the middle of formal ones like birthdays, weddings and vacation-time group photos where everyone poses awkwardly. Was he just trying to take that last picture so he could develop his film? Or had he shot any others that morning? If he had, unfortunately, none are around. What were the aesthetic choices he might have been considering while framing the shot as he was peering over the ground-glass? Did he select this particular frame to be printed or was it the printer at the studio who chose it because it had the best exposure? There is another version of this picture – a square crop in which you see my father’s slippers placed neatly in front (my father has always been quite a dapper of a man who I can’t remember ever having seen bare feet) and so, I wondered what the full negative was like. I have tried to locate that negative from Dipankar Kaka’s daughter but we have been unsuccessful. I had never met Dipwanita, but this search brought us together, first on Facebook and then at a bookshop café in Pune.
There is much I am curious to know about the making of this picture but that is now impossible. Dipankar Kaka is no more.
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