Do my pictures look like me?

All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this -- as in other ways -- they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it: A John
Berger Quote

My mother liked to keep me in fancy dress and then often enough walk me down to Captial Studio of Chandigarh's Sector 19 on my birthday and get a photograph clicked. I was a doll born after five boisterous boys and precious. This one here has me in my jewels which my father would take out from the bank locker and I would be adorned. Hard times and the jewels vanished. I did not miss them much but my mother missed them for me.

Childhood needs a garden and there was a big garden in the house my father built in Chandigarh. The first one he had built was left behind in Lahore's Garden Town. When I went to Lahore recently, my siblings asked me to look for it. I did not because I had no memories of it born as I was eight years after the Partition of the country. The Chandigarh home belongs to someone else. We sold it. But I often go there in my dreams to be with my dear ones who have passed away to another abode.

I was six and had a tafetta frock in green but that Birthday I wept because the Beeba Bakers would not give an iced cake on credit as a bill was pending. My father and I returned sad. My mother baked a cake in a pot on the stove and decorated it with green and pink burfi. My big brother who lived separately came with his wife and daughter and gifted me a lacqured papier mache bangle box that they had bought in Kashmir. So everything was fine and I was happy. Can't you see it in my smile?