Baa kept a tin biscuit box under her bed. It had once held Parle-G
biscuits — the kind with the little girl on the yellow wrapper — but
now it held photographs. Dozens of them, some black-and-white with
scalloped edges, some faded color prints from the 1990s, a few glossy
ones from more recent years.
She pulled the box out one afternoon when Nandu was sitting on the
floor of her room, pretending to read a comic book but really just
staring at the wall.
"Come here," she said. "I want to show you something."
She spread the photographs across the bedsheet. Nandu looked down
and saw a baby — plump, bald, with enormous dark eyes and a mouth
shaped like a tiny O.
"Who is that?"
"Your Thatha. Three months old."
Nandu stared. The baby looked nothing like Thatha. Nothing. Thatha
had been tall, with silver hair combed back in waves and a nose like
a ridge of the Vindhyas. This was just a blob with eyes.
Baa placed another photo beside it. A boy of about fourteen, skinny,
wearing a white half-shirt, squinting into the sun outside a school
building. Then a young man in his twenties, handsome, standing next
to a motorcycle with his arm around a friend, grinning.
Then a man in his forties, thicker now, with the first streaks of
grey, holding a small boy on his shoulders — Nandu's father. Then
an old man with deep lines around his eyes, sitting in the chair by
the neem-tree window, reading his newspaper.
"Which one is the real him?" Baa asked.
Nandu's hand hovered over the photos. "All of them?"
"All of them," Baa agreed. "And none of them. The baby's body became
the boy's body. The boy's body became the young man's. The young
man's body became the old man's. He changed completely — every cell,
every shape — and yet something stayed the same through every single
photo. The thing that looked out through those eyes. The thing that
laughed. The thing that loved you."
She tapped the last photo — old Thatha, reading his paper.
"This body stopped. But did the thing inside it stop? If it survived
the change from baby to boy, from boy to man, from man to old man —
why would it not survive one more change?"
Nandu looked at the row of photographs for a long time. The baby,
the boy, the young man, the father, the grandfather. Five bodies.
One presence. And then — maybe — a sixth, somewhere he could not
see yet.
