Leela was clearing the cob webs. It was a usual Saturday afternoon, something triggered her to open the old trunk. Dust had covered the outer surface completely, it made the green color box looked gray. She swept the surface with a broom. A lizard rushed out of it, it seemed quite irritated to have been disturbed so suddenly. The scent of old books gushed out the box. Leela sneezed and tried to dust her hands and clear the dust in vain. The trunk seemed like an entry point to a different era, a time machine. Had it been a science fiction movie, it would have been depicted with flying saucers, in amateur college presentations it would have been depicted with turning of pages, in television programs with a circle closing in. The real life being much less dramatic didn't have any of those effects but none the less, the transportation to another era did happen.
A variety of things emerged from the trunk all at once all of them dying to tell their story,competing to get the attention. An old purse, a book turned yellow by age, an empty photo frame, a paper cutting of a recipe. From among them emerged a hardbound photograph it was of Leela's mother.
"We shall surely go tomorrow", said Rukmini to Leela, when the later suggested the get a photograph clicked. Photographs were quite a rare thing, unlike the today's world where anyone with a sizable salary buys a hi-end camera and calls oneself a photographer. Finding cameras and photographers was quite rare, one would find them in fairs or exhibitions. The idea of photography as an art was also not born, at the most it was looked at as a peculiar machine. Not just the photographers but also the subjects were also difficult to find. Venkamma believed she would die if a photograph is clicked, her son would try several ways to convince her to get herself clicked but she wouldn't oblige. Venkamma was eighty five years old and his son feared she would die without leaving herself being clicked, he wanted to capture her memory in a picture. But Venkamma truly believed, getting herself clicked would bring her death nearer. Her son finally had to click her without her knowledge. This was not the case with Rukmini, she didn't harbor any of these beliefs, for her it was just the matter of making the extra effort to go to the studio and be clicked for which she never found the time or interest. On the rare occasions when the photographer was there in the village, she either procrastinated or postponed, she didn't really feel motivated to be clicked. Not just the technologies, people were also quite different then, being photographed was considered to be the prerogative of the privileged or the leaders, why would normal people photograph themselves, they thought. But Rukmini was photographed once and the photograph was what her daughter was holding now. It was the corpse of Rukmini with her family in the photograph, her picture was taken but only after death in an attempt to memorialize her life.
