'Baba? why are you cleaning your camera lens?' i asked my
father, who after 9 months of staying at home and being jobless, took out his
camera that morning. He was the salaried still photographer for Bombay Dyeing, which
was shut for the last 9 months due to a strike by the mill workers, led by Mr
Datta Samant. In these 9 months, we had witnessed the increasing diameter of
the hole in our savings. To begin with, even his regular salary was far from
enough to make us a privileged family. But in these months of his unemployment,
we were now bordering poor, the monthly budget was now next to nothing. Next to
our colony, there would be these beggar children who would stand in a que
during late afternoon every day, and some rich businessmen would come in their big
cars, and give turn by turn each kid 1 piece of bun maska. My father came out
to pick his towel one afternoon from the small veranda every chawl flat had,
and saw me standing in that que alongside beggar children. He could have jumped
from the veranda to catch hold of me but thank god that he was aging. He still
ran, like a wounded tiger, and picked me up from my unwashed shirt's collar and
aerially dragged me home. What happened after that is a common story with most
children in our country.
'I have to go to work, to click pictures today, so i need to
clean the lens, it has caught fungus due to no use' replied my father. I was
elated, i ran to the kitchen, hugged my mother, telling her that 'baba will get
money today'! She nodded, her response was undoubtedly cold, but i could
imagine why. After months of no income, one day's working wage would hardly
bring us out of the gutter of debt. My father left for work and we stayed home waiting
for him till he came back. Usually he would come back in a few hours, since he
would take pictures of an event or a minister's visit to the mills, and then
his job would be done for the day. But that day we kept waiting till late
evening, now my mother was getting impatient too, someone whose patience in
these months was comparable to Sunil Gavaskar's against the mighty West Indian
fast bowlers. My mother, now that i look back, was silent throughout this
financial lull, absorbing every jolt a no income family gets. If she would have
lost it, or mismanaged in the no budget times, i don't think my father would
have picked up the camera ever again. But its unfair to just judge a homemaker
by only her resilience, control and balance. It would be criminal to say that
she had no dreams. But that's how it is, in our country, women need to stand by
their husbands, in their good and bad times, live their husbands' dreams, feed
them with tasty food when they come back home from work, make love to them in
the night and give them pleasure.
It was 9:45 in the night when my dad appeared at our main
door, which was kept open. He had red eyes. He must have cried for a long time.
He had consumed alcohol too. That added to the redness of his eyes. This was
not the first time he had come back home sloshed, but it certainly was the
first time he looked so upset after his drinks. He sat on the floor with his
head resting on the wall, and stayed like that for almost an hour. I kept
looking at him and then I eventually fell asleep on my mother's lap.
The strike continued for a total of 2 years, during which all the mill workers were jobless. My father though would go to work almost once every 2-3 days. My mother told me much later, in my
college years, that we were lucky because her husband was a still photographer.
Everytime a mill worker committed suicide during the strike times, my father
was asked to take the body's picture, after which the case was lodged. He would
earn wages out of taking pictures of the suicide victims, most of them his friends,
for the next year or so.
