Dialectic photography

Opposites? I decided I would try the dialectic instead. A thesis and its antithesis, brought together in a single photo: the synthesis. I started by focusing on the water which was dripping from the shade above the balcony. It was a couple of tries before I was completely satisfied with the focus. Inside the drops I saw a blur of light: the cloud-covered sky shining through the water! That was sharp focus and blur together in that droplet, just as it starts to break up.

A potted canna in the rain in one corner of the balcony gave me a synthesis between front and back, the two sides of leaves visible simultaneously. Also, sunlight through one leaf, the rain slicking the other. More than one pair of opposites in this photo. After days of limiting myself to using a cell phone, I was happy to sit on the balcony of the hotel with a proper camera, photographing nature in the rain. It is so hard to carry a normal camera outdoor in the monsoon.

A copperpod flower felled by rain on leaves below was a strange mixture of the barren and the fecund. The rain brings new growth, but it can destroy a flower before it fruits. Farmers in this region have had a little too much of this destruction in the last few years: crops destroyed by unseasonal rain, or by rain that refuses to come when it is expected. This year has been cruel. Half of the country flooded, the other half suffering from extreme dryness. Those in the know say they think the price of food could increase sharply during the coming months.

The reflections on these leaves was fascinating. I saw them moving as the trees above them shed large drops of water. The usual trick of photography stops time and motion. Here it has done just that, as it caught the parabolas of the splash arcing away from the point of impact, while the bulk of the water drop flows down the innermost part of the leaf. A modern mobile phone camera fails miserably in catching the fleeting, something that my actual camera does as a matter of course. But then isn’t this what you set out to do when you take up photography? Isn’t the act of taking up a camera a declaration that you will be contrary and try to freeze the flow of time?

The six seasons: 2

Summer is the time of mangoes. In the part of the country where I grew up, the decisive beginning of grishma (summer) would be the brief week or two when the house would fill up with seemingly unending baskets of lychee. But they would be over before I could ever anticipate it, and suddenly one day the house would have the first mangoes of the summer. There are almost no lychees in Mumbai, and the summer starts with the delightful apoos (alphonso). The other delightful aspect of this, the most terrible of seasons, are the flowering trees. My favourite is the red of the silk cotton flower (Bombax ceiba), named after the silky feathers which waft through the burning air in May, carrying seeds from the burst fruits. On the other side of the road, peeking out from behind a building I can spot another favourite, the red flowers of the gul mohar (Delonix regia, the flame of the forest). The easiest to photograph from my window are the copperpods (Peltophorum pterocarpum, yellow flame) which line the roads around us. Nearby, and invisible to me now, is a jacaranda tree which must be in flower. None of these popular road-liners are native to Mumbai. The first rains of the next season will knock all these flowers off the trees, and for a few days the roads will be carpeted with vivid patches of colour decaying into mush.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. For now I can see the morning’s light moving along my kitchen wall. A couple of weeks ago the sun, as it rose, would burn me as I made my morning’s tea. Now that spot in my kitchen is safe, and the sun’s first light falls on the southern wall. The cool land breeze of the morning stops earlier now, and the equally cool sea breeze also sets in earlier. The sound of the birds has changed; perhaps they have moved to different parts of the garden, and someone else in getting the early morning concert that I would a few weeks back. In Mumbai you feel the summer more by an increase in the humidity as the sun warms up the ocean. I can feel it already.