Memories

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The Instagram Project: Lens and Piston

Lens And Piston( @lensandpiston ) One of the early memories Fayaz recalls from his childhood is of him crawling under a Maruti Gypsy. He viewed the underbody of the Gypsy with as much fascination as someone seeing the stars in Milky Way for the first time. “It runs in the family,” Fayaz said “the love for automobiles.” With time the toddler’s fascination grew. He identified cars by its bumpers before he could count numbers. Fast forward a few years, the teenage Fayaz pined after bikes his father couldn’t afford. Undeterred, he saved up for his first bike, doing odd jobs. He bought his first bike, a Yamaha YBX 125 in his second year of Engineering. The depth of love and pride he felt for his hard-earned bike knew no bounds. If he could cuddle it in his sleep, he would have. But in his final year of college, the trend of owning a Royal Enfield Classic gripped Fayaz, just like everyone else. Everywhere he turned the exhaustive sound of the Bullet bikes followed him like a gh...
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Going home

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There was a groove towards the right side of the pathway, that led to my home, and I remembered that my aunt's driver would manoeuvre their over-sized white Ambassador car through it. All the backseat passengers tumbled a little to the right side as the car slumped past the groove and rounded the long cow-shed. My aunt later sold the ambassador car. She told me it was as old as I was. Today it was just me and my mother and we came in an Autorickshaw. The rickshaw driver wouldn't know how to steer through the groove, so we stopped in front of the gate and walked the rest of the way, keeping to the left. Little white spiked flowers of the Elengi tree, that stood guard at the end of the pathway, had fallen down in millions all around its base. The sharp smell of it always reminded me of coming home. Some of the clay tiled lining on the roof were broken and the vast majority of it was covered in moss. Kamalakshi opened the double doors to my mother's ancestral home, its hin...
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The kites of Jamia Milia

Every evening  I made my way past the Jamia Milia Islamia University in the magenta line metro, towards my hostel in Jasola Vihar. Once the beautiful white domes and minarets of the university are passed the metro line divides the underlying community into two sides. On my left side there are shabby apartments with daunting black water tanks on their roofs, with many other wider assortments of building stacked too close together leaving no space to breathe, each building in various states of deterioration; paints peeling down or coated with the undulating Delhi pollution, a visual testament of the clear disregard for aesthetics of the Delhites. On the right side lives the upper class with their state of art air conditioners sputtering to cleanse out the air, sunroofs marred by exotic green plants, well-lit apartments with their beige coloured paints intact. The first time, I sat facing the right side window, I whizzed past the mostly deserted balconies of plush apartments occa...
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