Picture perfect

 Old photos can transport you to another world and another time

 

During one of my periodical clean-outs of my study, I came upon an unmarked white envelope tucked away in one of my drawers. I opened it cursorily and was immediately transported to another world. There was the teenage me, wearing a red silk sari, posing alongside my college friends, all of us holding up trophies that we had obviously won at some tournament or festival, long since lost to memory. 

 

Those faded colour prints brought all my college-days memories vividly to life. Those days spent daydreaming at the library window, while pretending to study Chaucer and Petrarch. The afternoons we sneaked off college grounds to loiter around Park Street getting up to no good at all. And even though I could no longer put a name to all the faces in the picture, I had crystal clear recall of how excited we had been posing for this farewell photo, taken to mark the last day of college. I remembered how our spirits had been imbued with a wild optimism about the future as we set off on the wild adventure called life, the possibilities of which seemed endless.

 

See, that’s the thing about old photos. They are like windows into another world and another time, tinged not just with nostalgia but also with a soupcon of insight. 

 

Sometimes when I look at old pictures of my parents – posing self-consciously in their wedding finery; staring into the camera in some studio that no longer exists; caught off-guard laughing at some long-ago dinner party – I suddenly see them as human beings in their own right, not just as my mother and father. I wonder what was going through that 18-year-old girl’s head as she sat beside her groom, who was a perfect stranger to her. What awkward conversation did these two people, who had been thrown together for a lifetime, make with one another as they came face to face for the first time? And how did they go from being those two stony-faced strangers to that couple that laughed so uproariously, their eyes fixed on one another? What was their journey? And why didn’t I ask them about it while I still could?

 

That’s not the only regret I feel when I look at old photos, though. Rifling through photo-albums (remember those?) from my younger days, I can’t help thinking that youth truly is wasted on the young. All through my twenties and well into my thirties, I was tormented by the feeling that I was never good enough: never thin enough; never tall enough; never pretty enough. But now, when I look at photos of my younger self, I am struck by how much better I look in retrospect. Why didn’t I appreciate what I had going for me in those days, I ask myself. Why did I keep beating myself up, measuring myself against some standard against which I kept failing? Why was it so hard for me to love myself for what I was? Why didn’t I realise that I was enough just the way I was?

 

And it is that realization that actually prompts me to be kinder to my middle-aged self. When I find myself obsessing about my expanding waistline and incipient crepiness, I tell myself that I will be looking at my current photos in ten years’ time and thinking: Hey, I wasn’t that bad at all!