Name Place Time or Location

Name - Place - Time Or Location

"The moment an
image becomes a camera, representation loses its reality and becomes
the camera," Pylee's imagination of camera Lucida and its translation.


The word (gramam) would be familiar to anybody
living in India, and so familiar that it would hardly be strange to
those who live in it as villagers. Cook, as a word would be common to
the sea, sailing in words where son and sun leave their difference to
the experience of the year or ear. To translate the word "cook", in its
literal sense of being a dwarf village in Malayalam.


To connect again as (cook-gramam) would be to curry
it in a humour of being imbued to tasty figures savoring speech.


A favorite place in cook-gramam is the "idlers
junction", an epithet that would describe the variety of happenings
there. Such an utterance would however irritate the dwellers and they
might retaliate back with an equal pose that would resemble the golden
harvest as "talons of the eagle" or "claws of death".


The roads that intersect "idlers" are quadrangular
in nature and they end there, like the relic that prophesies: all Rome
is roads and leading! An occasional idler might be seen with the
countenance of letting off a tap. The benches that lie in the corners
are active throughout the day with as the leading events of the
Malayala Manorama, the leading daily proliferates into absorbing minds,
enjoying the pure delicacy of conversion.

It's a
war of worlds and a war of words. An occasional voice can be heard
amidst decreeing: "what's use of boycotting bottles of the coke clan?"
It's a shame that the vehicles of law are themselves victims of the act
of immoral traffic. Other matters of concern are stories relating to
the nature of unfaithful wife, the eloped lovers of different castes,
the fall in the price of rubber as a result of freeing the market by
removing tariffs that restrict import.
An older person there seems to be dreaming of those benches as though
they are a "tryst with destiny", remembering the face a of a gone
generation, of a particular face that recited those lines of Frost "the
woods are lovely dark and deep. I have many miles to go before I
sleep". But he is still remembered affectionately as names of famous
roads and buildings.

Another is young and seeing
her as a dream in which Mrs Dalloway is walking in water, alive to a
dream of never coming back and waking.
To throw a casual glance across is to see the only studio called "Kala"
which means art. It's a two in one kind where the front portion is the
office and the rear the home. The photographer of (cook-gramam) is most
wanted person in the village; his presence is sacramental as an
uninvited ghost who nevertheless can't be left out. He officiates at
funerals, at weddings even at christenings. The only time he was
unwilling to take a photo was during the death of his own father.
Any one who knows the photographer in the manner of being more than a
client would perhaps be initiated into the secret world of art where he
has conferred himself as the artist. He was not particularly keen to
read Pylee's translation of "Camera Lucida". But, he was in such an
urge to put the frame of the translators imagined quote in the
beginning of "Camera Lucida": "the moment an image becomes the camera,
representation loses its sense of reality and becomes the
camera."
Till now he has not deciphered the meaning of those lines, though he
imagines them to be a thought that lies in the realm of pure art. He
does regret the quality of photographs, of the endless number of stills
having no quality of living memory, other than that of necessity.
Perhaps he would rummage underneath and bring out those collections
that would be private and marked strictly confidential.
They are innumerable in number, special collection of birds and beasts
caught unaware in their rite of ecstasy. Even the wasp's nest as it got
embedded in a cane tray is caught into eternal memory, long after the
comb like clay shredded itself into nothingness.


The village police station situated at a distance,
where a good 15 minutes walk from the idler's junction, would swim the
skin into a profusion of tropical sweat. It's not remarkable to see the
small police station surrounded with a legion of four-wheelers. They
are belly brim with sand and are lying as confiscated property for
illegal activity.
The river running on the side of the village is a rich source of this
raw material. Over the years, this unceasing pillage has left the river
barren, leading to the lowering of the riverbed. If the monsoons are
late, water scarcity is luminous as a dark cloud that refuses to
rain.
Summers there's water as much as a trickle. Very rarely does an
unnatural death like homicide occur. If it occurs, any one in the
village could be pressed into service.
On a walk along the idler's junction, I was accosted by the voice of
the photographer in great anticipation. The whole frame was a cauldron
stirred by the ingredients of some magic potion. "Look! There's
something you should see". The art in him gripped into my shoulders and
I was forced to yield to the strength of his built up biceps.
Even before I could settle down in the studio, he came forward with a
few stills. The eyes are adjusting themselves to the images trying to
arrest and transform meaning. Humour, aversion, revulsion, all
convoluted into the organs of sensation.

The body
is old having spent a number of days hidden to life and out of life.
Flesh is gargantuan and mutilated into an identity of having never come
out of a breathing orifice. Deep incisions in the body unveil a
pounding; the uneven layers are precise in their orientation of being
trammelled with the bluntness that metal could afford.
Partially burnt flesh stares at your motion of seeing a gismo, having a
voice that's evolved through language of silence. Little dwarfs
crawling in and out of the earth have found their way in; they are
swarming in thousands hardly differentiating their negligence.


am too frightened to look at myself; I try to look
at the photographer who appears to be smiling, a rather weird sort of
smile, trying to shift his attention to me and to the photographs as an
exorcist.
All the limbs pale, and sweat drops molecule down as granules of a
silent requiem. The image bequeaths the silence of a phantom, howling
the opera of an utter horror - the truth! The person is reduced to a
compact amorphous abstraction?
Name
Place
Time
Location.