a photograph, a note, a camera, a street

My phone
The camera, the front view camera is back
It’s almost as if I have eyesight back again
After almost three full months, I got the callow front camera lens of my badgered iphone 5s repaired
On my way to the repair centre in Shankar Market I had multiple thoughts about not getting it done
I even thought of investing in another phone instead
But a gentle reminder of the situation with my funds sent me back to the thought of getting it repaired
As the lensman sat in the cocoon of his space mending my phone camera and another customer’s battery
Right in the middle of the office space was an aquarium
(a term I don’t even remember when I learnt or heard of first)
Two beatific, almost perfect yellow fishes swam around the wallopy waters
Flip-flop, blob-blob
Bubbles of water surfacing up once in a while
I looked at them, my attention acutely tuned just to that vision
Nothing spectacular,
Just something I don’t get to see everyday
I saw, enveloped in an ensconced sense of worry-lessness
Afterward when I got my phone, the first way to check the precision of the lens was to take a photo of text
I took the book am currently reading out of my bag and opened a page at random, fully realizing that there is nothing called “random”
I took a photo of the page and zoomed in a bit to see the clarity,
It was back!
My other set of eyes, my vision of this world is back
Overjoyed I got out of the shop and tried to make a photo of a bookshop across the road
I came to work, completely forgetting about the camera, about the photos of the text from my current read and the bookshop
During lunch I quietly slipped into one corner and tried making photos of my polybag covered dabba
And slowly moved the phone to right under my nose and took a photo of the muffler settled quaintly right over my crotch, against the dark green silhouette of my sweater
The checkered lines of the muffler,
The forest green of the pullover
The ashen gray of my pants
All of them, clear
So clear, glistening even, if I may call it that
The babe, the photograph I took after three months on my phone of my clothes looked more real, even surreal, than the reality, the present time in which I stood there wearing those exact clothes
I felt like crossing the lens and reaching out to what lies beyond it and touching the pixels that made the photograph…
I slide left and the photo of an exposed-brick wall, with paan-stained leaves resting against it by the roadside shows up
I had taken the photo triumphantly,
As an eponymous aglet of my small joy of having been able to afford the repair of my phone camera
The photo was a bit blurry, but burly all the same
I could smell stale pee and spat out gutkha from the photograph
The photograph which had by then transcended into a memento of the minutes when I walked on KG Marg, towards my office
Next came the photo of the bookshop,
Two men sat there—one reading a newspaper, and the second soaking in the sun
The photograph showed the bookshop resting majestically in the shadow of the canopy
The visage from the photograph said that bookshop could easily belong to a hill-station
Dazed, confused
I sat there, staring at the photo over and over again
Thinking of the all hillstaions I’ve traveled to and back
None as clear as this one
Was this a photograph, an ennui, a déjà vu or just another truncated trick of the mind?
Or was it only a trick of the light, the misty, soggy, smog-laden light falling slantily against the verandah space outside the bookshop…
A memory well-made, a façade well-captured, a camera well-ruptured and restored back to normalcy—that to me it was.