Where are the photographs Ma? A ghazal by Pragya Mittal
Photo: Pragya Mittal
‘Whatever the heart carries is buried in the jargon of technology. / A button of delete, with a noise of take-off, finishes a gallery.’
The assertion of timelines on the faces bore dread in the gallery.
Love of lovers in university envies the paintings of the gallery.
The digital drawers banish the stack of albums kept beside my bed.
The photographs of my parent’s wedding are not in my phone’s gallery.
When the sky separates a cloud from the moon, I bring the camera.
I look above with the hole in my eye to save him in the gallery.
How deserted the moon is, I realized when I forgot to close my eyes.
My finger slips on screen, right and left, fondling him in the gallery.
Do the necks still hurt while producing a photograph on a polaroid?
Neither the youth of my parent’s love resembles the same in the gallery.
The wrinkles of my baba in a photograph of 1999 is the result of 2022
which sleeps unadorned in some folder named Family in my gallery.
Whatever the heart carries is buried in the jargon of technology.
A button of delete, with a noise of take-off, finishes a gallery.
Where are the white cracks on the black and white faces?
Do the digital reminiscence of squares breath in the gallery?
The family photo with a golden border on the wall of my room
Is replaced with the wallpaper on my screen, saved in the gallery.
A decade from now, my daughter will ask me,
Where is the album of your wedding in the gallery?
I will ask my mother to bring her album for my daughter-
Because she has seen the photos in the grid of the gallery.
The photographs her mother has are the bookmarks in her books.
Generations pass and Pragya muses over the melody of her memory.
***
Pragya Mittal is a Delhi-based poet and post-graduate scholar of English literature. Her areas of interest are Kashmiri literature, translation, nineteenth-century realism and archaeology. She recently contributed a chapter on the trauma of partition in an academic book. You can find her on Instagram: @thepragyamittal.
