Jimikis

We all have old photographs which like those mountain passes are a tenuous link to a whole wellspring of nostalgia. One look at those faded, brownish images and memories (often tinged with a kind of sad happiness) come tumbling down from old racks. When we run our fingers over them a fuzzy melody could well be running in our minds.

I have one such photograph of me and my sister, in the backdrop of an unsophisticated set in the local studio. The owner of the studio, a tall man with curly hair and a paunch that merged quite neatly with the rest of the body had borne witness to so many of our family occasions.
But I had always cherished that photograph as it is one of the earliest photographs of us together. I have shown it to my friends and the girls have always pronounced, 'Oh so cute!!' Needless to say I was joyous at such reactions, even had a tinge of pride mixed up somewhere. The photo shows us facing the camera in a posture of attention. We stare with eyes wide open, I and my sister. Innocence I thought.

'Cute!! Your sister is so lovable!'
'And me..?'
'You have the same lost look man, some people don't change I guess..'
'Oh you are being jealous'
'Jealous? You think too much of yourself Mahesh...'
'Umphhh'
(I think that was Madhavi...)

In the photograph I am wearing a round-necked t-shirt and shorts, my knock-knees showing. I look at my face in the photograph and I can with the benefit of hindsight see that my face is as yet unformed. The ridges are not yet deep and the eyes not set deep in the bone structure. So they are a large pair peering sincerely at the camera-perhaps trying hard not to wink when the flash goes on and end up asleep for posterity. I see my sister is dressed in pattupaavaadai. Her face is done up with a thick eyeliner and a round evil mark on the cheek to ward off cursed stares. Her fingers are chubby and curved inside, no sharp lines of the bones show up. I in contrast am bony and tall. The differences in our height is huge, she still looks an younger sister. All this would change in later years!

I do remember the circumstances of that shoot though in the past I haven't always recollected it-my sister had to be cajoled and then forced by daddy to wear an eardrop, called 'jimiki' in tamil. I see the picture and there is no jimiki there. There is only a roundish paring of the glossy surface under one of her earlobes. When I had looked at that photo as a kid I had asked myself where the other jimiki was! But there are no jimikis here. Now I can imagine daddy on the other side, in the dark, licking his wounds after a lost battle with his daughter. I hear our family photographer assuaging, 'Oh sir, these days the kids are too fashion consciousness for ornaments of our times..don't worry she looks smart even without the jimiki!'

I had missed till now the nervousness exuding in the fingers that are entwining each other, the toes which are tightly withdrawn and are scratching the floor. The eyes large and yes, lost, exuding an expression well expressed in tamizh as 'miratchi'. The face not cute but puffed up after a prryhic victory over a stupid jimiki. If I choose to go beyond the surface and dig my memories its perhaps one of the saddest photographs! And as a reminder my sister still doesn't like those lovely eardrops we call jimikis.