There is that photograph. An old one there. An old new one. Black and white to speak of old times. Old times in new. Times oldened by death and all. Oldened by the old and new.
I see my mother in it. She was a baby back then: a couple of years old perhaps. She is sitting pretty on the floor with a lot of panache I think; gazing straight at the camera with a gleam of wonder in her eyes. Her eyes are resolute and full of time-- time unspent, time yet to live-- time yet to die. At the back, an old poster: the shining face of the Murphy baby with the radio obscured by my mother's posture and the sad stains of time on the photograph.
I can see a couple of legs behind the propped up poster which constitutes the scenography of this tiny little photographic drama. Someone must have held it up from the back. A patch of darkening corridor can be seen between the two legs. I wonder how my mother's expression would have altered, had she been looking at the Murphy baby's face. What would attract her more? The eye of the camera or the Murphy baby's eyes? Both alive and dead, human and non-human at the same time. Will time tell? We think it does, but it only passes; passes untelling.
I have been told that it was grandpa holding up the Murphy baby poster in the photograph. And the photograph was taken by his younger brother. The snap snapped, unsnapped and resnapped in time. The snap snapping the cord. There is this story running in the family that after this photo, my mother had got an offer to be the baby face for the Murphy ad from our city but grandma did not give permission because the original Murphy baby had died soon after the ad campaign was shot.
This is an old story of course and it sounds older still, in narration. I have heard it long back from the man who took the photo. When he told me this, my mother had already passed away. We were talking in the solitary room of his old age home and after telling this snippet, he gave a rejoinder which got stuck in the dazzling afterglow of that evening. It is stuck in my mind too. He had said: 'We can't hold on to things in time. Everything must go.'
It's been years since. And I see there the old photograph. The old new one. It's only a copy of the original. That day in the old age home, I had photographed the photograph of my mother. There it sits pretty. My mother's photograph's photograph, twice away from me in time and she, not big enough to hold me then. The rest is locked away in time's folds and crossed out in silence. Only the photograph in photograph remains. The umbilical cord of fading sunlight, snapped long since.
