Over these weeks, Diya’s meetings with the photojournalist over drinks at their respective hotel bars multiplied. She told herself it was casual and easy, two foreigners seeing each other solely because they shared a country of residence in common and no deeper connection. But she felt them slipping into some other precarious liminal space in which he might ask something of her directly.
Once, a person:
- left his phone face-up on the bar while he went to the bathroom. The lock screen lit up with an incoming call, a number associated with a picture, an apparition that materialized of a woman holding a toddler, both cheesing for the camera.
- removed a piece of jewelry from his left ring finger, leaving a spectral, untanned area that was as noticeable as what was usually present there.
- looked away from the ringing phone, feeling like she was invading his privacy, and when he returned from the bathroom she didn’t ask him about it, not then, not after, even as it sat in the air between them.
One evening the photojournalist told her to meet him at his room, he wanted to give her a galley of his forthcoming book of photographs. When she walked in, she noticed a spread of food in his sitting area.
I ordered us dinner, he said. I thought we could just hang out up here.
She spotted charred kebabs and rich curries amidst steaming cartons of rice. He’d clearly forgotten she was vegetarian. She made herself a plate that was largely liquids; if he noticed her picking around the meat, he didn’t say.
As she finished she noticed him staring at her, and he moved to sit next to her on the loveseat she’d claimed. He reached out and thumbed the strap of her dress, tucked an escaped tendril from the braid behind her ear. She was unable to shake the feeling that he was handling her like a camera—practiced and attuned to precision, but manipulating her more like a machine than a warm body. She, too, a challenge to unlock, like how the right amount of fiddling and preparation could yield the most poignant photograph of a ruined landscape.
He took her hand and stood up. What kind of person am I, she thought, as she stood up, too, and felt his other hand on the small of her back. A secret / a stranger / a closed book—
But that wasn’t really the right question, she knew. It was: What kind of person did she want to be?
I have to leave, she said, and did.
*
The exhibition, called Trust, happened five months after Diya first set foot in the village. When all the photographs had been taken, Diya had laid them on the floor of her hotel room and seen the thread running through, clear as if she’d known it beforehand. The subtle shift in gaze in the portraits, downward-cast to straight-on, the body language softening, the progression from the paths to the porches to, eventually, the courtyard inside. The residents’ one condition to granting consent for the exhibition was that they write the catalogue’s introduction:
We, who’ve lived here for generations in these houses, wish to craft a living archive for ourselves of the facades we’ve erected, the ones we’ve lived behind, the protective measures we have deployed against misfortune, which dwells in and among these buildings as much as joy, sorrow, pleasure, pain, remain sibling ghosts. That this haunted architecture may be seen if only to convey the message that not everyone you don’t know is a stranger and not every stranger is someone you don’t know. For we, as all of us may be if we are honest, are intimately familiar with our own ghosts, awake between the lines of the stories we could tell in our sleep.
Diya invited everyone from the village to the opening, offering to arrange transport. Though none of the residents expressly declined, she knew already from the way they shook their heads or said maybe that they wouldn’t come. At Amrita’s request, she also invited her daughter who lived in the city, who said she would.