“I am a refugee in love!”

This is a photograph of my paternal grandparents Kewal Krishan Puri and Reva Puri whom I call Dadu and Granny, taken at the Bombay Photo Stores Pvt. Ltd Studio in Calcutta, (Kolkata), West Bengal. My granny’s maiden name was Barbara Dorothy Reynolds, and my Dadu was devoted to her. This is their love story.

Dapper young men in Bombay

When I was growing up, our home too had several photo albums – the ones with black pages and deckle-edged black and white photos affixed with photo corners. One afternoon, in Calcutta (now Kolkata), my mother and I began organising the albums sticking back some photos that had come loose. There we were pouring over pictures of what could best be called a rather haphazardly maintained record of the last two generations of my family’s middle-class existence.