My Amma’s kaleidoscopic life

This image of my Grandparents, Om Prakash Gupta and his wife, my grandmother, Ramkali Gupta is one of the oldest photographs we possess. The original image was photographed and hand painted in a photo studio in Bhopal around 1975, right after the birth of their fourth son, Sanjay. While the original photo print was lost, a bigger duplicate still exists, framed and hung in a corner of our home. While my grandfather’s past exists in a few blurry anecdotes within the family, it is my grandmother who has really lived and witnessed a kaleidoscopic life.

Guarding our families and land

This photograph is from the late 1990 at my paternal village near Sri Muktsar Sahib, a south west city in Punjab. I am not sure who took it, but it would have been developed in Muktsar. Here I am as a little boy in the arms of my uncle Jaswant. Ours was an agricultural family, who like many others or decades, if not centuries, had owned and tilled lands for grain. However, since the 1970s the Insurgent militancy in Punjab had begun to disturb the peace of the villages and towns, and by 1990 it was at its peak even though between 1987 and 1991, Punjab had been placed under the President’s rule.