At my Grandmother's

Lazy post for today.  The last of my pictures from Mumbai were taken in and around the Mahalakshmi Mahal (new name for the grandmother's house!).  In retrospect the visit had all the hallmarks of a plot for a chick flick - single woman with a career visits her grandmother's place and rediscovers life and family, finds love with an old fling and decides to stay on.  Though elements of each of these were present on my visit, in retrospect its a good thing that real life is not equal to Hollywood!

First up, the blossoms of the citron/narthangai.  My Tamil genes speak when I say that curd rice+narthangai on a summer afternoon=perfection!

I only know the basic kolams but I do like making them and the black slate laid down for it at the entrance made it an infinitely pleasurable activity.

Often I had little to do except wander around the house.  Despite some of my internal feelings which were at times unhappy, there was a certain kind of tranquillity brought about by observing tiny details - though I never achieved the state of grace of the protagonist of The Scent of Green Papaya :-)

When I did venture out the photographs I took were partly a record of sights I grew up with and that somehow seemed to have survived time, even as the people have changed.  The vegetable carts in Rajawadi are an example.

All the time I was in Mumbai the house was full of painters and they would be terribly self-conscious each time I photographed them.

Most of my pictures are a recordal of things that interest me though they make for pleasant images. When my cousin was visiting, she played around with my camera a good deal making for very different images. This image of our grandmother is by her and I like the way it foregrounds an object that my grandmother uses every day.