The colorized 1978 photograph shows my mother absorbed in her annual summer ritual of making vadiyalu, with eight-year-old me and my toddler brother lingering nearby. We were wearing lalchi-paijama for the first time — a style we had always associated with Muslims or North Indians, never with ourselves. The moment captures a slice of domestic life that feels almost ancient now, both culturally and technologically.
Vadiyalu is a food-preservation craft unique to our region. Unlike pickling, it involves preparing crispies from rice or lentil flours, shaping them, and drying them under the harsh summer sun so they can last an entire year. The most prized among them is gummadi vadiyalu, made from ash gourd despite the name suggesting pumpkin. Traditionally, this was a skill passed from mother to daughter. But my mother had only sons, so we became her compulsory company during the long, hot hours of mixing, shaping, and laying them out on cloth sheets to dry.
Even though my parents believed that gender should never restrict ability, we still lived under the weight of traditional roles. Daughters were expected to learn cooking and domestic chores, sons were dispatched for shopping and “outside work.” My brother and I offered only token help, and even that vanished once we found better distractions. Ironically, I would only learn domestic skills years later, alone in America, when survival demanded it.
The tradition itself has nearly vanished today. No one — men or women — has the patience or time to dedicate entire summer days to such labor. Commercial swagruha stores have taken over, preserving the variety but rarely the quality. Homemade craft, with its slow precision and personal touch, simply does not survive mass production.
The photograph got me thinking about cameras and the people behind them. It is easy to forget, in an age of smartphones and endless cloud storage, that photography was once a luxury, often an event in itself. Long before this picture was taken, my mother’s uncle, who owned a small photo studio, was responsible for most of the photographs in our family. Cameras were rare, and a single portrait meant either visiting a studio or inviting the photographer home.
When I was about ten months old, my father borrowed a camera from a friend and took several photographs of me. Before we had our own camera, I had perhaps twenty photos in total — still far more than my cousins, who had one or two at most. My father’s enthusiasm for documenting childhood ensured I had a visual history others could only envy.
A little later, one of my father’s college friends returned from Russia after his higher studies and sold him an old but reliable Russian camera — the Smena II. By then my father had settled comfortably into his job, and my younger brother was a crawling infant. It was the perfect moment to bring home such a luxury. We were among the few families in our circle who owned a camera. My father was fascinated by technology — that was also when he bought a tape recorder. To a child used to waiting for songs on the radio, the idea of recording and replaying music on demand felt like sorcery.
The Smena II demanded full manual control — exposure, focus, aperture — far beyond the abilities of a small child. I finally got to use it around the age of fifteen, during a trip my father couldn’t join. He taught me how to judge light, adjust settings, and steady the frame. Then he handed over a single film roll — thirty-six exposures — and reminded me that each click mattered. I was careful by nature, though hardly coordinated, and his trust felt enormous.
During that trip, I spotted a jackfruit tree heavy with fruit and ran toward it without noticing the steep slope beneath my feet. I only avoided tumbling downhill by crashing into the tree trunk — nearly smashing the Smena II in the process. At that moment, I was more terrified for the camera than for myself. Thankfully, both of us survived, and the few photographs I took came out well.
The photograph that set off this entire chain of memories — the vadiyalu afternoon — was taken by my father in black and white. Like most men of his generation, he was almost always behind the lens, rarely in front of it. So while we have abundant pictures of my mother, brother, and me, very few include him.
In 1982, when my uncle was getting married, my father decided to try color photography. Color film was expensive, but a wedding felt like the right occasion. The shopkeeper mistakenly sold him two rolls meant for slides instead of regular prints. My father used one at the wedding and the other during our grand tour of North India. As a result, our earliest color photographs existed only as slides for nearly twenty years, until we finally digitized them. After that, color photography became our norm — and there was no looking back.
Since then, we’ve witnessed the entire evolution: black-and-white film to color, film to digital, digital to smartphones that do everything — focus, exposure, color correction, storage — automatically. In my first eight years, I had around twenty photographs. Today, we take twenty pictures of the same sunset in eight minutes… and forget about them just as quickly. Ironically, the old family-album photographs have been viewed, touched, and cherished far more than the thousands of digital images buried in our devices.