I must have looked at them twenty times.
Not because I doubted they were mine.
Quite the opposite.
I couldn't quite believe they were.
The registration papers were in my name.
So was the insurance.
There, in black and white, was my name.
The Silver Plus was parked downstairs.
Silver, of course.
Brand new.
The first brand-new vehicle I remember entering our family.
I had a helmet.
A salary.
And the papers.
At twenty, this was all the evidence I needed
that I was now a serious adult.
The fact that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing with my life
seemed like a minor technicality.
A few months earlier, I had finished my B.Sc. Home Science.
My plan was simple.
Hold on to the catering seat while waiting to hear from journalism.
The ever pragmatic Jum phupi told me in no uncertain terms
that this was unfair on my father.
If I wanted journalism, I should wait for journalism to come through.
If I wanted catering, I should take catering.
My father could not afford deposits and admissions
for every possibility while I made up my mind.
That was a fair point.
Unfortunately, it was also a disastrous one.
I chose journalism.
Journalism rejected me.
It was an impressively efficient way of ending up with neither.
Most people describe moments like this as devastating.
I remember being embarrassed.
Everyone else seemed to be moving forward.
Postgraduate studies.
Jobs.
Plans.
Purpose.
And there I was with a degree, no admission,
and no particularly convincing explanation
for how I had managed to arrive there.
Sitting at home was not an option.
So I found an evening journalism course.
It happened to include photojournalism,
and that was enough reason for me to sign up.
The truth is, journalism was simply
the closest thing I could find to something I loved - photography.
Photography fascinated me.
Stories fascinated me.
Images fascinated me.
News, not so much.
But I didn't know that yet.
All I knew was that I couldn't sit at home waiting for life to begin.
The course turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made.
Not because it led me into journalism.
It didn't.
My final project was a photojournalism piece
on the artists who painted Bangalore's hoardings by hand.
This was long before giant digital printers took over the world.
These artists stood high above the streets on bamboo scaffolding,
transforming small drawings into enormous billboards.
I remember being fascinated by them.
The scale of their work.
The confidence of their brushstrokes.
The way half-finished faces floated above traffic
until, somehow, they became complete.
And somewhere during that project, Father Joe noticed.
Father Joe ran Media Centre.
He was a large man by Indian standards –
tall, broad, always smiling and unfailingly kind.
When the course ended, he offered 17-year old me a job.
Head of the AV department at Media Centre.
I accepted.
The salary was a princely eight hundred rupees a month.
To me, it felt like a fortune.
The Silver Plus arrived around the same time.
My father had always insisted on helmets.
No discussions.
No negotiations.
If you rode, you wore one.
So I had a helmet.
A job.
A little income.
And a brand-new scooter.
For someone who was still making up her future one day at a time,
it felt remarkably adult.
Photography began taking up more and more space in my life.
My father had been interested in photography long before I was.
He owned a TLR camera that eventually passed to my brother.
My brother used it extensively, even photographing Kodaikanal School yearbooks with it.
By now he was working and earning his own salary.
He introduced me to the darkroom.
The chemicals.
The trays.
The enlarger.
The strange magic of watching an image slowly appear
where moments earlier there had been nothing at all.
I somehow acquired an SLR of my own.
I honestly don't remember how.
What I do remember is becoming completely captivated.
I spent hours photographing anything that caught my eye.
People.
Places.
Light.
Shadows.
Life.
Media Centre opened even more doors.
I learned audio-visual production.
I learned sound.
I paid for guitar lessons.
I worked.
I explored.
At one point, I was sent to Chennai for a month-long training program.
My father arranged to have the Silver Plus transported by train so I could use it there.
That still amazes me.
While I was there, I spent time at Cholamandal Artists' Village and completed a project there.
I made friends.
I made a few mistakes.
I learned things that had very little to do with journalism
and a great deal to do with growing up.
The funny thing is that none of it seemed connected at the time.
It felt random.
One experience after another.
One opportunity after another.
One small step after another.
Then my sister-in-law Zoya mentioned a course at Jamia.
Mass Communications. Filmmaking.
I don't remember asking many questions.
In fact, I don't think I even knew filmmaking was something people studied.
Films simply appeared in theatres.
I had never stopped to think about how they were made or who made them.
What I did know was that it involved cameras.
And photography.
And at that point, that was enough.
My life felt as though it had been standing still for long enough.
I needed to be moving forward.
Going somewhere.
Doing something.
There was a course.
It involved photography.
I applied.
More than six hundred others applied too.
Twenty-five were accepted.
I was one of them.
Once I got there, it felt like I’d finally come home.
The world of stories, of sound and cameras.
I took to it like a duck to water.
Drowned myself into everything I possibly could.
I was convinced I wanted to be a cinematographer.
That seemed like the natural destination.
Photography had brought me this far.
Why wouldn't it continue?
Then, as I was nearing graduation,
one of my editing professors pulled me aside.
He told me I had an instinctive knack for editing.
Not a learned skill.
An instinct.
He thought I would do very well as an editor.
I hadn't seen that coming at all.
Until that moment, I had never seriously considered it.
Years later, people would point to Jamia and say that was where everything began.
For a long time, I believed that too.
Now I'm not so sure.
Jamia was the door.
But the years before Jamia built the key.
Had either of those colleges accepted me,
my life would almost certainly have followed a different path.
Perhaps a perfectly good one.
Instead, the doors closed.
Looking back now, I see the web of my life was not random at all.
The choices that changed everything rarely felt like choices.
They felt like the next thing to do.
At the time, they seemed ordinary.
I spent a long time thinking I was lost.
I wasn't.
I was becoming found.