My mother is in a sari in nearly every one of these, and the sari does not adapt to the weather. It went up the Great Wall under a winter overcoat. She is not the one who looks out of place.
18 photographs.
Mataji in the crowd at the Rio carnival. Niemeyer built those stands in a hundred and ten days, and he built them so that the parade belonged to the people again.
Mataji leaving St Basil’s with the shopping. Stalin’s men wanted it gone. The man sent to prepare the demolition refused, wrote to Stalin saying he would sooner cut his own throat, and went to prison instead. The cathedral is still standing.
Two children are gazing up at four presidents. My mother has seen enough. Rushmore was meant to show them down to the waist, but the money ran out and the sculptor died, and in 1941 they declared it finished anyway.
Mataji on Copacabana, in a full sari, on a beach where nobody else is wearing very much at all. Everyone credits that wave pavement to Burle Marx. Portuguese stonemasons laid it sixty years before he got there.
Mataji on the Great Wall, in an overcoat, with the sari going all the way up it.
The rest of it
Mataji at the Catherine Palace, outside St Petersburg. Somewhere inside there was a room made of amber. German troops took it to pieces in 1941 and nobody has seen it since.Mataji at Pohutu, at Whakarewarewa. It is the biggest active geyser in the southern hemisphere and it goes off about once an hour, thirty metres up.Mataji at the rail on Victoria Harbour. That stretch of water was two and a half times wider when this was taken. They keep filling it in.Mataji in the sea. Who needs a swimsuit when you have an all-purpose sari.Mataji on a Pacific airstrip, beside an aeroplane in a livery Air New Zealand painted out in 1996.Mataji at Capelinhos, on Faial. The volcano erupted for thirteen months and buried the villages under the ash.Mataji on the steps at Bhubaneswar. The city had more than seven thousand temples once. About seven hundred are left.Mataji in Death Valley, some time in the year before March 1985. The sign says NATIONAL MONUMENT, which it stopped being in 1994.Mataji at the wheel of the hire car, above a crater lake in the Azores. She drove. All over the world she drove, which was not a thing most Indian women of her generation did at all.Mataji, her children, her sister and Raj Mamaji, under a stone arch. Ravi is about three, which puts it around 1968.Mataji and all four of us on the cathedral steps, around 1971. Veena is holding the guidebook.Mataji’s sister on the winch train at Palani, going up Sivagiri hill. You can walk the six hundred and ninety-three steps instead, and many do, as penance. At the top the god is made of nine poisons, ground together by a sage.Mataji in the doorway of the aircraft, in a sari, as though she does this constantly. She did.