Most of these I had forgotten. There is a stretch in the middle where I appear to be doing nothing but standing next to other people’s cars. That was, in fact, the job.
15 photographs.
The heavens have opened and four of us are standing in it, delighted. One of the monsoons of my three years in Jaipur.
Everyone else is in jodhpurs. I turned up to the President’s Bodyguard in jeans. They are the senior regiment of the Indian Army, raised in 1773, they will not take a man under six feet, and every one of them is also a trained paratrooper.
Fifteen of us on a lawn, during my college years in Rajasthan.
A Mercedes with English plates, in a shed in the Gulf, with its bonnet up and a handshake over it. This was the job.
Germany, September 1994. Somebody else’s S-Class, briefly. Amitabh Bachchan had ridden in the back of it, in London.
The riding club again. This time I am on the horse.
The rest of it
My cousins and me, on a rooftop in Delhi.Four of us and an auto-rickshaw. It is descended from a little three-wheeler the man who designed the Vespa drew up in 1948, for Italians who could not afford a car.Leaning on a pillar, in my college years in Jaipur.Papaji and me on the grass, around 1971. I am nine or ten.The Empire State Building, and behind us the two towers that were still there.The Jungfraujoch. The railway station up there is the highest in Europe, and they cut the tunnel to it through the inside of the Eiger.A luggage trolley, a friend, and an airport we cannot name.Liberty, from the ferry. She came over from France in two hundred and fourteen crates, and her copper skin is no thicker than two pennies laid together.Papaji and two of us on a promenade in Europe, around 1971. Anil is eleven. I am nine.