Why I started obsessively photographing everything after my father passed away

The night before I left Bengaluru to start my job in Mumbai, I hovered by the corner cupboard in my living room, pretending I had a reason to be there instead of in bed. Prying open the doors, I reached for the photo albums stacked inside. I didn’t need to see them, I’ve memorised every image. But it’s a habit I can’t shake, like checking my phone when I wake up.

The photos, clicked by my father, capture my family at our candid best: me rolling on the floor of a department store mid-tantrum. My amma in the kitchen, wearing a blue nightie and sporting her famous murrikyal (Malayalam for ‘fierce glare’, one I have inherited), wielding an appai (utensil) in protest against being photographed. My brother perched on a hospital bed, holding up a freshly fractured arm from some misadventure. Walls, chairs, his offices, my plushies—my father feverishly documented the mundane fragments of life no one else would think to hold on to.

Back then, the pictures seemed unremarkable, a waste of film, but now I cherish them. Those photos weren’t about perfection or preservation; they were about perspective. My Appa’s perspective. My father passed away suddenly when I was 15, right after my board examinations. He was—and continues to be—one of my favourite people. It took me 15 years to realise the profound power his photographs held, building a bridge between the two planes of existence that separate us.

At first, I clung to the images he took because they were more than memories; they were proof. Proof that he had been here, that we had shared those moments. But his absence in them haunted me. A few months before he passed, he said something I’ll never forget: “I took all these photos, yet no one took a single one of me.”

At the time, I didn’t grasp the weight of those words. Later, desperately searching for his face in old albums, I felt their sting sharp and deep.

Appa’s self-portraits, often taken on his work trips abroad, were unintentionally comedic—close-ups of his nostrils and moustache, his face slightly out of focus. Armed with a boxy, black Canon point-and-shoot camera, he was the OG selfie king before selfies were a thing. The results weren’t perfect, but they were unabashedly him. After my father passed away, my brother and I studied the photos he took on his trip to Leh, his final journey. We searched the snow-capped mountains, the halted trucks and silent vistas over and over for clues, for a message he might have left us.