The Class Photo I Hid From
Back row, half behind a taller boy, I curated my own absence.
There are eleven school photographs of me taken between the ages of six and sixteen, and I am fully visible in none of them. In every one I am a sliver: half a face, one shoulder, a single left ear rising out of the space behind Arjun Nair like a moon in partial eclipse.
This was not bad luck.
It was a craft, and I practiced it the way other boys practiced their cover drives.
Photo day at St. Xavier's Boys arrived every January with the same rituals. Mr. Britto, the photographer, would park his scooter by the basketball post and unload a tripod that looked older than the school. The peons carried out the long wooden benches from the science lab. Sister Carmel walked the rows with a steel comb dipped in a mug of water, flattening one cowlick after another as if she were personally offended by each of them. Tallest boys in the back. That was the rule, and that was my one piece of luck, because I was tall, and the tallest boy in class was Arjun Nair, who was built like a steel cupboard and cast a shadow you could picnic in.
I had a drill. Half a step to the right of Arjun. Quarter turn of the shoulders. Chin down, eyes up. Then, in the second between Mr. Britto raising his hand and the click, a small drift to the left, two inches, maybe three. Enough. The prints came back three weeks later and there I would be... one eyebrow, a slice of collar, an ear.
I can tell you the exact day I learned my face was a problem to be managed. I was eight, at my cousin Deepa's wedding, wearing a bow tie my mother had rescued from some other decade. An aunt I barely knew held my chin and turned my head left and right, the way she might inspect a brinjal at the market, and announced to the room, 'Don't worry, he'll grow into his face.'
Everyone laughed. Someone repeated it to someone who had missed it, and they laughed too.
I remember the wedding laddoo going chalky in my mouth. I remember deciding, with the cold clarity only children are capable of, that nobody was going to get a good look at me again.
School helped the decision along. In fourth standard a boy named Ronnie said my ears stuck out far enough to catch Doordarshan, and for the next three years my name was Antenna.
The drift spread from photo day into everything. At family functions I volunteered to hold the camera, which is the only perfect hiding place ever invented. In birthday group shots I discovered the shoelace: bend down to tie it as the flash fires and you become a rumor. My mother would collect the prints from the studio and flip through them with rising irritation. 'Where are you? I paid forty rupees and I got your elbow.'
I got very good at being an elbow.
It followed me out of childhood the way these things do, politely... without asking. In my college farewell photo I am a smear of motion at the edge of the frame, apparently mid escape. In my cousin's wedding album I appear exactly once, photographed from behind, identifiable only by the ears. And then there was the passport office, where hiding is illegal. The plastic chair, the white screen, the man behind the counter saying 'Look straight, sir' four times, each time with a little less hope. The photo they finally accepted looks like a mugshot of a man arrested for apologizing.
Then, last December, twenty two years after the last wooden bench, I went to a classmate's wedding in Kochi and found Arjun Nair at the buffet. Still enormous. Salt in the beard now, reading glasses pushed up on his head. We did the arithmetic old classmates do: who married whom, who moved to Dubai, whatever happened to Ronnie. And then, while spooning raita onto his plate, with no warning at all... he said it.
'You know I always knew you were back there.'
'Back where?'
'In the photos. Every year. I could feel you lining up behind my shoulder like a fielder.' He said it the way you would mention the weather. 'So I would shift. Half a step left, just before the click, so you would have somewhere to go.'
I laughed. He did not.
'My mother saw one of the prints once and said, Arjun, stand straight, you are blocking that poor boy. And I told her, I am not blocking him. I am his door.'
I stood there holding a plate of biryani that went completely cold.
For twenty two years I had believed my invisibility was a private skill, my one flawless art...
It turned out to be a duet.
Somebody had seen me so precisely, so entirely, that he knew the exact half step my hiding required, and he had given it to me every January without once asking for thanks.
You cannot hide from a person who is helping you hide. You can only be loved by them from one step away.
That night in the hotel room I wrote something for the first time since school. Not a diary entry. Short lines, with breaks, about ears and benches and doors. I did not know what to call it, so I called it nothing and saved it in my phone between a grocery list and a flight number.
Weeks later, at two in the morning, I found myself reading strangers' poems about childhood, and it was like walking into a waiting room full of people with my exact injury. Boys who had been Antennas. Girls who had spent every group photo tying a shoelace. I cleaned up my hotel room lines and posted them on a community wall for poets, under my full name, which felt like stepping out from behind something. A woman I will never meet left a comment five words long: 'I was the shoelace girl.'
I used to think healing would mean learning to love those eleven photographs. It turns out to be a smaller, stranger thing: learning that I was never actually unseen in them. Someone knew my choreography better than I knew it myself. The pictures do not show a boy who disappeared. They show a boy standing beside a door that loved him.
Last month, at my niece's sixth birthday, someone raised a phone for the group photo and I felt the old machinery wake: shoulders turning, chin dipping, feet already drifting toward the tallest uncle in the room.
I made it all stop.
I stood in the front, in the middle, both ears out in the open like flags.
There are eleven school photographs in which I am a sliver, and now one birthday photo in which I am entirely, catastrophically visible. My niece studied it and said I was making a strange face. I was. I am looking straight into the lens, like a man standing in a doorway, finally ready to be found.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.