I

Growing up as a child with a physicist father, I was told that black is the absence of light. And white was the all-encompassing colour that exists – the sky turns white because all the colours are soaked in by the sun. I remember having a Soviet imported book with an old man on the white cover with his white beard, a vibgyor flowing from behind his head, almost like a halo, just not quite. As an inquisitive child, my first response to my father’s proposition was how do we comb our hair then? If I have black hair, are we combing absence? Is absence quantifiable, dissectible with the teeth of the comb? Clearly, my father had no answer. Just like he did not have an answer when I had inquired why he didn’t know Hebrew – but that’s a story for a different time.

In middle school I learnt black as a colour that absorbs all other, and white as the colour that reflects all. If one thinks that the animated pop-culture, or the glorified tales of Chhota Bheem is going to affect the growing mind, one should really look into the different stages of science pedagogy, which exist in middle and high schools. First you are made to learn that light travels in a straight line. Inside a higher grade classroom you hear that light never travels in a straight line, but always in a curved one. As you reach the optimum of school level physics, you learn how light actually travels both as a wave and a particle. And clearly, because it is deemed scientific, you forget the many contradictory stages of science learning that you let go of.

Then black started meaning as the inherent property of an object that absorbs all light, and white started meaning the inherent property of an object that reflects all light. The cinema screen is white – that is why. And yet, I had to compensate my quest for combing darkness by a makeshift explanation – better than the earlier one of course, but not the most suitable kind. I had a filmmaker uncle who always used to wear black clothes much to my father’s irritation; my imagination would always struggle to find how he finds the black clothes in the dark corner of his wardrobe, after all? Did he always have to put them in between a red T-shirt and a yellow to find where he had kept them? Did he fix a bulb inside the wardrobe to shower light on the pile of black clothes? Did he take out each one to figure out which one was different how? This struggle would only turn real in my brief gothic phase during college when I would only own black pieces of clothing. Indeed, you cannot comb darkness, nor arrange it.

Was it then, that we see in absence?

II

In such a state of confusion, as a kid who held dear anything old, an affinity towards the old b/w photographs of lost homes, lost homelands and lost rivers were the most fascinating. Neither did I know the people in the photographs, nor was I adept at making the familial connections with distant relatives the way my mother could – “Oh! This tiny face here with large glasses, she is my cousin’s niece’s grandmother’s college buddy. They used to be very close in the days, I wonder where she is now.” I, as a child and as an adult have remained the least bothered. And yet growing up, I did take to the now-expensive b/w film reels – ilford, fuzi – all made more sense than a DSLR. Was it because the black body of the Zenit camera did not allow me to see a screen full of preview like in my Nikon, where the colour could turn grey, the grey could turn fluorescent on the press of a single button? Or, was it because, the dark black negatives and their coming into being in the dark compartment within the old camera was a process I was most intrigued by? I had even learnt to make a pinhole camera with a shoebox, just where I would capture the sunlight upside down. The inside cover had to be white and black, I remember.

Natasha Eaton talks about chromatic genealogies, and her study is fascinating. Multiple studies have emerged on how our memories are coloured. Was the vermillion on my grandmother’s b/w matrimonial photograph striking, because it was red or because it was supposed to be b/w? Was it strange that my mother had a b/w photograph sent for her marriage proposal at an age when all Calcutta studios had shifted to cheaper colour reels? Was it strange that half my childhood photos are taken in b/w and the light on my face is striking because there is a dark flower next to it? Is it strange that I remember my friends in colour and not b/w, unlike what the films make you think with their flashbacks of a different colour? Even most of my dreams were coloured as I paid careful attention after waking up. Remembering minute details, sometimes writing them down, for some analyst prescribed someone. Only when I started dreaming in a printmaking format, where my dreams turned animated (for the lack of a better word), I could finally dream in b/w.

Chittoprasad fascinated me, so did Haren Das and other printmakers. For the game was to completely reverse the dark and light. The lilting meadows, the carved staircase to a bird-house – all would have to be carved in reverse. Make a drawing, trace in reverse. If you see a block of lino or wood, you would see that the crevices – the absences are the spaces which lay white. Whereas, the peaks really make it to (mostly) black imprints. It is the same with rubber stamps – the ones we all were fascinated with while growing up – someone’s name printed on it in reverse as a mirror image. The trick was the mirror. And yet, the absence – which would remain absent in the final print of a bi-chromatic print – was the one that was actively carved; scraping material off the surface so that they could embody light. The peaks really contained the absence – the absence of touch, the absence of any labour as such embodied within. They just remained as it is and they transformed for there were absences carved out all around them. Their imprints would be the black – borders, shades and patterns, the one that really creates the chiaroscuro on a print. And yet, the chiaroscuro would hold within – not one but many such kinds of absences. Maybe this is how you carve out absence?

Was it then that we touch in absence?

III

Once I met a stranger in the lonely outskirts of Gurgaon, where I discovered how iPhones had the fascinating feature of turning your screen entirely b/w (and grey). As I’ve forgotten how he used to look or how deep was his voice, I remember a screen where everything was black and white. Unlike just a wallpaper, or a screen saver, all the apps were overrun as b/w. To think of it, that was the most fascinating part of him: he could perhaps even turn the saffron to grey that way.

Does a thing lose meaning if it loses colour? Could the early humans really see the Red Sea if they see it in a b/w photograph? Would the black and white swans be any different if they were in colour? Would the fairy godmother and the evil stepmother be coloured differently? Would the colour of evil remain forever with its contested and violent histories – the all-encompassing black? Could they be purple, the colour I hate with all my might, in a different monochromatic world?

And yet, ‘Subarnarekha, The River of Gold’ hardly lost its meaning in monochrome. I could even see the yellow waves of rundown gold in the water. A yellow river that was supposed to be and it turned yellow perhaps even in a monochromatic frame of a maestro. Was it a magical real world where the yellow would be yellow,for the real river has lost all its ochre hues. When we ventured into the river – the river that was in full bloom, in colour – was it any less real than the monochrome the screen had given us? Was the dark grey-blue water somehow more real than the starkness of light and shadow on the screen just because it missed the real tint? Was the river of our dreams was the river of our screens not more golden than the river flowing in front of us?

Was it then that we think in absence?