Saturday, Dec. 30, 2006

Today I try to get back to my usual routine. Working hard, shooting a lot. But my hand stops me. Too much pain and swelling.

So I go to the school in the morning. After tea, Prashant takes me around to shoot and tie up some loose ends in my photo project. What am I missing? It’s time to try to fill in the gaps. Some photos of child marriage.

We go first to an area we visited once before at dusk. There is a teenager, 16, with a baby. She was married when she was 10 and had her baby boy six months ago.

I have a certain photo in mind that I’d like to get. When they are married, Indian women have a red mark they wear in the part of their hair. So how to photograph a teenage mother with this special part? From above. She is slightly weirded out, but I get something close to what I wanted.

I shoot as she cradles her baby, breast feeds him. Then she lifts the boy up to her face and he kisses her. Click.

There is another girl in this area who was recently married. She is 14. But I don’t see her today.

Close by, a little girl is washing dishes in the sunlight. Her toddler sister wails behind her. Their mother is at work. The little girl must care for her baby sister while her mother is away.

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Next we zip over to a house near Prashant’s. Here lives a woman whose husband is addicted to the Indian equivalent of marijuana. He does embroidery for a living and spends most of his money on this stuff.

The leaves need to be boiled. Then they are ground up and made into a little ball that you eat. The leaves can also be smoked, I think.

The woman has to make the drug for her husband every day. Once, when she didn’t do it, he beat her.

She is not boiling or grinding any leaves when we arrive, but I photograph her doing chores about the house. Her husband stands and watches in the background.

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I try to photograph some widows begging. I don’t get exactly what I want, but we’re out of time, so we go back to the school.
All morning, schoolchildren have been helping make gift bags that will be distributed to needy children the morning of Jan. 1. The bags include shawls, snacks and toys.

Prashant tells me that thousands of children come from all over to receive the gifts. It is absolute chaos. I will be photographing this Monday morning before I leave.

I still have no appetite because of the food poisoning, so I sit in the office for a while and look through my photos. So many. It’s overwhelming. I hope I have my story.