Diva Days : The beginning of my visual journey

Yesterday, after finishing the writing quota of the day, I was just leisurely fiddling through the old photograph folders stored in my external hard drive. One of the folders titled ‘Diva days’ grabbed my attention. I stopped by, clicked it and stepped into the past, 9 years back.

This was the time Nawneet, Sumit and I spent together in a poorly developing sub-urban settlement near Mumbai. This was Diva, originally a village, but now rapidly growing into a little clumsy conglomerate of poorly built sprawling buildings. All the buildings had 1 bhk, 2bhk flats with small rooms well suited for the low income persons working in private offices in different parts of Mumbai.

Our building was beside the railway lines between Thane and Dombivali- two well known hugely crowded satellite municipal towns of Mumbai. Every 2 or 3 minutes local trains roar past the place towards Mumbai or from Mumbai. Their metallic rattling sound was so prominent at night that even in our sleep we felt it if we slept some earlier.

Only after 11 at night this metallic cry was settled and a magic lull stretched over the village with gushing sea wind from the creek infested with pungent smell of the sea. The creek was on the other side along the railway track flanked with mangrove jungle for a long stretch from Mumbra to Dombivali.

Our small 1bhk rented ‘chawl’ was on the third floor of a newly constructed 6-storied building whose backyard was opening towards lush green thick mangrove forest. A narrow 4-feet lane was connecting our building to the main street of Diva village.

The trio of us were the freelancers doing in-house translation jobs all through the day sitting in our small flat.

Mumbai has been notorious for her scanty water supply, but our Diva was somewhat fortunate enough to get just enough water for our daily need. We had a small 200L rectangular plastic storage placed on the vault specially built under our bathroom roof. So this was our daily quota of water that was not sure to be provided on strict daily basis.

We were working all day long in our small room, and the window opening outside towards the mangrove was the most tempting thing for me that was the mischievous cause for me to bunk my work, sit on its broad slab and watch outside incessantly. There were many things outside. The playing children and the little girls collecting wild flowers, a gang of boys always on hunt into the mangrove for something unknown to me.

And the most happening thing that was never ending was construction! There were always construction machines, the migratory laborers from different parts of the country, the lories with building materials and a lot of sounds and some time commotions.

And the monsoon! That was a wow! The cloud on the Mumbra hills, those grey ones, so chunky and so brisk! The rain was not the rain! They were like the part of some raucous band, a rocky troupe. The rain was so heavy with such an aggressive wind. You could measure the true intensity only by watching the response of the trees!

This third floor window was not an ordinary window. It was the gateway of my imagination that led my attention to so many lovely things. It was the start point, standing where I felt a slowly growing interest within toward the avian world. Never before had I watched birds so close and with such a great interest. They were the common ones but great in numbers- pigeon, dove, sparrow, mynah, raven, parakeet, bulbul, kingfisher, cormorant and herons- flocks of them!

There were three other points of engagement for me. One was the evening vegetable market. I still remember soft spoken Kaka, the gentle man draped in typical Marathi attire. Everything white, even his boat-shaped cap which he always wore! He sold only lemon, ginger, green chili and coriander leaves. His manner was highly gentle and smart.

Second one was the near-secluded diva junction platform which happened to see a small crowd only twice during the entire length of the day when Diva-Vasco-da-gama Passenger departed and arrived.
I spent hours alone enjoying many hot windy mid-days here on the all-empty platform benches. Beside me there were some resident platform dwellers, too. They were the local beggars and stray dogs enjoying their day sleep there.

A chill runs through my spine when I still remember that scaring and dismal end of one of those beggars who was run over by a fast non-stop local train. The man was crossing track at some distance from the railway crossing. The train dragged the body to a couple of kilometers before it stopped. It was a dark evening. The search operation went on for an hour or so on the track. All the railway staff and police came back with were the blood-soaked pieces of bones and flashes in gunny bag.

There was a huge tamarind tree beside the platform. A flock of milk-white herons was residing on that giant tamarind. The height of the foot over-bridge on the railway platform was vertically parallel to that of the tamarind tree . This was my favorite vantage point to watch those white beauties which I had never observed before.

I spent many of the rainy evenings on the platform studying mysteries of lights and shadows under the platform lamps. …And there were the great number of faces of the passengers sitting on the window seats of Diva-Vasco-da-gama passenger train. I watched them. They laughed, the talked, they were happy, they were sad. And some were all alone not talking to anyone at all.

One of them was a lean Sikh old gentle man selling pens in the trains. In the evening he came to catch his train. Every day except Sundays he was in time. Never ever I noticed he failed and never ever I found with anyone. He was always all alone with his own murmuring something to himself and then he start reading an old book which he always drew out from his cotton sack dangling on his shoulder.

Those flickering images of people- men and women and children, still turns me nostalgic, though none of them I approached ever.

And the third was my all time favorite one- the empty railway tracks that was the part of the Diva-Goa rail section. Here I spent almost all of my mornings and long rainy afternoons. This was where I grew a long lasting love for butterflies. This love is still with me and it helped change me both inside and outside.

Inside it filled me where there was a huge lacking. Outside it changed me into a person who can endure the ruggedness of the world and the physical environment. Also started the tryst with nature and the world exploring through the optical magic that’s, Camera! Those were the days I just started clicking with a pretty little Kodak knowing nothing about photography, lens and camera.