Old and all alone

Shiju S. Basheer hesitates. Someone wants to know the story behind a picture he took. There, in it is an old man resting peacefully on the street below a wall full of pictures of gods and goddesses. That photo, clicked in Kathmandu, speaks for itself, doesn’t it, Shiju asks. If you still have questions, there is a coffee table book called Unscripted Lives that Shiju has authored. He has kept a few copies of it at the Ballard Bungalow, Fort Kochi, where he is also holding an exhibition of some of the photographs he has clicked from around the world.

“It’s got a theme — oldness can be loneliness,” Shiju says. On the walls he has pinned carefully chosen pictures of the old, some as profiles, some in action. “Seeing these, many visitors became emotional and my hope is that at least some will refrain from abandoning their old parents.”

Shiju interacts with the people he takes photos of. A 90-year-old woman in Jodhpur who saw him with his camera asked Shiju if he was going to click her picture. He said no and she said no-one has taken her picture in 90 years. ‘Go ahead, take my picture,’ she told him. And Shiju clicked a face, ‘a story in every wrinkle and line’.

He found lonely figures in his homeland too. In an old tharavadu in rural Kerala where the sole inhabitant is an old man, standing in Shiju’s photo at a spot that had once bustled with relatives.

In Nepal he had found another old woman called Mrs Wangdu who was forced to leave her property by her son but who had persistently fought. “I wouldn’t go anywhere else. This is my home,” she yelled to deaf ears. But Shiju ends his notes with hope. “A saviour can be here, anytime.”

His exhibition ends on January 15.