After almost five years, five hundred gigabytes of photographs, an estimated five hundred thousand words and one hundred and twenty thousand kilometres under the belt, hundreds of thousands of litres of petrol, six hard drives, three computers, three cameras, six lenses, one dirt bike, one Volkswagen, countless LandCruisers, two GPS units, one Camelback, two dogs, four apartments, four destroyed tires, one head-on collision with a camel, twitchy camel spiders in the Empty Quarter, a gang of armed militia in Yemen, one two-night desert trek for rescue, one whorehouse in Calcutta, one detention at an Omani army border camp at the Saudi Arabian border, one search and detention by the Indian Border Security Force on the Bangladeshi border, one tiger disco in Thailand, one Malaysian gangster, streets full of vintage cars in Iran, the occasional relationship, one Indian Army rescue in Arunachal Pradesh, two Formula One races – all of this is true – I have resigned as editor of Oman Today. What a ride. Thank you for being a part of it.
As always, now and in future, wherever I might be in the world, you will find me through my website, www.pinaki.info. It will, in addition to its blog and portfolios, carry updated information on my current phone numbers. While you can still get me on +968 99824026, I will soon announce my switch to +968 95630791. My email address is pinaki@pinaki.info.
It is 4 minutes to midnight and dinner was too long ago, and Tom Waits is singing Tom Traubert’s Blues and I follow its lyrics under a table lamp as it drags along the bottom of my cold floor, in a voice “like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car.” I should be drinking bourbon but I hate whisky, unless it is poured down my throat mixed with Coke. So gin is better. I started that after I had hiked seven hours up to Birkat Sharaf and slept under a juniper. It was only later that I had recognised the berries that I had twirled between my dry, excited fingertips that night on the bottles of Gordon’s. It made a good story, which I repeated often to myself. I should have taken my hip flask to Wadi Geel and sipped on it on top of my hillock. Instead, I used the car as foreground.
I am sitting by myself on an exposed outcrop of rock almost 400km from Muscat, in a little dead-end wadi that no one knows of. Nothing seems to have changed in this little cup between mountains for thousands of years. True, the trees would have died, but successive generations would have sprung up in their place, and they would have looked much like the present-day vegetation. This is the first feeling you get as you sit atop a hillock in Wadi Geel, that hint that you are looking upon what people of another civilisation, or some rudimentary form of it, had seen too. Geel is timeless.
It is also silent, at least on first impression. Soon, I hear the little sounds, like the crisp flap of the pages of my notebook, or the wind through the leaves of the sidr, or the shirt slapping against my back. Occasionally, the wadi will bring with it a faraway sound, like a goatherd from Tokzah, calling out to his herd. Everything, even the wind, bounces off Jebel Misht and its characteristic jagged top that casts shadows even when it should be afternoon. This evening, anything seems possible.
Previous tenants had left a few clues, including the remains of two stone rooms that were used to shelter at night, or to house goats. There are a few rusted cans and batteries lying about – later additions, perhaps, for by the time men had acquired such things they had lost the will to build walls out of wadi stones.
A weathered, sun-dried archaeologist is waiting for me an hour away in Bat, and we will eat chicken in his kitchen – the archaeologist, stonemason and writer – a few dusty turns away from 5,000-year-old stone tombs. The next morning we will drive an hour up to a plateau and then hike up three more hours to a little village stuck to the side of the mountain where they harvest lemons. The fruit itself must have been imported into these depths of Oman centuries ago, the living remains of ancient migrations and conquests.
Wadi Geel – with its immediate area rich in stunted, centuries-old trees, old stone dwellings and casually undulating terrain surrounded by mountains – should be a blank canvas against which you have an intelligent conversation, or be shown something of monumental importance. But there is nothing here except the wind, and my own desperate attempts to find something a bit more concrete to hang on to.
Of course, the photo not only demonstrates my genius in holding an SLR with one hand while attempting a self portrait with a bit more intelligence than that involved with a mug shot, but it also reminds me of Joseph Koudelka’s image in Czechoslovakia in 1968, which I admired online in college, before I had even started shooting. Of course, Koudelka cheated: he’s using a wider lens than I am, the arm is probably not his judging by the angle and hell, if I was in Czechoslovakia and not Wadi Geel do you really think I would be bothering with any of this?
How does it feel to spend a whole day stuck in a sweatshop, and have an entire photography workshop’s worth of people jump in and shoot you?
One wild eye stares at me as I am offered fruit by an old lady who sits looking out over Hillat Mina at 5pm. I’m not sure what she is saying but the grapes aren’t bad, and I know I will return in a day or two with a local contact and get the story. For the moment, I lean in, and ignoring what I just said at the workshop – that whole bit of spending time with the subject, the quieter approach, the soft step – focus on that glorious grey eye and shoot, shoot while I wait for things around her to fall into place at the same moment she does something. Shoot while the boy blurs in the foreground, the Pakistani passes through, the girl shows up in the lane behind, the fruit stick out, the head lifts up, the eyes widen. 14 frames before she knew what was happening: a lousy approach that guaranteed results. A story might follow, but right now 14 frames of an old woman add up to one paragraph.
Raj is from Punjab, and has found it worthwhile to work in a hole in the wall shop in Muscat, in a back-alley maze where every second window is, seemingly, a tailor’s. The hot item is the laysu (like the Dhofari thob), that colourful wrap that women here wear, sometimes with the generic, faceless black abaya over. But here in the narrow lanes, where even the sunlight barely makes its way through, the more colourful the better. After five years of synthetic fabrics, sequins and pure kitsch, Raj has made enough money to do something back home, and will, in two months, leave Oman for north India.
A heartbeat away from pavements, Range Rovers and the royal ship, from the gold souk and the corniche and the hypermarket – those reassuring fixities of the modern pan-Arab city – a warren of lanes and by-lanes run amok between houses, mosques, tailors, stray cats, the occasional shadow of a pregnant dog, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis and Indians. I’m not sure where I am, but this is another hillat, an old neighbourhood, perhaps even village before the city spread over. Somewhere over these graffiti-plastered walls there is a sheikh, a story of a tribe, an influx from Baluchistan. If they had more space they’d be playing football. There are earthen watchtowers above, looking over the port, but the one time I tried getting higher something growled at me and I went down again.
It is just past six and a hundred Pakistanis sit down to eat on the pavement, wedged in between bare mountains, tons of second-hand Toyota engines imported by the shipping container-load, motor oil, differentials and the flow of traffic through the warehouse dominated neighbourhood of Muscat’s Wadi Kabir. The 40-degree day is coming to an end, floodlights come on, and iftar, the breaking of the Ramadan fast, begins.
Classic example of too much subject matter. Reminds me of my first assignment, shooting Muharram off Bombay’s Muhammed Ali Road, where hundreds gather to whip themselves with knives. At first glance you think you’re in photographer’s paradise: a shot everywhere you look, like a fisherman with a swimming pool of fish around him. But if you have a line, not a net, if you have an SLR and not a camcorder, it’s just too much to take in. You have to narrow it down, to pick a subject and stick with it, rather than whip your line around, or try to shoot everything. You have to look for the one old man on Imamwada road who will represent the hundred. You have to look for the metaphor. That’s the secret.
I mucked up. Maybe it’s been too long a while. Or maybe it just didn’t work out. I should have got better shots. What I did get was a gift of about five kilos of mutton drowning in about five litres of oil. That mass of food is now in my fridge and I’m trying to forget about it by writing, and turning the music up loud. The bread I fed to the goats of my fishing village this morning. I think they enjoyed it. Made a nice change from the diet of plastic, thorn bushes and cardboard they grow up on. Pity I can’t try the mutton on them.
after the feast, the server sits alone with his cauldron
The truth is, Calcutta was a failure. After a lifetime of hearing about it I just about scraped through, like a pariah dog of the Bengali community with its tail between its legs, managing a handful of nights on my way out of the Northeast. I thought it was going to be fantastic: after more than two weeks spent between Bhutan, China and Bangladesh, I would hit the intellectual capital of India and wring it of every last drop of possibility.
But I’d forgotten how soon a big city can start to look like every other big city of the world. This one was just a bit grubbier than most. And the Calcutta I had heard of had long disappeared, in a fast-evaporating cloud of Bengali ego and the inevitable sprawl of urban India. The famed bookstores of College Street sold text books, not literature, the supposedly up-market inner streets of Salt Lake looked as run down as those in Sonagachi, the age-old red light district. And, the final slap in the face to every Bengali who has been breaking out into its song: the coffee of Coffee House tasted like hell.
Residents shouldn’t take my views too personally, though. Urban India doesn’t get particularly better, from the three-hour traffic jams in Bombay to the semi-urban sprawls of Arunachal Pradesh. You have to travel for days in the subcontinent to get to anything remotely rural. Everything else is a mix of shanty-town corrugated metal sheets and concrete monstrosities: the so-called ‘boom’ that we are supposed to be rejoicing.