Krishna Murari Kishan- Jan 17, 1952 - Feb 2, 2015

There was scarcely an event worth reporting in Bihar that went by without Krishna Murari Kishan's signature click on it.

Noon or night, rain or shine, flood or flame, if something was happening, Kishan was there with his bandolier of cameras, shooting. There was nothing he would give a miss. On the odd occasion Kishan wasn't there, things stopped to happen and awaited his arrival - a big-ticket news conference, a foundation laying, a celebrity opening, an evening gala, it was as if they wouldn't be complete without the emboss of Kishan's lens.

Think the Bihar landscape, its contemporary life and times - it will mostly be the stuff of hardship, tragedy and atrocity - and it is difficult to think it without a Kishan image: a massacre, a famine, a carnage, a boat capsized in the Ganga, a landless farmer being thrashed, a gangster showing off, a Naxalite brandishing weapons, an illicit gun-maker peddling his wares, Ravi Shankar swung on his sitar, Sitara Devi blazing onstage, Kishan swept the whole range. We are not talking years here, we are talking a decades, Kishan did what he did each day for 40 years. His wasn't only a stellar career, he lived out an era of his scripting and which closed early Monday morning. Abruptly. Unkindly.

Kishan was diminutive and portly and the wonder often was how he could even move with so much heavy metal battery of lenses round his midriff. But he was everywhere the news was, materialising around occasions like a phantom-powered apparition, then vanishing in a trice some other place. It's probably fair to say to keep an eye on Kishan in Patna was an efficient way of keeping an eye on the news.

From the first day I saw him, on my first reporter's assignment back in 1984, to the last - which was just the other day, wasn't it, just the other day in some Patna melee - he lumbered about on a ramshackle scooter.

' Theek hai boss, Patna ke liye yahi theek hai, barka gaadi mein baith jaayenge tou kaam kaise karenge?' (This is just fine for Patna, he'd say of his scooter, how will I work if I get into a big car?) Looking at that scooter of his you'd never guess Kishan was the swiftest in the trade. But it was never about that scooter, perhaps, it was about Kishan's drive. I asked to see him one afternoon to sift through his archives for some photographs of Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad in their student years. He was sure he had them, he said, but I wasn't welcome during the day. 'Assignment miss ho jayega boss tab kya karenge? Aana hai aaram se raat barah baje ke baad aaiye naa boss, baithenge... (What will I do if I miss an assignment? Come leisurely, come after midnight, we will sit).' To his craft he brought an edifying commitment.

A Patna friend recalls a story from a north Bihar flood in the late 1990s. Kishan had managed a lift with an army chopper dropping aid. It so happened, the chopper developed troubled returning from its sortie and crashlanded in a marsh. Kishan was among the injured. But the first thing he did after the chopper had settled into the water was to dart out and begin taking pictures.

Even in the digitised age, Kishan retained his dark room at home in labyrinths of Patna's Dariyapur; midnight was his witching hour. It's when the day's work would be reviewed, the best pictures picked, captioned and put online, or despatched to illustrious portals of world photography - the National Geographic, Corbis, Focus, Nature.

For the better part of his career, he wielded his camera for the ABP Group. The photograph that appeared on the front page of the first edition of The Telegraph on July 7, 1982, was one Kishan took. There isn't a photo service worth its name that has not used a Kishan click one time or another. For a long length of time, through the last decades of the 20th century, Kishan was how the world would get introduced to Bihar. If you didn't know Kishan, you didn't get very far.

Kishan became that by embodying the era and environment that produced him. Bihar is a rough place, it requires you to be ready. In the tumultuous mid-1970s, when Kishan began his tryst with the camera, it was even more so, a time agog against the Emergency, a time flung into the vortex of mass disruption.

The requirements of essaying Bihar's underbelly can even now be rather coarse. I accompanied him one very wintry night - pillion on his scooter - to meet the boss of a hooch gang who had decided to contest elections. It happened to be a woman called Malo Devi, who operated from a shadowy neighbourhood near Bakhtiyarpur east of Patna. When we arrived, late into the night, Malo Devi sent out word she wouldn't be photographed.

Kishan shoved her messenger aside, barged into the room and let loose a cannon of abuse upon her that even I could hear standing outside. In effect, what he told her was that with the illicit trade she plied, she didn't have the benefit of choosing or refusing. Kishan got his photographs; Malo Devi came out and posed smiling with her election symbol. As he clicked, Kishan joked with her why she hadn't chosen a bottle of booze. Kishan never drank or smoked. More's the pity he was claimed by a chill that drowned his lungs.