Thomas Ruff, Portrait (A. Siekman), 1987

I needed an American visa. It was getting too late, and the fact that I couldn’t put off applying for it any longer was making me feel resentful and a bit queasy. I knew I had pushed myself to a tight and risky corner. It was a hot day in the beginning of April. I thought I’d start with getting myself photographed, for there were elaborate, nervous-making instructions about the photos in the form.

The studio was right next to the visa office on Ho Chi Minh Sarani, a schizophrenic street that can’t decide whether it is in Calcutta or Washington — and its name doesn’t help. You have to enter through an antique gate and walk across a wasteland of demolition rubble to get to the studio. I went in through the swing-doors into a tiny, sparsely furnished, but tidy room. One end of it was curtained off, where the pictures are taken. The air-conditioning was perfect, the neons stark but not harsh, and there was music playing — Enigma’s Mea Culpa on a loop. There was a youngish man working at a computer, and a younger fellow lolling semi-purposefully.

I found myself relaxing immediately in this room. But I felt alert too, curious, almost a little turned on — not sexually, but inside my head and eyes. Switched on, more than turned on. Something will happen here, I felt, something mysterious but so quiet and fleeting that it would be like nothing. Yet, it could be carried away to the world outside and would stay with me. The older man seemed to know what I had come for, and gently asked me to wait.

Sitting there on a little stool, I was reminded of how, on a summer’s day in Rome many years ago, I had walked into one of those immense Baroque churches, just to take refuge from the stupefying heat, and seeing a row of latticed confessionals inside, had decided on an impulse to confess like a good Catholic. Waiting in front of that curtained-off space to be photographed reminded me of those fake, kinky, but calming moments of waiting for the priest. I had felt a peculiar blankness inside the church, as if the combination of pretence and having nothing to confess had reduced me to a kind of nothing in that space, an absence of identity that was oddly exciting. The anticipation of being photographed had exactly that feel of having misplaced an essential bit of myself just when I would be called upon to present it to somebody — to somebody who could do something I couldn’t do. It was like realizing suddenly that I had left my face behind at home. This did not fill me with panic, but with excitement, for wouldn’t it be fun to fake a face?

Then my eyes went to the large pinboard on the wall behind the computer at which the man was working, and I knew why this room made me feel switched on from the moment I stepped into it. It was a place of darshan: its everyday religion was that of the eye. (And how brilliant that this quintessentially Indian word yoked pure looking with nothing less than pure philosophy!) I dislike taking photographs myself, except tentative ones on my phone that I erase after a while. But I am happiest among photographs and photographers, as delighted to watch them taking and making photographs as I am to look at photos (ordinary as well as extraordinary ones), play around with them and use them as aids to reflection and writing. And I knew that what I saw on that workaday pinboard would keep me occupied for a long time.

Most of Calcutta’s celebrities, I saw, patronized this unobtrusive little studio. So when they come to make their passport and visa photos here, the proprietor enlarges these images and puts them up, one after another without any space in between, on his pinboard, after getting some of them autographed. The result, quite inadvertently, is an ongoing photographic installation that somehow captures, in a fluid and open-ended way, the strangely moving ironies of the human face. Like those little hidden cinemas in Paris that show offbeat matinées, so that you stumble into one in the middle of the day expecting something vaguely blue, and then realize that you are watching great cinema, this utterly mundane place next to the American embassy had quietly placed before my eyes a little theatre of human identity.

On that board, there were all the page-three faces that one sees ‘having a ball’, ‘shaking a leg’ or ‘painting the town red’ in the city supplements every morning. (I am addicted to them as I would imagine a medieval scribe, working away in a spartan monastery, would have been addicted to lurid depictions of the Seven Deadly Sins.) There were Tollywood heroines, starlets turned politicians, veteran actors turned icons, sons and daughters of icons, heroes looking like gym-instructors, gym-instructors looking like heroes, ageing fashion designers, writers looking like ageing fashion designers, ageing footballers looking like writers, young musicians looking like ageing gym-instructors, and a few other faces that took me to the brink of recognition, but no further. They had all come for their passport photos, so they all faced the camera full-on, wore no make-up, had to allow the use of a flash, and couldn’t smile. All of them had that blank, washed-out, opaquely staring look that gave no intimation of an interior life. The young women, particularly, looked beautiful and battered, as if they had just recovered from a black eye or wounded lips. Enigma was still singing Mea Culpa, the sexy whispering and the trancey music lending a hypnotic theatricality to the images I was riveted by.

It was as if all these merry people had heard the Trump of Doom sounding suddenly in the middle of what had begun to feel like an endless party, and promptly giving their faces a last, cold scrubbing and after a long, heroic draught of ice-cold water, they had come, with a touching lack of resistance, to face the most pitiless and unblinking eye of all. It struck me that just as I can’t take my eyes off the third page every morning, I am addicted to page two of the Bengali newspaper as well, where the faces of the dead mingle with those of the holy and the healing. How strange it was to think that each of them must have come to a place like this, one day, to be photographed. So that when you look at the faces knowing that they are of the dead, you read into their regulation blankness the mystery and pathos of the one certitude that we carry within us all the time.

The young fellow called me behind the curtain, and in a few quick flashes finished his job with me. I came out and darted back to my seat, for I hadn’t finished looking at the pinboard. (For photography to mean anything, it has to be both quick and slow, continually fusing two kinds of time — the clicking of the shutter and then the slow realizing of the image.) By this time, however, something else had started happening around me.

A sprucely uniformed driver had come into the studio with two little photos of his employers. I sneaked a peak over his shoulders, and the man and the woman in the photos looked stately and substantial. Let’s call them the Datta-Chaudhuris of Elgin Road. The man at the computer took a second to identify them, and immediately fished them out of his computer. Then, click-click-click-click-click — with five deft clicks of the mouse he reproduced five more Mr and Mrs Datta-Chaudhuris, while their driver alternated between scrutinizing (with a faint smirk) the celebrities on the board and glancing into the mirror hanging next to it, using the comb on the rack below to fix his hair. Then he put the ten, coloured and cut-to-size Datta-Chaudhuries into his pocket, took a last, vain look into the mirror, and disappeared through the swing-doors into the city.

The whole thing took just a few minutes. The bringing of the photos, generating their copies, printing them out, cutting them up, putting them into a numbered envelope and carrying them away were done with an automatic, synchronized, deadpan and wordless impersonality that was delightful to watch. What would it be like, I thought, to film this little episode, and then play it at a Chaplinesque speed on a loop? I thought of the soundtrack too. It would have to be that sublimely comic duet in The Magic Flute, when Papageno and Papagena sing about living happily and prolifically ever after: “Lots of little Papagenos! Lots of little Papagenas! Paapa-papapapa-geno! Paapa-papapapa-gena! Papa-papapapapapapapa-geno! Papa-papapapapapapapagena!”

Soon, I too got my face back from the man at the computer. Twelve copies, six each of two different sizes, and a reference number for future use. In the metro on my way back home, sitting among a sea of unknown faces, I steeled myself for a long look at my visa photograph. There wasn’t a trace of the queasiness and the sweat and the wait in the studio, of the many things that had happened within, around, before, during and after. It was pure surface. It said nothing.