I think it was this one. It definitely looks like the camera brought from the Soviet Union for me in the mid-1970s by my Ma. She had a stint as a teacher of the Russian language to non-Russian, mostly African, students at the Patrice Lumumba Friendship University in Moscow. The Berlin Wall had not been torn down, Soviet Russia was still the other pole in a bipolar world, Leonid Brezhnev was its leader, Indira Gandhi was India’s Prime Minister, my parents were filmmakers and I was a school student in Navy Nagar, Bombay.

The memory came up because a photographer friend wrote recently about how, when he was in the depths of despair, in the 1980s, he was gifted a 1970 Olympus (German) camera. One evening after spending nights at the hospital he was resting at home when he picked up the camera. It had no film.
Digital photography had not evolved. He wound and unwound the stick over and again, 20, 200 and probably 2000 times, absent-minded yet lost in thought, till he fell asleep.

When he woke up in the morning the Olympus was next to him. He wondered if it was a dream. It wasn’t.
He twirled the stick again, clicked, checked the shutter speed from 1/18 to 1/1000. It worked.

He went on to become a fellow of the National Geographic Society.

My Smena is lost in the movements of time and space. It used to load cassettes of 35 mm rolls that would take 36 stills.
It had an automatic rewind button. After the film rolled back into the cassette I learnt to take it into a darkroom, develop it, first the negative then a positive on sticky raw film and then a contact print and then pick and choose the positives if they were worth it to enlarge. My Ma had brought the camera for me because even back then I had set my mind on being a journalist.

In between travelling from Bombay to Delhi to Calcutta to Delhi and back to Calcutta and losing parents and more the Smena, last remembered ensconced in a carton full of wires and junk like used plugs and sockets, has vanished.
The camera had to be held by both hands. The right forefinger clicked it.

The concept of the selfie if it existed was unknown to me. I took pictures of a shipwreck off Napean Sea Road in South Bombay.

The iron ore-laden ship was sailing to Karachi, The Times of India reported, when it drifted too close to the shore and got grounded. It was a medium-sized ship. The shore there was, is, rocky. Barnacles had crept up its stilled propeller and the hull of the brown rusty tub.

The pictures were captured in that Smena. It wasn’t an SLR – I learnt about single lens reflex much later –and the pictures came out in grainy black-and-white but I could write around it later in the (Elphinstone) college magazine.

It has to be said that photographic memory aids the written word. Maxim Gorky replied to students during an interaction when he was asked what it takes to be a writer in one word.
“Memory”.

Three decades later on one of many reporting assignments to Afghanistan I found myself in Jalalabad. I want to go to Torkhum, the Afghan end of the Khyber Pass. The US-led coalition forces had invaded the country following 9/11, the rocketing of New York’s Twin Towers in the year 2001.

Inside the Indian Consulate in Jalalabad the Indians who were supposed to be diplomats were cloistered in the brown-walled compound afraid to step out. For months they were living, sleeping, and being in one anothers’ faces. They warned me not to attempt to go to Torkhum.

At night in a hotel near the radio station in Jalalabad that was gifted to Afghanistan by the All India Radio masked men came to meet me. They said they will escort me to Torkhum. Torkhum is on the western end of the Kabul River Bridge. Across it is
Landikotal of Pakistan. Landikotal is manned by the Pakistan Rangers. On the Afghan side Torkham is flanked by the Safed Koh, the white mountains.

I thought about the proposal. What if I were kidnapped? The Indian state being what it is and security for journalists being what they are was it a risk worth taking?

Then this masked man in a turban comes up to the cot – the room in the hotel had only a moth-eaten cot – and asked in broken English : “Hind?” (Indian?).

“Hanh, yes”

“Speak English?”

“Yes”.
“Camera?”
“No”
“I got. Help”.

From a satchel he was carrying across
his shoulders he dug out a Cold War
product.

It was a Smena.