Kiss of Dawn

I was going through old papers, and came across these photographs, the first R ever took, as a boy, using a borrowed box camera. As it happens, when I was a child my mother gave me the box camera she had used as a child - seeing these photographs I groaned at the thought of my own efforts:

"Kiss of Dawn" -- Tiger Hill, Darjeeling (1948)

Burmese Pagoda, Eden Gardens, Calcutta (1948)

Gandhi Statue from window of the police chowki,
Juhu, Bombay (1953)

Two of his photographs were published in Navroz, a Parsi magazine based in Calcutta, in 1953, with an article about Darjeeling. When he went with a posse of his classmates to collect the promised payment of Rs. 5, they were told that they should go away, and be happy that he had gotten his pictures in print at such a young age.

R entitled his picture of Tiger Hill "Kiss of Dawn"; but because of his strong Gujarati accent, his friends heard it as "Keys of Dawn." It was only when they saw the name in print that they realised what the name really was. Apparently no one wondered what "Keys of Dawn" might signify.


(Photographs by Ramesh Gandhi -- his website: www.rameshgandhi.com; his blog: http://rameshgandhi.blogspot.com)