Memory Keepers: These Photographs Of Objects Helps Draw A Mental Map To Childhood

As humans, we constantly attribute meanings to objects. We hold onto them in order to remember a place, a person or a point in time. Whether it is our childhood blankets that we don’t want to give up no matter its worsened condition, a note from a friend or a piece of art that moves through the houses we change. My grandfather’s typewriter finds its way to every house I inhabit, be it my childhood home or my college room or even my first apartment. Back in 1994, Chungking Express had a dialogue that stayed with many, “If memories could be canned, would they also have expiry dates? If so, I hope they last for centuries.”

Objects truly do function as memory keepers and photographer Chirodeep Chaudhuri understands that better than anyone else. During the lockdown, he found himself stuck in Mumbai, missing his parents back home at Calcutta. In order to revive and relive those little moments, he released a set of photographs of various objects as part of a larger collection he had shot in 2019 while at home.

At this point, these photographs have become a way of tracing a mental map of his childhood, travelling back to his parents, and a way of holding onto memory. Each object tells a story and transposes him back home.

“A wedding gift, this wooden doll, my mother told me, held a small vial of perfume. The showcases in our home, when I was growing up, were always full of such curios – some inherited, some received as gifts or others collected patiently, one item at a time, by my parents (mostly Maa),” reveals Chirodeep.

While it isn’t the inherent value of the objects that he wishes to capture, it is the objects’ value to his personal history. Much like the picture of the silver bowl that originally belonged to Durgamoyi Roy, his mother’s maternal grandmother and was a gift to his mother to celebrate seeing her great-grandson for the first time. The bowl, probably 100 years old now, has been with his parents for as long as he has been around and continues to exist as a daily use object at his home.

The safety pin is the last surviving piece from a set of a dozen of such pins was used to keep his diaper in place as an infant. The remaining piece was a gift to Chirodeep’s mother from Eva Maima (his aunt) who was visiting them from the US.

“Maa got the stone elephant and the ivory lion from Thamma. The elephant, in all likelihood, originally belonged to her mother. I can’t remember how it broke but trust my mother to painstakingly put it back together. The lion, I knew, was no plaything.” tells Chirodeep.

“The sand clock, an object of immense fascination for me, was a gift to my parents from my mama, Dilip Ray and my aunt Eva.” says Chirodeep.

The objects do not only form a mental map to Chirodeep’s childhood but also become a way of knowing his family history, the objects laid out tell a story. They encapsulate a lifetime within them, not only his own but also that of his parents and relatives. If books function as ways to navigate through the narrator’s way of life, Chirodeep’s photography of objects from his childhood becomes a way to navigate through the dynamics of his childhood and family, opening up avenues to understand a Bengali household.

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