"It has been so long, kanna, that I am beginning to forget what you used to look like," my mother tells me when I call her up these days, "Why don't you email me some of your more recent photographs?" And she, like all of us, lives looking for warmth in frozen images from the past. Drawing comfort in reinforcing old impressions, created long ago. When reality has much blotted the images of the photographs: roads are narrower; buildings, higher; the air, blacker; and people, much different. But today needs to freeze into pictures, like yesterday did. And we click photographs. One by the huge auditorium, in front of the waterfalls, with exotic species of birds, and one with bright colours of Fall decadence, one with him, and another with her. "Can you click a picture of us, please? Thank you." For, all the fall hues dotting the kaleidoscope, captured into baroque frames, will wait and hope that the next fall is much alike. And we pose, hiding the wrinkles, the receding hairline, careful enough to smile the right amount, stopping the inevitable for a moment -- it should look good in posterity. Though people will have changed. Trees will have been cut. He will no longer smile at you that compassionate smile. She will have run out of love for you. And times will have changed. But it does not matter. What we need is an anti-reality check, when reality will stare at us like the afternoon sun, and we will be too blinded to peer anymore. So we stare at the photographs, once again. The colours in the parchment will not fade like before, wearied by our stares, for they are immaculately stored into email attachments. And the past is rosier, digitally enhanced.

So, in response, I assure my mother, "Okay Ma. I will send you some photographs I clicked during X's visit." And I take photographs every now and then. One by the lake, and one by the trees. And remember to pose well. Lest the smile not belie something else.