Barthes says the Photograph is never a memory—it actually blocks memory, becomes a counter-memory. There are huge gaps in my memories from childhood, and the family photos that survive are infinitely more scattered. These gaps sometimes seem larger than the collective amnesia of an entire people completely losing a self-determination movement to the larger State that swallowed it whole.

Koka's dementia was even longer.

Alzheimer's is scary in the sense that it reveals everything about the people taking care of the person who's actively losing memories every day—memories that define their relationships with the others. Koka took a lot of photos, and was the only person who actively looked after them in the family. Or at least thats how I remember it. The family albums that survive, survive in parts, all of them as exposed to Guwahati's humidity as we were for ten years. Now along with the sporadic, violent memories I have of these ten years of Koka's Alzheimer's, all I have left is equally sporadic family photographs.

Before I can go out and photograph anyone else, this leftover archive of memories and counter-memories is what I'm making sense of.