I found it while looking for something else entirely.
That is how these things usually happen. I was going through a box of old papers in my parents' house - certificates, report cards, a birthday card from someone whose name I no longer recognised - when I found the photograph at the bottom.
It was a family photograph. All of us together - my parents, my younger sister, me. I must have been nine or ten. My sister was maybe six.
I did not remember this photograph being taken. I did not remember the occasion.
We were standing in front of a house I did not immediately recognise. My father had his hand on my shoulder. My mother was looking at the camera with the particular expression she has in photographs - not quite smiling, not unsmiling, something careful in between. My sister was looking at something off to the left, which was typical.
I was squinting.
I looked at my father's face for a long time. He was younger in this photograph than I am now. This was a strange thought to sit with. I had always understood that my parents had been young once but understanding something and seeing it in a photograph are not the same thing.
He looked like himself. But lighter somehow. Less settled into his face.
I asked my mother about it that evening.
She looked at it and said it was taken outside my father's childhood home in Lucknow, before it was sold. She said I had been there once as a child but I would have been too young to remember.
I looked at the photograph again. My father had never talked about that house. Not once that I could recall.
I did not ask more questions that evening. Some things are their own and you sense that asking too many questions is the wrong kind of attention.
But I kept the photograph.
It is in my wallet now - slightly bent at one corner, the colour a little faded. When I look at it I think about the version of my father who is younger than I am now, standing outside a house he would have to leave, holding his son's shoulder.
Some photographs are not memories. They are the evidence of things that happened before you understood enough to pay attention.
