Picture this: a village called lamayuru situated somewhere between srinigar and leh: in this village a stone two-storey with the words "Medical Clinic" painted in red on the side: in this stone two-storey a man, a doctor, a brahmin, squatting in a cluttered kitchen area, smoking a bidi to pass the time: in this image of a smoking doctor of a stoney clinic of a midway village: is this is there a body that we know about? Does tobacco smoke stray off the page and infiltrate viewing lungs? Does hard cement in the summer warmth cool viewing ankles? Whose hands are these entexutalized and quadrupley fbcussed upon? Does his gaze graze on these hands or do these hands graze grate grind over his body's image? A story a story a story a store he the subject and me the viewer, the photographer cannot hear the photograph.

No such thing as a photgraphic self-portrait, no such thing as a photograph which is not a self-portrait, no such thing, perhaps, as a definitive line between the front and back of a lens. Especially when the south asian subject clashes with the south asian viewer, emulsion turning brown. This is the head space.

The head looks up, turns up, toward, takes in the image already taken. This is the disconnection, the disarticulation, the place where the head is taken off. A barren (not barrel) chest, cut off from parts extreme. In here is a south asian story of south asian experience in (and not in) a south asian world.

A south asian body tail. The viewer is clothed in darkness, hands in warped content, and in the text inscribes itself around the body, the south asian body, clothing the body in words unauthored. The movement comes from the groin, clothed itself in jeans, not pyjamas, and hands clasp unclasp silently between gazes. Still a still glance from below unaffected by rising bidi smoke or by errant window light or side-by-side residing hands still.

He looks up on he, he looks upon he, and up to legs flexed in mid-rise, legs floating between words. The south asian body is diasporized, say they, the body of southasianness dispersed, But here is the immediacy of the body, south asian conflicted between the rise and fall of a shutter, captured and transposed into silver-based brown.