Two months later: the slow emergence from darkness; the moment she became Muse

Once again, after having slept for just a few broken hours, I found myself awake and unable to sleep further. I quietly got up, punched the remote to start the car so that it could warm up, dressed, quietly slipped out of the bedroom without disturbing Margie, came to this computer, checked emails and then drove to Family Restaurant to eat an early morning breakfast in solitude.

It is now two months to the day since Muse and soul friend Soundarya chose to follow her husband Anil into the "thereafter," whatever the "thereafter" might be.

I put "thereafter" in quotation marks because Anil once used this word in an email to me to describe how long the journey that he would take with Soundarya as her husband would last - "life and thereafter."

Today is also the first day since November 18 that the sun will completely rise above the horizon in Barrow. A few days ago, I began to read reports from Facebook friends there that the top arch of the sun had been spotted peeking over the drifted tundra, but today is the first day that it will arise in its entirety.

I wish that I could be there to witness it.

Early in this process, I resigned myself to also living with an inner darkness for all the time that the Barrow sun would remain below the horizon. I most certainly have.

Now the sun is coming back.

What I always remember about the winters that I spent completely or mostly in Barrow is how, after the sun would come back, that was when the really deep, bitter, brutal, cold would set in.

I don't know. In my mind, I had imagined myself writing many things about all this in this post, but now that I am sitting here, I don't feel like it. I find that once again my eyes are moist and I feel a trickle on my cheek and I don't want to say or write anything.

I don't know why I am. To write in all circumstance is just who I am, I guess.

I feel so tired. So very, very, tired.

And I am not getting anything done. Except this blog. It is the only thing that I am getting done.

In many ways, this blog has helped me to get through, but I have found myself incapable of doing my work. I open it up and I try, but I just stare at the computer and get nothing done. For some reason, I can always blog, but I can't work.

I have accomplished almost nothing since I last returned from Barrow.

No, that's not true. Besides this blog, I also have a novel that I am working on. I started it quite awhile back, made some progress, stuck it aside, picked it up later, made a little more progress, stuck it aside again.

In the fall, I picked it up again and resolved that this time, I would stay with it, if even for as few as 15 minutes a day, until it is done. I figured that might take ten years - if I live and have a mind for ten more years.

Then, when Anil and then Sandy died, I quit working on it altogether.

But I picked it back up again a couple of weeks ago and I have worked on it every day since.

I set out to do 15 or 30 minutes but often wind up going anywhere from one to three hours. So I am making progress there.

But of course, that puts no money in my bank account.

Amazingly, thanks to the donate button that I have put up on the side bar, this blog does put a little money into my bank account. Nowhere near enough to live on or to allow me to become a full-time blogger, but enough to give me hope that such a thing might actually be possible.

If I could increase my regular readership 100 fold and have support come in at the same level percentage wise that it has been coming in, I could do this blog full time. Then, I could really create something here. Right now, it is just a whisper of what I envision it to become.

Surely, for every individual who does come here on a regular basis there must be 100 more who would if they could somehow be brought into it?

See, all I want to do now for the rest of my life is to work on my books, this blog and the electronic magazine that I plan to add to it.

I suppose that I have rambled like this before and this all sounds redundant. But its true. And that is how the rest of my life should be spent.

This picture, by the way, is me driving back home after breakfast - although I suspect most of you have probably surmised that already.

There are two other things that have helped me get through the darkness so far. One, my family. I don't talk about it much to them, but just to have kids and grandkids swing by now and then, to come around, to go out and get coffee, to carry a spatula everywhere, to look with adoring baby eyes into my eyes and to feel the often sad but sweet spirit of my wife who has endured through this insane, risky, always insecure, forever teetering on financial destruction, life-stye that living with me these past 37 years has subjected her to.

And there is Soundarya's family, which is also my family. Her brother, Ganesh, my nephew - he credits me for introducing him to the fact that he is a photographer. He is a natural and has the potential to be great. In our communications, although she is always there, we do not talk about Sandy much, but rather about pictures, and about what we are going to do in her memory, namely to take a long hike in the Brooks Range.

Then there is her sister, Sujitha - Suji - my niece, who has appeared in this blog, who loves Jobe and Kalib and who leaves a comment or two here now and then. In so many ways it is she, who has been hurt so very, very deeply, more deeply than I can even hint at here, who has helped me to the deepest degree, just in the communications that we share back in forth.

While it may be difficult for some to understand this deep, platonic, relationship that I share with her sister, still, now, even in her death as I did in her life, Sujitha does understand and she lends comfort that could only be lent by one who understands and is hurt and grieving to the maximum degree herself.

The maximum degree. Yet, she helps me. I am happy that little Jobe, in particular, helps her. And from 9000 miles away.

It looks like Suji and Manu's wedding will happen late next month. I wish that I could be there, but I see no way.

There is also Kavitha, or Cawitha, Soundarya's cousin. I met her only one time and that was at Sandy and Anil's wedding. We do not exchange emails all the time, but every now and then and, except for those that came with announcements of death, I always enjoy receiving them. Kavitha is a trekker. She treks in the Himalayas, she treks about southern India, she treks into dark caves.

She plans to come on the Brooks Range hike.

I hope the rest of us can keep up with her.

One thing worries me a little bit about this hike. My Indian relatives are all vegetarians. We can carry a certain amount of dried food, maybe even enough to get us through with some fairlly significant weight loss, which will be good for me, but I would kind of like to supplement our diet with at least a few fish and maybe some ptarmigan. If there are enough of us to eat it all, maybe even a caribou. But I can't feed fish, ptarmigan and caribou to vegetarians!

We will have to carry a gun or two, both for protection and as a survival mechanism, should it come to that.

I think we will figure it all out, though.

Last night, I dreamed that we had just left on this hike. We were very unprepared. Margie had packed my pack and I did not even know what was in it.

When I opened it up, I found a suit, white shirt, tie and a pair of shiny, black, shoes.

The above image, by the way, is Metro Cafe as I drive by on my way home from breakfast.

There is a folder within my pictures folder labeled, "Ravens for Sandy." It has many photos in it, many that I sent her and others that I did not, but that I placed in the folder to hold until the day that I would.

And all these ravens that continually appear here, I still photograph them for Sandy. I no longer put them in that folder, but only here, in my daily blog folders, but still I photograph them for her.

I photographed this one yesterday, as I walked to Metro to get my afternoon coffee. Both Kalib and Jobe had fallen ill, could not go to daycare and so Margie had gone to town to babysit them. I was left without a car and so I walked.

I am a little surprised to realize that I took no pictures while I was at Metro.

I don't know how that happened. I had my camera. It just never occurred to me to take a picture while I was there. 

And this was one of those rare times when I was on the inside, at a table, slowly devouring a hot cinnamon roll as I sipped and savored the coffee - not on the outside, looking in through the drive-through window. Maybe I am beginning to lose it.

Hey - just a couple of weeks ago, it would have been completely dark at the time that I took this picture.

So the light is coming back. It feels kind of strange - as it always does when the light first manifests itself in the new year. We have had plenty of cool weather in the sub-zeros here in Wasilla, but we have yet to experience any true, deep, cold this year like we can get in this neighborhood this time of year.

I guess we had better brace ourselves. It ought to be coming any time now.

The moment she became Muse

Although I have been running this little series of India pictures in memory of her, I have not been including pictures of Sandy herself.

Today, I make what I believe will be my one exception, because I did not explain this muse thing quite well enough. I did explain how, after my first trip to India, I began to photograph the world that I live and work in here in Alaska with the goal of producing images that could explain it to a young woman in India and thus she was my muse.

But this is the moment - the very moment - she became Muse.

In the early 1990's, at the request of Melanie and Lisa, whenever I would travel, I began to photograph cats wherever I could find them. If I went to a new community, village, city, state or country, I would always seek out a cat and photograph it for my daughters.

So, when my sister's daughter Khena and Vivek planned their wedding and it became clear that I was going to go to India, I immediately began to imagine the cats that I might find to photograph there.

But Khena told me that in all her travels with Vivek in India, she had not seen a single cat. She did not believe that it was common there for people to keep cats the way they do here. Vivek could think of no cats, either. When I got off the plane and met his parents, they did not know about any cats.

And then, after the wedding feast where two soul friends from who knows how far back recognized each other, Sandy invited me to walk and so we walked.

We talked of other things and did not speak of cats.

Then all of a sudden she squealed with delight. She had spotted a cat - this one. She hurried over to the fence. She did not know the lady but asked her to hand her the kitten and let her hold it for awhile. The lady picked up the kitten and lifted it over the top of the fence. I raised my camera.

Hence, Soundarya! Muse!

May her memory live forever.

View images as slides

Charlie: Two studies; bubbles in the Indian wind

Those who visited this blog yesterday know that I posted only the first image that I shot from a day that was spent with Kalib, Jobe, Lisa, Melanie, Charlie, Caleb and Margie. Since then, I have been debating with myself as to whether or not I should go ahead and post a series of photos from that day or just move on to other topics - as I do have many items backing up, including Junipurr's scary fight for life and a Metro Cafe event where I found myself warmly engulfed by a horde of beautiful women.

I decided to post and I have now spent at least an hour-and-a-half preparing the photos for that post, but I can't afford to spend anymore time at it.

So, I will save it all for tomorrow, except for these two academic studies of Charlie:

Charlie Study, #3982: Charlie sitting on a chair, caught by window light

Charlie Study, #67692: Charlie, caught by headlights, as he prepares to drive from Wasilla to Anchorage

But I must also include one from India:

After we passed the elephants, Anil and Melanie made bubbles in the wind.

View images as slides

Transitions - Barrow to Wasilla: iPhone communications to the living and from the dead - I have opened comments on the previous post*

My flight on Alaska Airlines was scheduled to leave Barrow at 8:20 PM, but it was running about one hour late. So I took a seat and pulled out my iPhone to occupy myself. Soon, Hazel Pebbly and her granddaughter, Makayla, whose Iñupiaq name is Pamilaq, sat down across from me and pulled out their own phones while the fellow at left played on his iPad and the woman at right worked on her laptop.

I am not certain, but it sounded to me like Makayla was talking to a young sibling - a brother, I think. It might have been a cousin.

"I love you," she said. "Now you say it..."

There was a pause. 

"Say, 'I...'" she continued...

"Now say, 'love...'

"Good! Now say, 'you!...

"I... love... you!... I love you!"

Sometime after Jacob and Lavina gave me my iPhone, I began to use it to send email messages to Sandy from different airports whenever I would go traveling.

Just before I had left Anchorage to come to Barrow on this trip, I sent this message from Gate C 4:

Hi Sandy,

Here I am, sitting at gate 4, Ted Stevens International Airport in Anchorage, about to board the jet to Barrow. I have been insanely busy, yet I did not even come close to getting everything done that I needed to.

Oh well. It will all come together - it always does. I hope you get a chance to read my blog today - the one about the movie set.

Got to go. It's cold and windy. It will be colder in Barrow.

Love,
Bill

Sent from my iPhone

I felt extremely exhausted that day and a very strange thing happened after I boarded the plane. It was a cold day and the wind was howling. I was so unfortunate as to get a middle seat, squished between two big guys, so I sank myself as deeply into my seatback as I could, folded my arms over my chest and closed my eyes.

After awhile, I heard the engines rev up a bit and felt the plane begin to taxi. I kept my eyes closed. I felt the motions of the plane as it rolled down the taxi-way and made its turns, then heard the engines thrust to full power. I felt the g's as the jet accelerated down the runway. Still, I kept my eyes closed. My eyelids were so heavy I had no other choice. Then I felt the airplane rise into the air. Very soon, it slammed into rough turbulence, created by the wind as it tumbled over the mountains.

Turbulence is nothing new to me. I kept my eyes closed as the plane climbed through, buffeted and jolted until finally it rose above the turbulence. The flight smoothed out and the roar of the engines settled into pleasant background drone.

After we had been flying for what seemed to be half an hour or so, I suddenly heard a new sound come from the engines - that kind of minor acceleration that a pilot will use to shift directions or change speed while rolling on the ground.

Startled, I opened my eyes and saw that we were rolling on pavement. I could not believe it. How could we have landed without me feeling the jolt? I looked beyond the runway into the dim winter light, expecting to see the hills and vegetation of Fairbanks, but instead saw those that border the Anchorage airport.

I had dreamed the whole thing.

Now, the plane really did pull onto the runway. The engines accelerated, I felt the g's, the plane lifted off, then flew into a blast of turbulence and began to climb through it - exactly as I had experienced in the dream.

After we landed in Fairbanks, I sat in my seat doing nothing as departing passengers left the plane and others boarded. After awhile, I decided to tell Sandy of the experience, so I pulled out my iPhone, opened an email to her and wrote this:

Hello again...

Now I am sitting inside the jet as it waits outside the Fairbanks terminal for the new passengers who will fly on to Barrow with us.

It looks pretty cold out there.

I had a pretty strange experience after I boarded in Anchorage, I was clamped into the middle seat between two big guys, I just sunk as far back into seat cushion as I could and ... Oo got to power down

 
Sent from my iPhone

I did not get to finish, because the Stewardess had given the order to shut down all electronic devices.

The next evening in Barrow, I received this email back from Soundarya:

Hi Bill,

My laptop crashed again & I wondered how long I had to wait to read your mails...I'm glad I could!

Guess you had a squeezy journey?

You are quiet busy! Takecare...don't push yourself to the extreme.

Gotto rush now. Sorry for such a short mail. Will mail you later....

Love & Stress-Free hugs!

Sandy

These were the last words that she will ever write to me. Perhaps what I wrote above was the last of my words that she ever read. I did send her three emails in the short span between Anil's death and hers, but I do not know if she ever received or read them. I suspect that she didn't.

After I stood up and got into the security line, I heard someone call out my name. I turned and saw a woman looking at me and waved shyly, because I was not quite certain who she was. Then I heard the same voice as before call out my name again and say, "over here!"

I had been looking at the wrong person. It was my friend, Misty Nayakik from Wainwright who had called my name. She was with her young son, Caleb. She had just come in on the jet from Anchorage with her special man, Kennedy Ahmaogak, who was elsewhere in the terminal waiting for their bags to arrive.

He has been receiving treatment for cancer in Anchorage. Happily, that treatment has gone well and Kennedy is doing well now.

Finally, we boarded and then the jet was climbing into the darkness above the Arctic Slope.

Jeffrey Maupin, an entrepreneur, was sitting in the "C" seat across the aisle from me. I had been assigned to seat "D," but "E" and "F" were empty, so I scooted over to sit by the window. Not because I wanted to see what was outside - only blackness could be seen out there - but so I could lay my head against the wall and doze.

I did, too, and every now and then I would slip off briefly, only to find that my dreamy state was every bit as dark as the blackness pressing in at the window.

Jeffrey told me that every time he sees me, he thinks about his college days. I told him that I everytime I see him, I think about his college days, too.

I was working for the Tundra Times then and I did an article on Alaska Native college students. I interviewed Jeffrey in a place where Native students gather but that interview was continually interrupted by female students who saw Jeffrey and swung over to say "hi," to get his attention and even to flirt a bit.

They all seemed to be quite interested in him.

I reminded him of that.

"Could you tell me where those ladies are now?" he joked.

Once, many years ago, I was walking down the street in Barrow when Jeffrey stopped and offered me a ride.

I wasn't really going anywhere and neither was he. We were both just wandering about, to see what we could see.

The Running Dog was in top flying condition then, so I told Jeffrey to take me to the airport. I jumped into the front seat and took the stick. He jumped into the back. Then I took him flying, weaving about over various of the myriad million lakes of the Arctic Slope until we found ourselves near Atqasuk. I then brought him back to Barrow.

"Wow!" he said. "I was born and raised here but I never saw the country like that before."

That was then.

"Do you still have your airplane?" he asked, from the seat across the aisle.

"Yes," I said, "but it's wrecked. It doesn't fly anymore."

This is now.

In front of me sat someone with nicely coiffed hair.

When we began to draw near to Fairbanks, the pilot turned on the landing lights. The glow reflected off the leading edge of the wing and the tiny little stabilizers that run most of its length.

Then we were on the tarmac in Fairbanks and it was a shocking sight. Rain was falling, splattering against the window and pooling in slushy puddles outside. It used to be that even when the warmest Pineapple Express would blow in off the Pacific to turn winter-time Anchorage and Wasilla into a slushy mess, Fairbanks could be counted on to remain well below freezing, if not below zero. The snow there would stay good and dry.

Long-range forecasters predicted that this would be a cold winter, but so far it seems to have been warm - the warmest yet. In the past, when I would go to Barrow this time of year, the temperature would usually stay below zero the whole time that I was there. This time, it never went below zero and it got as warm as +32.

And Fairbanks! Look! The temperature in Fairbanks was about +40. Forty below would not have surprised me, but +40?

My niece Shaela had called from L.A. before I left Barrow. She said it was about 40 there.

Before we left Fairbanks, the plane filled completely up, they closed the doors and then the mysterious and enchanting stewardess delivered the preflight briefing. Her gaze seemed to reach somewhere way out beyond the fuselage walls.

I wondered what she could see that was invisible to the rest of us?

Lighted signs pointed the way as the pilot taxied toward the runway.

Then the plane was airborne and we were rising over Fairbanks International Airport.

A week or two ago, Sandy sent me an email to tell me that she had taken up the study of Spanish. She asked what language I would most like to learn. Iñupiaq, I answered, followed closely by Apache so that I could speak to Margie in her own tongue. Next would be Tamil, so that I could talk to Soundarya in her native language.

After the jet landed in Anchorage, I called Melanie's phone and Charlie answered. He said he would tell Melanie and she would leave for the airport right away. When I stepped into the terminal, I found that I had entered at Cate C-9, the one farthest from baggage claim. That was okay. I needed the walk.

The last place that I ever saw Soundarya was at the Bangalore Airport. Murthy had hired a big, van-like taxi-cab operated by a trusted driver and much of the family had come along to say goodbye to Melanie and me. Anil and Buddy traveled on Anil's motor scooter, sometimes zipping ahead of us, sometimes falling behind, sometimes right alongside. I sat in the passenger seat so that I could take photos. Sandy sat behind me and leaned forward so that her head rested on my seatback and from where she could lay her hand upon my shoulder. When my camera would go down, she would clasp my hand.

Sometimes, she would lean her head against my shoulder.

After we arrived at the airport and left the taxi, she again took my hand in hers. It was a complicated process just to approach the airport terminal and only ticketed passengers were allowed to enter. Melanie got through the outside confusion before I did and entered the terminal ahead of me. This worried me a bit, because I did not want to lose sight of her.

Sandy kept hold of my hand as I worked my way through the bureaurocracy and then walked to the terminal door, where a guard stood to see that only those with tickets entered.

I showed him my ticket and my passport. He motioned me to enter. Still, Sandy held firmly and warmly onto my hand, but remained outside as I passed through the doorway. Our arms began to stretch. "Look!" Sandy's mom, Banu, said. "She is going to the US with him!" The family laughed. Then the stretch grew too great. Her hand slipped away, her fingertips brushing mine as it did.

I turned, looked at the faces of all the family behind, then into her eyes, filled now with a painful mix of joy and sorrow, moistened by tears. I walked on. Sandy disappeared from sight. I searched the crowd for Melanie and found her - although she would fly out on a different airplane.

Melanie arrived at the baggage area before I did, but thanks to the heavy traffic had to park a good hike away.

As I hiked toward her, I came upon little Iqilan, held in her aaka's arms..

I am not certain that I have spelled her name correctly. If I haven't, her Aapa Charlie is invited to correct me.

I had always believed that one day Sandy and Anil would get off the plane in Anchorage so that I could finally give that tour of Alaska that we so often talked about. I would have Woody Guthrie plugged into the car's stereo system through the iPhone and the first thing she would hear would be him singing, "This land is my land, this land is your land..."

Then I would drive through Anchorage and would show the sights. Yes, even this diner. I have never eaten here, because some of my children have and they were not impressed. If she wanted to, it would be okay, but I doubt this diner has much of a vegetarian menu.

Margie and I went to this new movie theatre complex for the first time about two weeks ago. Afterward, I wrote an email to Sandy and told her about the movie and that if she got a chance to see it, she should watch for a certain kind of black taxi-cab that we had talked about before, a kind that I have seen only in London.

She answered that it would take the movie at least 45 days to reach India, but when it did she would go and she would watch for that taxi-cab.

The movie? Clint Eastwood's Hereafter. It begins with what can only be the tsunami that struck southern Asia in December, 2004 and that killed over a quarter million people, including many in India. Matt Damon stars in the movie as a psychic with the ability to help the troubled living connect with their dead loved ones and then bring them comfort.

Despite the late hour and the fact that she would only have to turn around and drive back to Anchorage, Melanie drove me home. I don't remember precisely when we arrived, but I believe it was after 2:00 AM. I was very glad that it was Melanie who picked me up.

We both needed to spend some time alone together. It wasn't enough time, but it was good time.

As you can see, the warm weather that has gripped all of Alaska was here, too. I have not seen any forecasts, but Melanie tells me that it is supposed to get cold in a day or two. Below zero.

I hope so. It bothers me when the climatic world gets so off-kilter as it has been lately.

We passed by Eagle River, but did not stop to eat.

And then we continued on to Wasilla. Maybe because I was so tired, I forgot to take any pictures after we arrived. I will take plenty of pictures at our Thanksgiving feast. It will be at Jacob and Lavina's this year.

*Although I had disabled the comments on the previous post, a few readers left comments elsewhere and made it clear to me that I had been unfair to readers who themselves mourn this loss.

I know it is too late to accommodate most of those who would have left comments, but I have gone ahead and enabled comments for that post.

View images as slide show

Slide Show, ten images: the Barrow Whalers football at practice

View the 10 image Barrow Whalers football practice slide show

In my last post, I wrote that today I would post images from yesterday's Barrow Whalers football game, the season opener, but I have changed my mind. I did prepare a selection of images from that game to post, but I was lacking some fundamental information that I can only get by talking to a coach, maybe a player or two and it is Sunday and I do not want to bother anybody by tracking them down at their homes.

Plus, I am feeling kind of lazy myself and don't really want to do any tracking.

So, instead, for today, I am just going to run this 10 image slide show of the Whalers at practice the day before the game. Perhaps tomorrow I will post the game.

It had been my intent to include a photo essay in the Uiñiq magazine that I completed several months back but which, for a succession of odd reasons, took a tremendous amount of time to get printed, mailed and then delivered and so only recently reached most readers. 

Before I had the chance to shoot that essay, I took my bad fall, shattered my shoulder, went through my two surgeries, lost my right shoulder and got a titanium one. So, when the 2008 football season started up less than two months later, I was in no condition to stand on the sidelines and try to shoot football.

By the 2009 season, my shoulder was still quite fragile but I could handle my big cameras again and had been thinking about it, but then my wife broke her knee for the second time in 7 months and I found myself unable to do much of anything but to help care for her.

Football was out. 

I still feel a little badly about that, because last year was the whalers 4th season and the final year that any players from the original team, one that has become a bit of a legend, would be with the team.

This year, the Barrow Whalers football team is in what is commonly called a "rebuilding season" in the sport - this means that the older, experienced players that made the team into the legend that it has become have moved on to be replaced by a largely younger group with less experience.

Yet, I have discovered that there is enthusiasm and fire in these boys and so this year I have set out to finally do my Barrow Whalers football essay - too late to capture any of the first squad of players, but then they were widely documented nationally by ESPN and others and may well be the subject of a future movie, so perhaps there was not much that I could have added to their story, anyway.

While the majority population of Barrow remains Iñupiat and Barrow is definitely an Iñupiat town, it is also a cosmopolitan community with residents whose roots and origins reach around the world. So too, as Coach Mark Voss told me, is the composition of the team and coaching staff cosmopolitan - Iñupiat, Samoan, Tongan, Hawaiian, White, African American, Filipino, Latino...

Should I pull this off as I hope, I think it will prove to be an interesting essay. While my take yesterday does do a functional job of covering the game, it is not what I would have hoped it would be. Yesterday, I learned that when it comes to photographing football, a game that I had not shot a single frame on since the fall of '92 when Caleb played his final year at Wasilla High, I am out of practice and need to sharpen my skills.

So I will attend more practice sessions this week to take many pictures. My only real purpose will be to hone my skills for future game times and to better get to know the players and coaching staff, so that hopefully I can produce the kind of essay that I envision.

To see the ten image slide show from the practice the day before the first came, click on the photo or on either of the links above and below this text.

View the 10 image Barrow Whalers practice slide show

2009 in review - May: Melanie and I go to India for Soundarya's wedding; I ride a bike in the cool Wasilla air; Kalib gets tossed

What a transition, huh? From the ice pack of the Arctic Ocean to a sweltering, sweltering, hot day in Bangalore, Karnataka, India. And it all happened because of this beautiful woman, Soundarya Ravichandran - about to become Soundarya Anil Kumar. I first met her 21 months earlier when my niece, Khena Swallow, married her cousin, Vivik Iyer, in Bangalore.

Yet, it did not feel like I had just met her, but rather that I had always known her. Tables had been set up in long rows for the wedding feast. Guests sat on only one side of the tables so that the servers could file past in front of them, spooning food onto their banana leaves, which served as plates.

She sat at the table directly opposite mine, facing me. So I raised my camera and focused it on her. "I don't take good pictures," she protested, embarrassed.

"That's okay," I said, "I do." 

After dinner, she invited me to walk with her, and we soon came upon a woman standing in a tiny yard behind a tall fence, along with an orange and white kitten and a little white dog. Sandy asked the woman if she could hold the kitten, so she passed it over the fence to her. She went nuts for that kitten, cuddling and petting it, smiling and laughing in true joy. I took some pictures and we have been the fastest of friends ever since.

Thanks to the internet, it is easy to keep in touch.

I call her "Muse," because even from so far away she has caused me to take pictures that I would never have taken. She has asked me to write stories that I might never otherwise have written.

I promised her that when she got married, I would come back to India to photograph her wedding.

And now she was getting married, so here I was.

And this man would be her groom - Anil Kumar. It would not be an arranged marriage, but a love marriage and would cross the caste lines of old.

There were musicians at the wedding, creating music of a type that we do not normally hear, here in Alaska.

And there were cooks, and cooks helpers, creating food as delicious as any that you can imagine. Oh, my goodness... was it good.

Now let me back up a bit, to very early in the day. A pre-wedding, pre-sunrise, ceremony was to be held at the home of the bride. Melanie had come to India with me and Vivek's parents had put us up at their house. We had spent the previous day with Vivek's mom, Vasanthi, shopping for saree material for Melanie and we had visited a tailor, who measured her and then went to work, cutting and stitching.

So, although we were still exhausted from the 40 hour trip, we got up at 4:00 AM so that we could get to Sandy's house in time for the ceremony.

Murthy, Vivek's dad, had arranged for a taxi-cab to pick us up, but the taxi did not show. I was a little distressed, as I wanted to photograph the day's events from beginning to end.

So Murthy put me on the back of his motor-bike and off we went. Bangalore is a huge, sprawling, city - twice the size of New York and, even in the light traffic of early morning, it took us nearly 45 minutes to get there.

We made it in time. Here, Soundarya receives a blessing from her mother, Bhanumati, or "Bhanu."

Soundarya enters the wedding hall with her entourage. Compared to a Indian wedding, a typical American wedding is a brief and simple affair. Many, many, many things happen at an Indian wedding and as I covered a good portion of it to some depth over several earlier posts, I am not going to do too much with it now.

Instead, I will jump to this scene, many hours later, when everybody broke out into applause, because Anil and Soundarya were now husband and wife.

This doesn't mean the ceremony was over. Many things would yet happen.

Finally, they got to eat. They fed each other little cakes, kind of like what happens at an American wedding.

After dinner, the ceremonies moved to the house of the groom's mother. You see the hand that gestures? That hand belongs to a photographer that the groom's family hired and he, along with his videographer, was a nightmare to me.

The videographer had a powerful, harsh, flat, spotlight, the likes of which I have never seen in the US. See the beautiful light from the candle? In about two seconds, maybe one, that videographer will blast that light away with the searing, brutal, glare of his spotlight.

The photographer will shoot his stills with flash, straight on, giving it the most washed-out effect possible. He will interrupt things and order people around.

And the photographer was very aggressive - he used his shoulders and elbows whenever he got near me.

But I was in his country, and this seems to be how wedding photographers go about things here, so there wasn't much I could do about it. I had to accept it and work around these two guys the best I could.

Ah, if only I could meet them on the ice-pack one day!

But you know what I would do if I did? I would help them out as best I could.

The bride and groom enter, kicking over a container of rice. More things happened as well.

Then there was a break. We all gathered around this laptop with Anil's brother, Ashok, and his wife, Thruptha, to look at pictures of their wedding, which had happened a short time before. That's Thruptha on the screen and sitting at right.

In the middle is Melanie, so beautiful in her new saree.

Melanie receives a blessing.

When it comes to my picture in this blog, my policy has been mostly to photograph shadows, sometimes mirror images and once in awhile a self-portrait.

But I want to include this one to promote my nephew, Ganesh, "Gane," Sandy's brother. He is a natural born photographer, wants to become pro and he ought to. He likes to roam around in the forest to photograph elephants, especially the big "tuskers," and other wildlife that he finds there. He does a good job with people. He did not have a camera, so he picked up mine and shot me drinking from a coconut, with these two characters nearby.

It was now about 1:00 AM. We moved back to the home of Sandy's mom and dad, where the day had begun.

Thankfully, the photographer and his videographer did not come. I had this to myself.

I should note that I did not manage to get any of the evening home pictures in my earlier series, either here or at the house of Anil's mom, so this is the first time anyone has seen them - even me.

Bhanu blesses the new couple before they enter the house.

Inside, there will be more blessings, for both the bride...

...and the groom.

This is Sandy's sister, Sujitha, "Barbie," and her man, Manu. It is kind of complicated to explain, so I won't, but they are hoping to have a wedding ceremony before long and they want me to come.

I want to be there but I am so broke now, I don't know how I can pull it off. But things always change so we will see.

Melanie and I did some touring after that, with Murthy and Vasanthi as our hosts. Being a host in India means something different than it does in the US. They would not let us pay for anything. We traveled by hired cab, and they paid for the cab and driver. They paid for hotels, they bought our meals.

If we started to look at souveniers, they would buy those, too.

I am pretty certain that if the richest family in the US were to be the hosts of a dirt-poor family in India, that family would not let the rich people spend hardly a rupee, but would sacrifice all that they had to make them comfortable.

Sandy and Anil came on the first trip, Vasanthi on every trip, usually with Buddy, who you can meet in the original series. Murthy had to work and so came only on the final trip.

To date, I have not found the time to even look at but the smallest portion of my take.

Sometime, I hope to sit down and do so. When I do, I will share the results with you. I am certain there is some good stuff in there.

As you can see, the momma monkey loves her baby. She told the daddy monkey to go to the store and buy a soda pop for the baby. As you can see, he did.

But then the daddy monkey drank all the pop himself. He refused to share. He was that kind of monkey.

We saw many wondrous things, including this ancient temple at Hampi. I had pulled this image at random out of my take for the original post.

Fishermen, at sunrise in the Sea of Bengal, offshore from Chennai.

And then, one day, I was back home in Wasilla. It was raining. Compared to India, it was a cold rain. I got on my bike and pedaled and pedaled. The cool, clean, air was so good to breathe, the cold rain felt wonderful.

But don't misunderstand. There is something about India that I love deeply. I wish that I had found the place when I was younger and that I had the money to go back again and again.

Even now, I want to go back again and again.

Yet, I hate to leave Alaska for very long.

That is the conundrum. 

Kalib, of course, must be included in this post. I actually took this shortly before Melanie and I left for India. Kalib had come down with pneumonia, but was getting better.

His dad made certain he got some air into his lungs.