The Boy in the Immaculate White Shirt

In my initial blog post Travellismus: The Blog, I mentioned the boy in the immaculate white shirt. This is his story.

The boy in the immaculate white shirt

In 2009, I travelled to Hyderabad during Ganesh Chaturthi, when crowds take to the streets to celebrate the birth of the elephant-headed god, Ganesh.

If you have never experienced it, imagine noise with extra noise piled on top. Honking traffic. Drums. Music fired into the street at full volume. Incense. Heat. Fumes. Colour. People everywhere.

I was sitting outside in the restaurant area of my hotel one afternoon, smoking a cigarette and quietly minding my own business. I know. A dirty habit! I gave up smoking in November 2017 and do not miss it. But at the time I was a smoker. Nearby sat a family of universally genetically posh they looked like something out of a lab experiment. The daughter had perfect ringlets. In India! Proper Shirley Temple ringlets. I remember thinking that some poor servant must have battled with humidity, brushes, and divine intervention to get them in place.

They were sitting upwind from my cigarette smoke and began performing theatrical concern for the child’s lungs while oblivious to the fleet of auto-rickshaws, taxis, cars, trucks and lorries belching black fumes into the air around us. (Can you hear the grumpy smoker in me?) I was tired, hot and slightly cranky, so their performance irritated me more than it probably should have.

Before the boy in the immaculate white shirt appeared

I heard the music coming from beyond the hotel garden wall. Not polished. Drums, shouting and whistles.

I stubbed out the cigarette into the ashtray — admittedly with slightly more flourish than necessary, inspite of the fact that no one was actually looking at me — and ran to get my camera. Let’s be clear. I do not run. My entire life philosophy has been built around the principle that only cowards run. Yet there I was, charging through a Hyderabad hotel looking for my camera bag because curiosity had beaten the crank in me and common sense said something was happening out there.

I followed the sound along the wide main street until I caught up with a tiny procession: two women, four or five children and a pram carrying a couple of small Ganesh idols balanced on what looked suspiciously like a wooden bakery tray. It was wonderfully homemade. Not some “meaningful experience”. Nobody had designed it. Nobody was selling tickets. It simply existed, and I had stumbled into it.

I gave them the universal traveller’s expression of “Would it be alright if I joined you?” — part smile, part nod, part awkward head wobble — and was immediately accepted into the group. The children were delighted by the arrival of a wandering gora in their tiny procession. For the second time on that trip, Hyderabad had other plans for me. Suddenly the fluorescent pink powder appeared. You know the stuff. Holi , except it was not Holi and I was not expecting fluorescent pink, or any colour at all.

I knew this was all part of the celebration. Emotionally, however, my first instinct was to hold my camera to my chest like a frightened Victorian lady clutching her pearls. The children instantly understood. To their credit, they became absurdly careful around me. They danced around throwing clouds of pink powder at each other while meticulously avoiding the foreign idiot with the camera hanging around his neck.

Then, I saw him. The boy in the immaculate white shirt. He was walking towards us on the footpath while we were out on the road. He was pushing what every Irish child of the 1970s and 1980s would instantly recognise as a “high Nelly”: the bike you dreaded receiving for Christmas when what you really wanted was a Chopper, a BMX, or a racer. He was about thirteen or fourteen years old. And he was wearing the most immaculate white shirt I had ever seen.

The street itself was chaos. Dust, noise, fumes, colour everywhere. Yet there he was in the middle of it all, emerging through shadow in this nuclear-white shirt that seemed to glow against the dark evening surroundings.

Why the immaculate white shirt mattered

My first thought was not artistic, rather it was very domestic. I suddenly thought about his mother washing that shirt. All at once I was thirteen or fourteen years old again, back in Ireland, I had just hung the washing out on the line and it had started to rain. My aunt dragged me to the window saying, “Look!” I knew she was expecting a reaction. I just did not know what. I looked. I saw rain. I shrugged, but apparently this was wrong. “NO! NO! NO!” she cried. “You’re supposed to look outside and say, ‘Oh Holy God and I just put the washing out!’” So I did.

Only then did I understand that washing was not merely washing. It was effort. Pride. Care. Work.  And standing there in Hyderabad, seeing the boy in the immaculate white shirt, that old memory came rushing back. Then, one of my little urchins beside me spotted him. Everything happened instantly. Rapidly but in slow motion.

The child lunged forward with a handful of fluorescent pink powder. My hands moved towards the camera before my brain properly processed what was happening. Even now I can still imagine the silent “Nooooooooo…” I projected onto the boy in the immaculate white shirt as the pink hand arced through the air. Splat! An earful of powder.

The boy jerked his head sideways and shook himself like a dog after a swim. For a split second he looked ready to go for my bold child. Then he saw me. Camera raised. Inquiring with a head wiggle if I could take his photo. And immediately everything changed. He gave a tiny wiggle head wiggle in return, adjusted himself against the bicycle and dropped into a pose. Not anger. Not embarrassment. Performance. The transformation lasted perhaps half a second, but I still remember it perfectly. Childhood vanity defeating outrage in real time.

Click.

What stayed with me

That photograph remains one of my favourites, not because it is technically perfect — it is not — but because I can still replay the moment almost in slow motion: the powder, the bicycle, the immaculate white shirt, the look on the boy’s face and the split second in which outrage gave way to performance.

The photograph is still sitting on a hard drive somewhere. What stayed with me was everything that happened in the ten seconds before I pressed the shutter.