The Boy in the Immaculate White Shirt

In my first 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 enormous crowds take to the streets to celebrate 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. Nearby sat a family so genetically posh they looked almost curated. The daughter had perfect ringlets. In India. Proper Shirley Temple ringlets. I remember thinking that some poor servant must have fought a war with humidity, brushes and divine intervention to set them.

They were sitting upwind from my cigarette smoke and began performing theatrical concern for the child’s lungs while seemingly oblivious to the fleet of auto-rickshaws, taxis, cars, trucks and lorries coughing black diesel fumes directly into the atmosphere around us. I was already 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

Then I heard music somewhere beyond the hotel wall. Not polished music. Drums, shouting and whistles.

I stubbed out the cigarette into the ashtray — admittedly with slightly more flourish than necessary — and ran to my room to get my camera. Let me be clear. I do not run. My entire life philosophy has long 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 overridden the crank in me and common sense said something was happening out there.

I followed the sound through side streets until I caught up with a tiny procession: two women, five or six children and a pram carrying a couple of small Ganesh idols balanced on what looked suspiciously like a wooden bakery tray.

It was gloriously homemade. Entirely uncurated.

I know. That word usually gives me a rash. The travel industry has spent years telling us about curated experiences, curated journeys, curated moments and curated authenticity, as if reality needs a mood board and a branded tote bag before it can be allowed to happen. But this was uncurated in the only sense that matters. Nobody had designed it for visitors. Nobody was selling tickets. It simply existed, and I had stumbled into it.

I gave 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 absorbed 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.

Things were going perfectly well until 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.

Intellectually, I knew this was all part of the celebration. Emotionally, however, my first instinct was to clutch my camera protectively to my chest like a Victorian woman with her pearls.

The children instantly understood.

And 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 hugging his camera in mild panic. I remember finding that strangely touching.

Then I saw him.

The boy in the immaculate white shirt.

He was walking towards us on the footpath while we were out in the road. He was pushing what every Irish child of the 1970s and 1980s would instantly recognise as a “high Nelly” bicycle: the bike you dreaded receiving for Christmas when what you really wanted was a Chopper, a BMX, or a racer.

He was maybe twelve or thirteen 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 almost luminous against the grey surroundings.

Why the immaculate white shirt mattered

My first thought was not artistic.

It was domestic.

I suddenly thought about his mother washing that shirt. All at once I was thirteen years old again. Years earlier, back in Ireland, I had just hung the washing out on the line and it had started to rain. My aunt practically 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 insufficient.

“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, staring at the boy in the immaculate white shirt, that old memory came rushing back.

Then one of the little urchins beside me spotted him.

Everything happened instantly.

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.

And immediately everything changed.

He gave a tiny wiggle of the shoulders, 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.