"We were crying as we were clicking photographs. People we knew were lying dead," says Mohan Jhala, another photographer who continued to take pictures even after he was hit by shrapnel. Says S.P. Singh, another tourist photographer who took photos of the scene: "At first we were paralysed by fear. We didn’t know what to do." But they egged each other on to take some of the rawest, most memorable photos of the scene. "I felt this was my moment. If I didn’t take photos now, when would I take them," Jhala recalls.
Over the next few days, their photographs appeared in several newspapers and magazines across the country and abroad, in publications whose names they can barely pronounce. Choudhry, who has made a little industry of describing what happened to media crews, says helplessly: "Who all could I refuse? I would have been happier if I had saved some people’s lives."
But for these photographers, the highlight of whose careers as unattached lensmen so far had been assignments covering Christmas carnivals and parties at suburban discos, are now feeling the satisfactioin of seeing their work in the papers. "I left home many years ago, but now people are calling me up from Assam saying they saw my photographs and liked them," says Choudhry, who exudes the kind of smoothness tourist photographers need as a stock-in-trade.
Choudhry, who also has an event photography outfit called KK&Group, has now got a job with city eveninger, Afternoon. Incidentally, Iqbal Sheikh, another photographer at the Gateway of India, was among those killed in the blast.
Saumya Roy
