More about the photos

As I was finishing my packing for my trip at home in San Francisco, I found out that Naren-tauji, an uncle who lives in Jaipur, has been gathering Shankar-Bhatnagar family info together on a website. I’m still learning about it myself -- and what a boon it is for this trip! -- but Bua and Vinita-didi hadn’t yet seen it, so we spent a bit of time yesterday showing it to them here in Chandigarh.

On the home page of the site, the photo of the couple together (the mustachioed gentleman with the cap and his wife) -- those are Vivek’s paternal grandparents. If you’ve met Pops or any of his brothers, you’ll instantly recognize the family resemblance to their father. (I have a photo of several of the brothers lined up together last year, and the likeness is stunning.)

Pops' parents -- though I swear, that could be Pops himself.

If you scroll down to the last group photo on the page, you can see that the resemblance carries on: Vinita-didi, sitting on Bua’s lap, fits right in. (And that’s Pops as a boy, standing, to the right of Vinita-didi.)

A family photo from 1951, at Sukh Bihar.

Finally, if you keep poking around the site, you’ll end up finding this photo of Sukh Bihar, the Shankar-Bhatnagar homestead in Kanpur (in the state of Uttar Pradesh, southwest of Delhi). 

Sukh Bihar, the Shankar-Bhatnagar family home in Kanpur. That's Bua and a tenant of the complex on the lawn.

“I’m standing there!” Bua said as we opened the photo.

Much of the family spent time at this home -- including Vivek and devarji when they were little kids. It had three sets of “houses,” for lack of a better word: two to the left of the driveway, and one to the right, behind the yard where Bua is in fact standing. Vivek tells great stories about sleeping outside on cots in a courtyard there, under the stars, when it was too hot to sleep inside. I’ve always been keen to see the place, although most of the buildings were torn down after the complex was sold about a decade ago.

Perhaps that’s a journey for my next trip.