Albums of Belonging

Photographs have always carried more than just faces; they’ve carried stories. Growing up, I remember the weight of my parents’ old rexine-bound albums. The pages were worn, their corners curled, the plastic sheets yellowed with time. Yet inside, each photograph seemed to hold an entire world. A sepia-toned wedding portrait, a picnic under a mango tree, a black-and-white snapshot of neighbors gathered on a verandah. Alongside these, my parents carried what I like to call “mental postcards”—stories told so often their details became etched in my imagination.

Those stories were often about migration and adaptation, about the ways family reassembled itself in new places. The photographs—faded yet firm against forgetting—were the anchors. When my mother described leaving her home in Delhi, she would tell us about her new home in the hills of Kasauli, and a photo tethers her recollection. When my father talked about working in a new land, there were fewer images, but the details he recalled—snow, used cars, businesses—were framed as vividly as any photograph.

Now, as a physician and a mother, I think often about how we manage memory. We live in an era of relentless capturing: thousands of images confined to digital folders, names like “IMG_2035.jpg” instead of moments, dates instead of meaning. Some families prefer sleek digital frames, where pictures rotate endlessly. Others create glossy photobooks that arrive in the mail, modern cousins of those rexine albums. Many of us, despite good intentions, let images hibernate on hard drives or cloud storage until they risk being forgotten altogether.

When I flip through my parents’ old albums, I realize their true gift is not organization but intimacy. These photographs live beside captions written in careful hands, little notes like “Diwali 1978” or “Trip to Manali.” They invite stories, laughter, and conversation. In contrast, when I scroll through my own endless digital trail, I feel an odd dissonance: abundance without anchor.

Perhaps that’s why I’m drawn to the idea of blending old rituals with new practices—printing select photographs each year, tucking them into albums alongside notes and anecdotes. In doing so, I hope to give my children not only a timeline but a narrative thread—something richer than a search bar can provide.

In many ways, my parents’ photographs have shaped my writing. They remind me that stories live at the intersection of image and memory, of what’s visible and what’s retold. And just like in the clinic, where both data and lived experience matter, the photographs we keep—whether in albums or in words—help us understand who we are, and where we belong.