Though familiar since childhood from the short story by Rabindranath Tagore, I had never interacted with a real Kabuliwala in Kolkata. The first person I met from Kabul was a driver who sometimes drove me around Lahore on my first trip to Pakistan. Everyone called him ‘Khan’ and I, Khan Sahab. His warm smile and constant chatter while driving made me remember Tagore’s story and feel that I had been robbed of the childhood Mini had. Growing up outside Kolkata, I had never had the chance to peek out of the window or run out of the door calling ‘O Kabuliwala! Kabuliwala!’ I felt sad that it took me so long to meet someone from Kabul, considering that many Kabuliwalas live in the city we call ‘home’.

Of course, Khan Sahab was far from any comparisons with Rahmat in Tagore’s story; however for me, meeting him was some form of fulfilment. Not only did he talk much, but in him I had found my ‘patient listener’. Later, when I returned home to Kolkata for Christmas, a real Kabuliwala had come to our house. Apparently, he had been dropping in during the winter months for the last two years while I was away in Delhi. My mother met him while visiting a relative in another Muslim ghetto of the city and, seeing his collection of shawls and carpets, asked him to come to our house as well. Then she told me that a group of Kabuliwalas live in the neighbourhood.  - even knowing which room in which of my aunt’s houses can offer a view of the Kabuliwalas’ flat.

Living in Park Circus, one of the oldest cosmopolitan neighbourhoods of Kolkata where Bengali Muslims, Bihari Muslims, old Hindu ‘bonedi’ families (the last of them perhaps), settlers from Lucknow, Armenians and Anglo-Indians co-habit, I found that I was not so surprised at this information. And yet at the same time, the figure of the Kabuliwala was such a literary one for me, that I found it a little difficult to let it sink that these are people beyond the confinement of pages. I also found it heart-breaking to accept this image of a Kabuliwala trying to bargain the price of a shawl with my mother in a combination of Bangla-Urdu -- a handsome, lanky youth with trimmed moustaches and thick eyelashes caved in by thicker glasses. So completely in stark contrast with Rahmat? Tagore’s story messed me up -- I thought -- and perhaps many of us.

This is also the perspective of Moska Najib, one of the photographers of the exhibition, From Kabul to Kolkata: Of Belonging, Memories and Identity, at the Brunei Gallery in SOAS London, running until December 15, 2018. Moska believes that Tagore’s story had for long romanticised the figure of Kabuliwala, merchants from Afghanistan, often from Kabul, who travelled across North India and came to Calcutta to sell shawls, carpets, dry fruits and nuts at a time when such exotic merchandise was not easily available to the people of the Gangetic plains of Bengal, especially a growing monstrous metropolis that served as a fantastic market for sellers of any goods.

At the same time, Tagore’s story also brought to the mainstream imagination the recurrent urban modern figure of the Kabuliwala -- travelling to Calcutta since the middle of the 19^th Century -- and even if problematically, made Bengali middle-class readers open up a soft-corner for the ‘other’ in their hearts. It is this ‘other’ness whose two sides Moska attempts to see through, placing the lens of her camera not only at the community but also on their perspectives. An Afghan growing up in India for the most part of her life, Moska is interested in documenting their lives lived in two temporal-spatial layers -- the physical idea of home they have been born with, historically, presently, in the city of Kolkata and the emotional home they carry in their memories, in the identity of being Kabuliwalas, in their language, in their passports and paper permits, the remembrance of a home that goes beyond the ‘mountains of Afghanistan’.

On the other hand, Nazes Afroz, a Bengali hailing from a small town who travelled to Kolkata to find himself a nest in the urban jungle, is in search for the city that has been ‘home’ to many such settler communities, this time focusing on the Afghan merchant community. Nazes fears that this sense of home that the chaos of Calcutta has historically been offering to whoever dared to invite themselves, is dwindling fast. Moska fears that the overlap of remembering and forgetting is gradually pushing the identity of a people into oblivion.

Inspired by Tagore’s literary classic, and perhaps pushed by their individual fears, the two artists have brought forth a collection of visual stories that pay tribute -- to not only the city of Calcutta or the Kabuliwalas living in it, but to the tradition of travelling, co-habiting, and accepting as acts of transgression that have become gradually censored and endangered in today’s politically, emotionally small world.

As a viewer, I find myself deliberately avoiding the use of the word ‘capture’ to describe what the photographs in the exhibition do -- for that is one thing they do not. Though the idea of a photograph might be to ‘capture’ a moment, the photos in this exhibition have a texture of effervescence, of a certain sense of fluidity -- perhaps because they contain glimpses of ‘possibilities’, while they reveal moments of past journeys and present settlements, an allusion perhaps to the artists’ background in journalism.

The pictures position the people in places and see these places being inhabited by the people in complementary compositions, bringing forth a balance between focus and background, figures and spaces, practices and experiences. Crowds gathered in the sprawling maidaan, solitary figures in front of looming colonial façades, frames in which young Afghan men pass their time playing carom, as the older ones chat in cafes and restaurants, reminding trinkets and evidences of community identity, the grandeur of portraits in soft sunlight are juxtaposed not in a series but as a stretched panorama of simultaneous occurrences. While some pieces show young men at work, employed in the tradition of textile business, others reveal their assimilation within the anonymity of an urban existence. Bringing the ‘other’ of Tagore closer to home is a poignant photo of an Afghan and a Bengali sharing a humble local lunch of rice and fish curry. Refusing the generosity of Tagore’s upper class kindness, an Afghan man smiles at the lens that zooms out of a Bengali traditional wedding.

What makes these photos so revealing and simultaneously fleeting is the acknowledgement of voids and absences. Transferring joy, attachment, pride from visual sensations to works of light and shadow, these pieces go beyond focusing on the moment. They reveal in their subjects and timing, a sincere patience of the eyes behind the lens, a sense of waiting of the hand that clicks and prolonged engagement to also understand ennui and detachment, melancholy, loss and silence.

The Afghan community in Kolkata is a private one; that Moska and Nazes have built a relationship over time with the community is tenderly visible in this collection of absolute visual treats. With the sheer lack of female subjects in almost all photographs, one ponders over the experience of Moska, the female Afghan photographer during this project. In finding a sense of belonging for the community in Kolkata, one sees the reflection of Nazes’s anticipated anxiety. Perhaps it is this sincere acknowledgement of absence and silence, of fears and trepidations that makes these photos what people call art. Reminiscent of Pablo Bartholomew’s incredible work on the Chinese community in Calcutta, the exhibition draws the viewer into the frame, resisting assimilation and provoking agitation. In them we see a reflection of our own selves and more importantly, how we may be seen from another’s perspective, nuancing the simple ways in which we think of ‘us and them’.

In taking pictures of such a private people and making these available to the public eye, resisting the recent attention Afghanistan has been drawing and following a story whose trajectory is one that goes beyond war, originating in human mobility and sharing, the exhibition offers a sensitive, beautiful narrative, that speaks volumes on the art of seeing and showing, on being and becoming and most of all, going back to Tagore, on the simple secrets of human relationships.

As I walk back from the exhibition, I walk into lanes of memory, of driving around Lahore, with the chattering Khan Sahib and our mutual understanding of the need to talk to each other -- two people away from home, in a city we had grown to love dearly.