Two Thousand Weddings

Sabapathy is sixty-one and has photographed two thousand and fourteen weddings. His studio on Tank Street, in a district town in the dry middle of Tamil Nadu, has the glass counter, the six sample albums and the painted staircase going up to nowhere that every reader in India will recognise. It opened in 1993 with a second-hand camera and a flash on a bracket, and it has shot every season since: the film years, the video years he watched from across the road, the digital years, and now the drone years, which belong to the rival on the bypass.

On the first morning of Margazhi, the one month with no weddings in it, a widow called Poongodi comes to the counter with her daughter and a plastic folder. The pension office says there is no record that she was married. Her husband, a depot mechanic, died in July. There is no certificate. The temple register has the priest's entry and no signatures, because the muhurtham ran late and the priest said come tomorrow, and her husband said next week for twenty-nine years.

The office will take, failing everything else, a photograph of the ceremony, dated by a record made at the time, with the sworn word of two people who were there. One of them may be the photographer. She was married in the small hall by the tank in the summer of 1994, and the studio that came for five hundred rupees advance was his, in his first year. Job number eighty-seven.

The search through thirty-one years of negatives is the book. It runs the twenty-nine days of Margazhi and three days into Thai, and around it the studio makes its own reckoning: five lakh of debt, a son who has signed to sell every negative in the cupboards to a data firm in Bengaluru, a rival with a drone, a hall owner deciding whose name goes on next season's contract, and forty years of marriage to Kasthuri, whose name is on the board over the door and who does not exist in a single frame beside her husband, because he was always the one holding the camera.