Editor’s Note

In an age of flux, the time-swallowing vortex of information overload, and the curse of instant familiarity, it is quietly meditative, perhaps tangibly startling even, to be introduced to a life of elsewhereness.
Ayan Biswas offers just this in his photographic essay chronicling the lives of an old couple of a certain tradition living in the remotest corner of Ladakh—including the last potter of a given earthenware form wedded to the textures and circadian rhythms of the earth. Biswas is empathetic in his language—both written and photographic. Crucially, he never intrudes but plays the role of an observer. His photographic eye sees evidence of the seasons unfurling; his gaze captures the echoes that reverberate between silences. As a result, this essay plays the role of both chronicler and insider—bound as much to the act of archiving as a means to remembering, as to the wonder of these lives being lived out in remote contentment.
Biswas’s camera treads the contours of these lives, unobtrusive, attentive. The house pets stumble about at dawn. A leaf erupts into its private continent of prairies and tributaries. A cherished photograph lingers on a window, perhaps in wait. An old hand, beautiful with wrinkles, with the passage of time, attends to the craft of creating things. Seasons change. Earthenware is born. Things wither away. Things are born, in the radiance of summer, in the fierce embrace of winter.
This family, and Biswas, offers a new way of life—one of less and awareness. One where your body moves in accordance with the seasons. One where time is a fragment, life part of a continuum. One of old earth and human skin.
‘Living with the Last Potter’ deserves to be read, and witnessed, slowly. As is any worthwhile life story, truth be told.

—Siddharth Dasgupta
The Bombay Literary Magazine