The jovial man found the camera and suddenly struck a pose

Walking near the market in the eastern Indian town of Malda, I saw several men busy at work inside a small shop facing the street. One was pulling something from a shelf, another talking with a customer, another flipping through the ledger in the back. Each seemed absorbed in his role—except for one man who looked strangely unhurried.

When I pointed my camera in his direction, he abruptly thrust one arm out horizontally, raising it in front of his face in a curious pose. Whether he was channeling a scene from a martial arts film or mimicking a bird, I couldn’t quite tell. Sunlight caught on the grey streaks in his beard, while his eyes fixed on me with a sharp, playful glint. Clearly, this was a man with a sense of humor—and a good dose of cheer.

Behind him, his colleagues carried on with their work, entirely unfazed, but he seemed unconcerned. Perhaps he truly had nothing to do, or perhaps he simply saw the foreigner’s camera as an opportunity for a brief career change into “professional posing.” In India, it’s hardly unusual for strangers to suddenly strike a pose; sometimes, the moment you raise a camera, models seem to materialize out of nowhere.

I never did find out what his actual job was. But that beard streaked with white, paired with his leisurely, out-of-place smile, stuck in my memory like a cool breeze in the heat. A breeze, perhaps, that the working men around him would have gladly done without.

Malda on Google Map

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