Invisible me hurts. Not all of it, just one elusive spot. We humans are cursed with an anatomy that allows us only 50 per cent visibility of status quo. The back is invisible except to the accomplished contortionist. Mirrors might help, but I have never had much time for them. My back, though, is a chatterbox. It broadcasts its opinions vertebra by vertebra and has grown more opinionated and temperamental with age.

I can live with that. What I can’t get used to is that one invisible spot. It is not on my solid, palpable anatomical back. It is on my metaphorical back, the one I see in the mind’s eye.

My metaphorical back is the one I see with my mind’s eye after I have captured an image in a metaphorical blink.

To hell with metaphors, say you? But a photographer has to rely on them because everything lands on the instant of that metaphorical blink. My camera blinks, my eye sees, my brain perceives. You would think the job’s done, but that’s when the trouble actually commences.

My metaphorical back views what I have just walked past and starts talking entirely in questions. I can usually answer some of them. Yes, the light was right. No, the angle was not skewed. Just wait till I have seen the image, and so on.

But the back persists with one question that starts off an itch I can’t scratch: Did the image capture the thought?

What is missing?

The first image explains my dilemma. It has both serendipity and intent. The elements are aligned to near Euclidean perfection. The air has a shimmer of chill. The gull, gilded by light, seduced by stillness, has let its fish escape. The sand, now blood, now gold, now submerged, is earth in all its chancy temperament. The sky hoards stories soon to be erased by light. All this is there, all this is serendipity. The intent is in the composition of visual harmony. What is missing?

What was I thinking at that instant? If I can recall that after four years, then yes, I am getting close to scratching that elusive spot. If you, the viewer, can see what the image conceals, then yes, I have scratched that itch. If you can smell the effluents in the water, choke on the polluted air, shudder at the mess of cans and cartons on the beach and worry about the gull missing breakfast, then, and only then, is the image complete.

The camera worries about what I see. I worry about what you see. The image must balance both anxieties. Marcel Duchamp used the descriptor “retinal” for art that is restricted to the visual image. The retina is too precious to lend itself to a pejorative, but yes, art lies beyond the image, especially in a photograph.

The Greeks, who have a word for everything, scoped my dilemma as acnéstis. Literally, the unreachable itchy spot on the knobbly spine, it soon became the wonted metaphor for the quest that never ends. My acnéstis is never evident while I’m on the job; it begins the moment I am done and is sore by the time I gather sufficient courage to view the image, always a shattering experience.

Sometimes, though, circumstances collude and quite without intention, the image captures my thought.

Bukhara’s fort, the Ark, in Uzbekistan, is a 2,000-year-old Frank Gehry nightmare. It is a tsunami of brick, and every brick tells a story. It has crumbled and has been rebuilt practically every century. You would think its history would be blood-soaked and brutal, but such is not the case.

Its memory is packed with tales of wit, of men and, more interestingly, women, whose courage and nous stymied enemies at the threshold. I had read these stories the previous night and was transported to an age where a joke could halt tyranny and a good meal win over the enemy.

So when I saw this platoon of young men marching around the Ark as if to draw inspiration from its martial might, my heart sank. This was a kathasaritsagara of brick, and I hated to photograph it as a military monument. I had walked around it several times, but nothing, not even the flutter of a mysterious blue scarf at a turret window, allowed me to enter its story.

I had almost given up, when I met Yasin.

I learned his name much later. At first, I walked past him, stifling a sneer that almost matched his own.

What was a Bactrian camel doing all dolled up like a Bollywood extra?

The thought stung, and I walked back.

The camel had his eyes trained on the horizon. He wore his ridiculous finery like drag, announcing his apartness. He was faraway, pacing dunes and mountain passes, seeking oases or sheltering from icy winds. His burdens were many, story not the least of them. All those miles on the Silk Road, weary and overburdened, he had dreamed of home. Now he was home, and home only recognised him in this disguise. The camel’s presence transformed the Ark into a contour map of his travels. Every brick, a story.

Ishrat Syed’s sixth photographic exhibition, “My Silk Road”, was held in March 2026 at Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai. He writes as Kalpish Ratna with fellow surgeon Kalpana Swaminathan. Twice in Nalanda, their latest novel, is now in bookshops.

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