My great grandfather died under mysterious circumstances, no one knows the full story. The villagers wouldn’t tell us what happened, so we assumed he had some sort of an accident. All we knew was that he had gone for a walk in the wheat field owned by the family in Baoli (Uttar Pradesh) and he never came back. Years later, some of his belongings were returned to our family by the villagers. Yesterday as I was helping my mother clean the junkyard of my grand father’s house, I found this bag with his end-of-days stuff. In it was an old Canon Canonet QL19 stained in blood. There was an undeveloped film roll in it. After hours of haggling with the best photolab in Delhi, I finally got it developed. The only surviving picture was this one, dated 7 December 1973, the day my great grand father is supposed to have taken the walk..

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This photograph received a lot of comments on Facebook, alas, it was just a prank story! I took this photograph using the panorama feature of the iPhone camera! 😀

“..to have such an eye for photography back in the 70s in a village in UP is so ahead of his time!!!! but the story is a little spine chilling..” – Neethi Narayanan

“Before reading the description, I though this was one of your moving iphone panorama experiment.” – Shefali Lathwal

“Amazing pic ! I am sure there couldn’t have been a better tribute to him than bringing out his work” – Rahul Gupta

“Something out of a story book- Swati- this has the makings of a proper adventure/ mystery novel.. Solve karne chale?” – Aabhas Bhardwaj.