My first night in New Delhi I stayed with two foreign correspondents: Marion, a reporter for the Boston Globe, and her boyfriend, John, a staff photographer at the AP. I could tell when I arrived late one evening that they were used to the constant traffic of guests. John answered the door sleepily, unfazed, showed me to my room, and went back to bed. I lay there, staring into the dark, suddenly overwhelmed by loneliness.
But the next morning, as I drank the coffee Marion cursorily plopped down on the counter for me, I saw the life I dreamed of right there in her kitchen. “We haven’t stopped working in years,” Marion said pointedly. She was trim and attractive and had no time for bullshit. “From India and Pakistan’s nuclear testing to the hijacking of the Indian Airlines jet to Kashmir . . . we are exhausted.” I watched her face turn serious and focused, my stomach flipping with admiration and anxiousness. Marion and John, who were roughly my age and from the United States, were covering major international news events, working hard, and establishing their careers while maintaining a comfortable home overseas. Instead of wondering whether I had made a mistake moving to India, I felt as if I had squandered my life in New York.
Everything that made India the rawest place on earth made it the most wonderful to photograph. The streets hummed with constant movement, a low-grade chaos where almost every aspect of the human condition was in public view. The vast disparity between India’s wealthiest and poorest made for an incredible juxtaposition of people and street life. Few subjects or scenes were off-limits in India. The country was a photographer’s ideal laboratory. The morning and evening light illuminated a rainbow of brilliant, saturated hues: I followed women draped in magentas and yellows and blues as they disappeared into dusty crowds. I spent ten days along the Ganges River in Varanasi, photographing Hindu devotion from the predawn hours until long after sunset; eight days in Calcutta, shooting men bathing on the street and children caked in dirt and begging for food. When the stimulation got overwhelming, I hid inside my viewfinder, outside of my body. Images were everywhere, and my eyes got tired. But I could endure anything for the prospect of beautiful negatives. I spent all my money on film.
I found a room in the dark, slightly depressing apartment of an easygoing thirty-something named Ed Lane. He was the bureau chief of the financial news company Dow Jones and loved his whiskey. The AP helped me get press credentials and an Indian residential visa. Ed took me to the run-down Foreign Correspondents’ Club, where international journalists gathered every week to gossip about their lives as expats, like something out of a Hemingway novel. They were a worldly but friendly bunch, used to meeting new people and welcoming them to their homes. Hearing their stories made the world appear smaller and more manageable—as if going to difficult or dangerous places were just a matter of knowledge and logistics, part of the job and the life.
When I wasn’t photographing, I watched Bollywood films in Hindi or went swimming at the American Club, an elite club run by the U.S. Embassy, with Marion. Life was difficult in India, but it was also cheap. Personal space did not exist, but a little money could buy luxury. I paid rent with one assignment and paid for a maid with another.
Back home my college and high school friends embarked on a year of endless engagement parties and weddings. I was often invited to be a guest photographer. Everyone’s life was moving forward while I was chasing good light and village women in India. I envisioned a nomadic life of adventure for myself, but I worried sometimes whether I was condemning myself to a spinster’s future: forever single, having affairs with random men, my cameras dangling all over me.
It could have been worse.
Within months I had gotten myself into a rhythm of steady work, pairing up with Marion for the Boston Globe and the Houston Chronicle and shooting the occasional story for the Christian Science Monitor and the AP. I wrote to the photo desk of the New York Times several times, offering myself up as a stringer, and each time my e-mail went unanswered. I wrote directly to the New York Times correspondents based in India and asked if I could shoot anything for them. They told me they took their own pictures while on assignment. I would keep trying. I felt that if I could only shoot for the New York Times—to me, the newspaper that most influenced American foreign policy and that employed the world’s best journalists—I would reach the pinnacle of my career.
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AROUND MID-APRIL 2000 Ed returned from a reporting trip to Afghanistan. He came home with fifteen Afghan carpets and some advice: “You should go to Afghanistan to photograph women living under the Taliban.”
“What do you mean?” I honestly didn’t know much about Afghanistan, aside from the Times articles I had read while on the elliptical machine in New York.