Fatehpur Sikri, Akbar’s famed capital, added one more page to its rich history when it became the “observatory” for sky-gazers, scientists and photojournalists to watch a total solar eclipse.
On October 24, 1995, the date of one such eclipse, the weather-man had brought glad tidings: Chances of a stray rain were as slim as a quark. The winter fog was a few months away. Smog was not yet in our dictionary. There was little else to expect. Internet was in its nascency, restricted to chunky computers with tortoise-quick modems.
More significantly, there was no Google to quickly ferret out information and sound wiser before the event. My attitude towards the event lay somewhere between plain curiosity and nervous anticipation. It was a first for me, and I did not have the luxury of being just a casual watcher. It was an assignment and I had to take images of the spectacle to my publication back in Delhi.
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Being prepared
So, I treated it as I would any other assignment, making the necessary preparations. In this case, it meant hitting Fatehpur Sikri much before the crack of dawn, to get a sense of the trajectory of the sun before the drama unfolded.
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Settling down with my equipment on a high platform within the ruins of Fatehpur Sikri complex, I could see Panch Mahal, over which the sun would sail. The eclipse would start a few seconds after 7.24 a.m. The tripod-mounted camera with its telephoto had been primed for the occasion. It was the day of the ‘film’, when the option of sneak peeks to see if the images were coming right was yet-unthinkable. I had chosen to shoot the eclipse on the then-revered Kodak Tri-X 400. A few minutes into the eclipse, I realised that I was being rudely thrust into the unknown. Suddenly, I was forced to be as conscious of what was happening on terra firma as I was of the spectacle in the skies. There was feathered anxiety around me, as panic-driven birds were rushing back to their nests in the trees around. Once the birds settled in, silence spread its wings across Fatehpur Sikri. The only sounds heard were the whirs of cameras.
The temperature plummeted even as the sun shrunk in size and began to resemble a moon in a moderately-lit sky. At 8.34 a.m., the sun vanished behind the moon, as if it were camera-shy, and the sky became ominously-dark, and not just for the birds. The whole of Fatehpur Sikri was enveloped in a quiet I was not prepared for. As I took it all in, my breathing became shallow.
Many seconds later, the famed diamond ring phenomenon took place. From down on the ground, it did look like a giant diamond ring. Very soon after this, there were a series of flashes in the sky. They were all rays of the sun escaping towards the earth from behind the moon, and then, a crescent of the sun began to become visible. That was when I saw something beautiful that perhaps only such a celestial event can trigger in humans — even strangers were making a preternatural connection by exchanging hugs, their differences eclipsed by a rare sense of awe.