I spent Christmas of 2005, 06 & 07 at my grandmother's place in Kakinada, a small town on the East Coast of South India. To get here, I'd catch an overnight train from boarding school about 600kms away - so this was something of a getaway I anticipated year round. At Grans place, no gifts were exchanged, and there wasn't a fuss about decorations but we all got new clothes, and it brought the whole family together for a full week (about 20 of them!). You could smell food being cooked from 50m down the road, the rooms were filled with laughter, chaos and my cousins. To top it off, my cousin Aaron was born on Christmas day; so each year we 'literally' doubled up on the celebrations. These were the best days of my year.

On this specific year (2007), my father let me use his new gadget unsupervised - a Canon PowerShotA300; a luxury commodity for that age. It had a 16MB memory card (yes 16 and MB!!). I figured if I dropped the resolution low enough, I could take 3x more photos than normal. So I did - and I went crazy!! Every laugh, every walk, every meal - if it happened, I photographed it.

The following year mid-November, I got a phonecall late at night. It was Dad on the other end telling me my 14 yo cousin Aaron was very ill. I found it absurd he would ring me that late to tell me just that. The next morning, he told me Aaron's brain aneurysm (a pre-existing condition) had ruptured overnight and he didn't make it.

A couple days later at his funeral, the last few photographs I took of him were among those that were blown up poster-size and framed on walls, banners and albums. They reminded us of the happy times we had around Aaron and the silly things he did that put a smile on our faces.

These were the last photographs I took of him.

I have never put down my camera since.

we will see him again one day,

but until then, we will hold on to this.