A sheet of white paper, held up in one hand at the edge of a crowd. Across the top, hand-lettered in outlined capitals: MISSING. Underneath it, occupying the whole page, an ink drawing of a human vertebral column — cervical curve, the twelve thoracic vertebrae with their spinous processes angled down, the lumbar five, the sacrum tapering out at the bottom. There is a small signature in the corner. There are two fold creases across it, because it spent the morning in somebody's pocket.
Most placards in this archive were made in a hurry, and say so. This one was not. It is a diagram. Whoever drew it has looked at a spine before — has looked at it the way you look at something you are going to be examined on — and then took that competence and used it to make a joke about courage.
The second one says it in a different register entirely. Night, a lit hoarding somewhere behind, a card held up at arm's length: THE HOTTEST ACCESSORY TO HAVE RIGHT NOW IS A SPINE — ACCESSORY and SPINE in red, the rest in black. It is written in the voice of a trend report, and the voice is the argument. If having a spine is this season's look, then the people who do not have one are simply behind; it converts a matter of character into a matter of what everyone can see you wearing. It also, quietly, admits that courage has become a thing you can be seen to have. Nobody writes this sentence without knowing they are at a protest that will be photographed.
The third is printed rather than drawn, set between two heavy rules like a newspaper masthead, with two small raised fists underneath: MY MOM DIDN'T SUFFER FOR 9 MONTHS TO BIRTH A SPINELESS CHILD. It is raining. She is holding it over her own head with both index fingers pointed up at it, so that there is no doubt about whose sign it is.
And this is where the word turns round. The first two placards are about somebody else's missing spine — a minister's, a government's, the people who did not say anything. This one is about the person holding it. It is not an accusation, it is a promise, and the guarantor is her mother. The obligation being invoked is not to the nation or to the examination or to a movement. It is to nine months of somebody else's body.
MY MOM DIDN'T SUFFER FOR 9 MONTHS TO BIRTH A SPINELESS CHILD
Put the three in a row and one word is doing three different jobs. Missing — the spine belongs to somebody who is not here. Hottest accessory — the spine belongs to whoever is prepared to be seen with it. Spineless child — the spine is mine, and I am reporting to my mother. Nobody coordinated that. Three people picked the same bone.
It is not a surprising metaphor; English has had spineless for four hundred years and Hindi has its own versions. What makes it worth an album is who was holding it. NEET-UG is the examination that decides who gets to study medicine in this country. Roughly two and a half million people sat it. The syllabus they had spent two years on is the human body — and the paper leaked, and the exam was cancelled, and they went out onto the road. Of all the images available to them, three of them reached for the vertebral column: the part of the body whose whole job is to hold a person upright while letting them bend.
The drawing in the first photograph is the one that stays with me, because of how careful it is. Somebody sat down with a pen, got the curves right, got the sacrum right, wrote one word at the top, folded it twice, put it in a pocket and took it to Jantar Mantar. The archive holds no photograph of anyone answering it. What it holds is the sheet, still folded along the crease.