Red Roof, Still Water

Northeast India · landscape

A house with a red-tiled roof sits between two large trees, its reflection held in a still pond at the foreground. Hills rise in soft blue behind.

Rural houses in the northeast of India tend toward two-storey timber-and-tin construction, with red-painted corrugated roofs that catch the eye from a long way off. They sit slightly apart from each other along village paths, each with its own kitchen garden and small fishpond — sometimes both at once, the pond doubling as a water source and a place to dry rice in flat baskets at the edge.

This one was framed for me by two large mango trees, with a pond in the foreground holding the morning's last calm. The roof had been freshly painted; the surrounding fields were green from recent rain. The hills behind were soft and blue and indistinct, the kind of distance that the air does most of the work of describing. I shot from a low angle on the pond bank, so the reflection ran the whole width of the bottom of the frame. There is a kind of Indian rural landscape that is so quiet you can't quite believe it is current. This is that kind. It exists right now.

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