The Watertower

India · architecture

An old concrete water tower stands against a streaked dusk sky, framed by the white bracts of bougainvillea. Utility architecture caught at its most cinematic hour.

Indian neighbourhoods are full of these water towers — built in the 1960s and 70s by municipal water boards, painted once at construction and never since, defining the skyline of the localities they serve. They look like overgrown chess pieces from a distance, with their cylindrical pedestals and squat tanks. The kind of structure that's so functional it becomes invisible — until the light changes.

I was walking past this one near dusk when the sky began to streak with the kind of high cirrus that catches the last sun. A bougainvillea had climbed a fence in the foreground; its papery white bracts blurred at the edges of the frame. The moon was already up — that pale disc at the top right, with a single bird drifting near it. I held the camera steady and waited for the wind to settle. There are photographs you take because the subject is beautiful. There are others you take because the light arrived. This was the second kind.

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