“I am the boat, you are the sea, and also the boatman.”

— Rabindranath Tagore, ‘The Fugitive’

This image is part of a series called ‘River Street’, inspired by the verses of ‘Gitanjali’ by Rabindranath Tagore. Captivated by the emotionally-charged spiritual lyricism of Tagore, I, for long, desired to create visuals that evoked the geography of ‘Gitanjali’, a bucolic landscape that was hued by its verses and peopled by the simple earth-folk of Tagore’s songs.

Between 2011 and 2015, while working for the ABP Group in Kolkata, I would spend my mornings walking alongside the ghats on the Hooghly river, ‘armed’ with two instruments for translating experience into meaning: a single lens mounted on my camera and a well-thumbed Macmillan paperback edition of ‘Gitanjali’ in the hip pocket of my jeans.

These dawn pilgrimages became a form of meditation. The quiet expanse of the light-bleached river stretched in the mind’s eye like a blank canvas. The activities and people on the river banks, the boatmen, morning bathers, the labourers moving sand, wrestlers, tea stall vendors, ferry commuters, the priests of the riverside temples, silhouetted against this canvas like characters of a pictorial script.

I would just patch myself to the scene, randomly read a verse, embedding myself in the languid ease of a world waking up in its timelessness. Hours would pass as I breathed with the river’s pulse, letting go of intention, waiting for revelation, seeking those fleeting moments when ordinary life transcends into metaphor.

Some of those moments became pictures.

— Bandeep Singh is an acclaimed photo-journalist and fine art photographer