By Mansi Thapliyal

Atika, 10, woke up early one morning in August 2008 and was sent by her mother to buy a few items from a nearby shop. She returned and told her mother she would prepare tea for her father before quickly going to use a communal toilet close to her house. She never returned.

Ambika was a feisty 15-year-old high school student who took wrestling classes. Her mother returned home from work late in the night on October 10, 2010. She woke up the next morning and found her daughter missing.

Atika and Ambika are among the thousands of children who go missing from India’s streets, schools and homes every year.

Following the case of a 5-year-old girl in Delhi who went missing and was then allegedly raped by a neighbor, I chose to find out what happens to girls who go missing and the struggles their parents go through to find them.

According to a report by Delhi-based child rights NGO Bachpan Bachao Andolan, from January 1, 2013-April 20, 2013 there has been approximately 680 cases of missing children in Delhi, 65 percent of whom are girls. In most cases girls are either forced into the sex trade or trafficked to placement agencies to work as domestic workers.

For four days, I met parents of girls who had gone missing. Every story was different, every story was equally sad. I spent hours with them, listening to their harrowing tales, understanding the grief and misery these families were going through. Only then did I turn my camera on to take pictures. Despite retelling their stories again and again over many years to hundreds of people, the mothers I met still cried their eyes out for their missing daughters when they spoke to me.

The family of Tyaba, who went missing in Delhi at the age of three in 2009, have searched across the country, visiting adoption homes, red light districts and orphanages in all of India’s major cities.

Other families, however, simply don’t have the means to actively look for their missing daughters, like Mamta’s family from Bihar, India’s poorest state, who work in Delhi as laborers. They lost their seven-year-old daughter Bharti in April this year. Living on a construction site where they work, they earn around $4 a day and have to rely on the police, who have a reputation for being inactive and corrupt when handling such cases.

I found that parents were keeping memories of their missing daughters alive through the objects left behind. The mother of Atika, the 10-year-old who went missing in 2008, continues to stitch embroidery for her daughter’s “bistra” – a bedsheet gifted to Muslim brides on their wedding day – hoping that one day she’ll return.

Nothing can surpass the agony and desperation that has become their lives. The haunted looks on their faces speak of pain which is beyond all comprehension. I’m not sure if my pictures will bring these missing daughters back to their parents, but maybe they’ll make people stop and think about the next time they see a girl begging on the side of the street or a young maid working inside a home.

It’s time to stop being silent spectators and take steps in the right direction or else who knows if the nightmare might come knocking on our doors…

By Mansi Thapliyal

My city is known as the so-called “rape capital of the country”. They say it’s unsafe, it’s dangerous, it’s full of wolves looking to hunt you down. A lot of it may be true. As a single woman working, living and breathing in New Delhi, I have had my fair share of stories. But the labels and opinions associated with the city were accepted on one level – no one questioned them, no one asked why – until a brutal tragedy one cold December night which shook the world and forced everyone (the authorities, the public, the lawmakers) to ask themselves uncomfortable questions and focus the on safety of women. It is still an ongoing, raging debate, thank heavens.

Meanwhile, I decided to focus on what Delhi’s women face and what they think about it. How do they go on with their lives, their work, their families? Just trying to understand the magnitude of how unsafe India’s capital is became one of the most challenging and emotionally exhausting assignments of my career.

SLIDESHOW: INDIA’S WOMEN DEFEND THEMSELVES

From call center executives to advertising professionals to tea stall workers, everyone has their stories and how they cope with it. Take the example of Chandani, 22, one of the few female cab drivers in the city. As she drove me around the city, a policeman stopped us at a barricade near India Gate. When he saw that a woman was driving the cab, he scraped his jaw off the floor. “You also drive a cab?” he said with an expression that suggested that he had spotted the Abominable Snowman. “I am doing a very unconventional job for women. Given that I do night shifts, I carry pepper spray and I’m trained in self-defense. Initially I faced a lot of problems but driving cabs at night has helped me overcome my fears,” Chandani said.

Overcoming fears, learning self defense, carrying pepper spray or sometimes, even knives – as is the case with Sheetal, who works at a night call center. After the brutal gang-rape of a physiotherapy student on December 16th, she picked up a knife and it has been in her handbag ever since. She says she has not stopped working night shifts or going out late with friends. “Something which needs to be changed is the mentality of men in the city, not my working hours or clothes,” she says.

Clothes; don’t wear miniskirts, don’t be revealing, don’t invite trouble.

Don’t invite trouble? “It does not matter what I wear, I still get stared at on the streets by men,” said Richa Singh, a middle class working woman who stays away from her family. Friends and family keep on giving her instructions about what she should wear and when she should step out of the house. She acknowledges that they mean well but is fed up with all the curbs being put on her.

On the other hand is Nalini Bhartwaj, a successful business woman and a mother of two children. She carries a Walther PPK semi-automatic. Though it is rare for women to carry guns, she says it is enough to shut up anyone trying to molest her or even pass a comment if she brandishes her gun.

Then there is the eternal question which perhaps only urban women in Delhi have to face: public transport vs private vehicles, which is a safer option?

“I made the decision to use public transport as my primary way of moving through the city because I really believe that it is my right to be able to use public space, just as much as it is of any man’s. Not using the metro or an auto or a bus or a cycle rickshaw (because it might not be a safe thing to do) is not an option in my mind because if I stop myself from living my life in ways that are most convenient to me, I’m giving into fear and ceding my independence,” said Simrat who works for a non-profit arts organization.

To validate her point, one evening I went out to shoot at a time as normal as 7.30 pm, looking for general shots of women walking on the street or waiting at the bus stop. I walked past two bus stops but I couldn’t find a single woman so I thought I would wait and see. And to my surprise, the frequency of the buses were more encouraging than the number of women standing at the bus stop.

Meeting these ordinary women living and working under extraordinary circumstances made me realize what women have to go through and the sometimes extreme steps they may have to take to ensure their safety. India has progressed as a democracy, but essentially somewhere we have lost sense of where we stand as a society. The anxiousness of being safe while going on with their daily lives is something that occupies a lot of their time and thoughts – just like it does mine. There are a lot of uncomfortable facts that we have to face about ourselves. Things have changed a lot, in terms of the public discourse happening in our country and society, but things have remained the same in lots of ways. There is this fear psychosis that women in this country live with. While profiling them, while seeing them through the lens, I saw myself too.

By Mansi Thapliyal

Music bands play an integral part to the big fat Indian wedding, especially in North India.

Weddings in North India are never complete until the family of the bride and groom dance to the tune of popular Bollywood songs. Brass bands are hired for the purpose of playing at the wedding procession in which the groom’s family dance all the way to the wedding venue where the bride’s family waits to receive them. A procession called “Barat” is usually accompanied by bright lights, fireworks, loud music and dance. The instruments played by these brass bands are a mix of Indian and western musical instruments.

The men who make up India’s brass bands are regularly seen marching through the cities and towns dressed in their flashy outfits and spicing up parties, though despite their loud presence, they usually go unnoticed.

I wanted to take a closer look and find out more about them, find out what they do when they’re not entertaining wedding guests and find out about their day-to-day struggles.

The routine of brass band members consists of leaving their shops around late afternoon. Once they reach the venue from where the wedding procession has to start, they often wait hours for the groom’s family to gather. One of the band members told me that earlier the hours used to stretch ahead endlessly but thanks to mobile phones and internet technology things are different for them now. They use their mobile phones to kill the boredom – huddling together to watch a film on the handset’s small screen, listen to songs or talk to their girlfriends.

They also use their phones to download songs along with lyrics to help them practice, something they used to do with records and cassettes which were more expensive.

At one stage, I was sitting and talking with them and I told them that I would print the photos out and show them. But one of the younger band members cut in and said I only had to give them a website link and they would be able to see and share the photos on their phones. I felt so stupid!

As the walk the streets and when they’re waiting for a bus, their gaudy military uniforms and old style brass instruments catch a lot of attention, especially from children.

The tunes they play may sound very scratchy, but the bands work long hours perfecting them. Their practice sessions, happen when there are no weddings planned for the day. Since the music is so loud, they can’t practice in residential or crowded areas. So I was curious to know where they actually go and to my surprise, they were practicing behind the bushes next to a railway track. They spent a whole day there, working on a new song.

I spoke to band members like Rajesh Kumar, 32, who saw it as a good way of making extra money alongside other petty jobs he does back home when he is not playing at the band.

Kumar says he gets between 500-600 rupees, around $10, for every wedding he plays at, which is not enough to survive on and support his family.

The music that the band plays is recognizable to many Indians. When I see a wedding procession, it’s strangely compelling and I’m drawn to it. But the music, loud and screechy, is something I can’t listen to everyday and is something meant only for momentous occasions.

I think there is a sharp contrast between the brass band players I documented and other musicians for whom music is almost like meditating.

It’s common to find a musician performing with his or her eyes closed and their faces full of pride. Even in the smallest town you will find pride in the face of a performer for possessing a special gift of music which many people don’t have.

But I feel the same can’t be said about the wedding band I got to know.

By Mansi Thapliyal

“I am Gandhi!” he says firmly. “His soul resides inside me,” he announces, smiling unwaveringly.

I stare blankly at the man who is wearing a dhoti wrapped around his waist, thick black oval glasses and carrying a cane just like Mahatma Gandhi.

GALLERY: MODERN-DAY GANDHI

Two weeks ago, I called this man asking to meet him and he politely told me not to say “hello.”

“Hello is a word used by the British and is a legacy left by our colonial masters,” he said. Instead he insisted I say the Hindi phrase “vande mataram”, meaning “I bow to thee my mother”.

After fixing a time to meet, I reached his house not knowing what to expect. To my surprise I discovered that he lived in a room, above a public toilet, given to him by one of his followers on the outskirts of Delhi. In it, he leads a simple life, just like Gandhi, cooking for himself, doing his daily prayers and reading the Bhagavad Gita, Hinduism’s holy book which inspired Gandhi’s teachings.

I spent around a week with Mahesh Chaturvedi. The 62-year-old frail man told me before he realized he was an embodiment of Gandhi he worked at a weekly newspaper. He had a job, a family, and a nice middle class life. But today, living alone, he says his grown-up children are embarrassed by his current appearance. He has chosen to leave his past behind him and expects others to do the same.

For his entire life, he has felt that he has had a higher purpose and that there was more to it.

According to him, in 2002 he started believing that the soul of Mahatama Gandhi resided in him. That was the turning point when he walked out on everything and started living like India’s “father of the nation.”

He started traveling through towns, cities and villages across India, drawing a crowd wherever he went as he mimicked Gandhi’s mannerisms and style.

People would want to take pictures of him with their mobile phones and would even bow down and touch his feet, a sign of respect in India.

His striking resemblance to the man who helped bring about independence to India from British rule has lead to many invitations to public rallies and demonstrations.

In a country where millions live in poverty, it’s not surprising to see Indians worshiping millions of different gods, with some believing that there might be some truth in Chaturvedi’s words.

To me, he is a living, breathing portrait of Gandhi, someone who I can talk and laugh with, unlike the silent framed images and statues of the great man I see across the country.

Chaturvedi reminds me of how important it is to lead a life of teachings encouraged by the likes of Gandhi.