Lost and Found

The amazing tale of how a camera found its owner

On one of Nupur’s visits to her cousin Anuj’s house, he showed her a big, fancy camera. “It was really cool, and I asked him if he had just bought it,” says Nupur. He hadn’t, and he told Nupur how the camera got there.

It all began when Anuj Shah’s driver Abdul approached him with the camera, wanting to sell it without really knowing its market price. Abdul’s father works
as a taxi driver in Mumbai, and after a long day of work on 12 December, he found that some customer had left a big black bag under the seat. It had a camera and two lenses. Now his son Abdul was trying to sell it.

“The camera was superb. I looked it up online, and it would have easily been worth Rs 40,000,” says Anuj. He showed it around to his wife and cousins, and even took a few photos of his children.

While fiddling with the camera, Anuj discovered that its memory already had around 1,000 photographs taken by its owner. It documented the life of a young couple, their travels, family gatherings, outings, everything. Anuj could tell that most of the photos were taken in Australia. “I saw some pics of a cricket match. Since I’m a cricket fanatic myself, I knew that the teams shaking hands were Australia and Sri Lanka. I knew the series had just ended in October in Australia. So the foreign country in the photos was Australia.”

But how on earth would they find this couple with the random bits of information they had? They also knew that the couple celebrated a birthday, going by a photo of a cake, and that they had eaten out not long ago. The last few photos on the camera were taken at a restaurant.

Meanwhile, another driver had offered to buy the camera for Rs 15,000. So the Shahs were in a spot. If a driver could buy the camera, he might as well buy it himself, thought Anuj. But his wife Amrita was dead against it. Going by the photos, the owners seemed like a sweet, young couple to her; people who would
terribly miss the valuable camera and its photos. So Nupur, Anuj’s cousin, decided to step in. “We decided that I would look for the couple on Facebook for a week. If I didn’t find anyone, the driver could go ahead and sell it.”

“Facebook is a place with a crazy number of connections,” says Nupur. “For me, it was all about testing the six degrees of separation theory, see if it’s actually true.” Also, two years ago, when the community group Nupur and I are involved with misplaced an important file on a local train, the person who picked it up found me on Orkut and returned it, as my name and details happened to be in there. Nupur, recalling that incident, saw the camera as a chance to do her own good deed.

Anuj emailed Nupur a photo of the couple taken at a restaurant just before the camera went missing. He reckoned this would make it easier to find leads. Before uploading the picture, though, she wondered if it was a stupid thing to do—trying to locate a couple by uploading a photo. Sure enough, the first comment on the picture worsened her misgivings (‘Ha ha ha, mad idea,’ it said). Nupur uploaded the images at midnight, 28 December 2010. By around 5 pm the next evening, she had received a call from the lady in the photo.

It had been a day of frenetic activity, both online and off.

Comments on the photo started being posted by early morning. The search had begun. A friend SMSed Nupur, ‘Mainland China?’ on her phone. She wondered if he was asking her out, till his next message popped in, clarifying that he was talking about the photo. The friend went online and found Mainland China’s website. The coasters matched. Another person left a comment, saying it was the branch above Shoppers’ Stop in Bandra. By 2:50 pm, the location was established—and it wasn’t Australia as they had imagined.

Many friends volunteered to play detective. Some suggested extracting the time and date of the photo from the camera, then going to Mainland China with it, looking for credit card details, and showing the staff the image to check if they were regulars. But the camera was in Anuj’s house, so Nupur had to wait till he got home to get the photo details. Meanwhile, encouraged by friends on Facebook, she called up the Mumbai taxi union. “They said ‘Yes, we do have a missing Nikon camera complaint.’ But it turned out to be for some other model. The guy on the line was too lazy to go through all the complaints over the past two weeks, so I gave up.”

Seven of Nupur’s friends posted the photograph on their own Facebook walls, asking people if they recognised the couple. Some sent mass emails too. One of them was me. My partner decided to post the photo on his wall as well. One of his ex-colleagues left a comment on the photo, saying, ‘This is great. I’m gonna share it on my wall.’

In less than two hours, the ex-colleague’s sister called him from the UK, saying that she knew the couple. She had also called the couple up, asking them
if they had lost a camera, and that their photo was all over Facebook. In all, at least 3,000 people had seen the photograph online before an identity emerged.
The couple, it turns out, was based in Australia and here on vacation to meet their families. They had got married exactly a year ago. In fact, they had gone to Mainland China to celebrate their first wedding anniversary. The camera, as now known, was a wedding gift from a relative, as the husband loves taking photos. They lost the camera within two days of reaching Mumbai, and had spent the entire trip filing police complaints, visiting the taxi union and searching for the driver of the taxi in which they’d left the camera behind. Nupur found them in the nick of time. They were to return to Australia the very next day.

The whole experience of losing the camera had been rather traumatic for the couple and their family. The relative who had given the gift was still paying instalments on it, and the camera contained every photo they’d taken since their wedding. By the time Nupur found them, they had already given up.

In keeping with our amateur detective skills, Nupur and I had decided to quiz all the people staking claim to the camera thoroughly. So when the lady of the photo called us, I diligently used my journalistic training in asking a million inane questions. “Where did you go for a holiday?” I asked, assuming she would say Australia. It didn’t occur to us that the couple could be living there. “Indore,” she replied, much to my disappointment. Since the camera contained an entire year’s worth of photographs, when I asked her what the name on the cake was, she cited the wrong name, as they’d celebrated two birthdays recently. “Why don’t you add me on Facebook?” she asked, giving up on the cross-questioning. “You will see I am the one in the photo.”

Indeed, it was her. Delighted, we all added her—and 20 hours after the photo was uploaded, we were able to ceremoniously tag the couple in it. Comments flooded in, congratulating the people involved and marvelling at the online miracle. We called each other in jubilation, excited by how it had turned out. If it were possible to ‘hug’ people on Facebook, and not just ‘poke’ them, we would have had a global group hug. It turns out, it isn’t just six degrees that separate us all from one another. Social networking has reduced it to one degree. When I added the lady in the photo as a Facebook friend, I made another discovery: we even had a friend in common.

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