Going Home

In 2020, my mother’s battle with cancer became a profound confrontation with fate, mortality, and the beauty of the world, which we think of as our home. An astrologer’s earlier prediction about her illness had haunted me, creating a paradox of certainty of the science and uncertainty of existence. 

While my family clung to hope, I was caught between blind optimism and the oppressive inevitability suggested by the horoscope. This duality made time unbearable—stretched thin by slow-moving despair, where the shadow of death loomed more significant than the event itself. 

Through this period, I became acutely aware of the disconnect between personal grief and the physical world and its landscape, which is indifferent to my grief and, in fact, to human existence itself. My relationship with time, home, landscape and existence fractured under the weight of this incongruity. 

After her passing, I performed her funeral rites—rituals akin to preparing her for a long journey, with offerings of food and water for her safe passage. In revisiting photographs taken over years—while travelling, visiting home, or during her funeral—these images, initially captured without intention, have taken on a deeper resonance.

One image, a road strewn with flowers from someone’s final journey, encapsulates this experience. These landscapes—fields beneath drifting clouds, endless horizons, and high-voltage lines slicing through the sky—blur the boundaries between home and landscape, emotions and indifference, and the process of constantly moving self and non-moving land. They converge into a single, timeless space, reflecting the universality of physical and metaphysical journeys, like a “photograph” of the “movement.”

In Indian astrology, planetary houses chart our life trajectories, and they are called “houses.” These images meditate on whether we are endlessly adrift in the cosmos, moving towards an unseen home according to our planets on the birth chart, or wandering meaninglessly in this land, searching for a house that never was. 

Like the sky mirrored on paddy fields, the line between life and the reflections on it, self and the world, remains coalesced. Could we begin to grasp only when we cross the high-voltage lines slicing these pictures and of existence?