Through the series Phantasms of the Blue Sky, migration is pictured as it is lived, with ghosts, fragments and ancestors carried along with the luggage. Through multidimensional narratives, the series illuminates journeying, diasporic, introspective and speculative as a shared human experience. Rooted in my life as a first-generation immigrant with ancestral ties to India and a syncretic, third culture upbringing across Oman and America, the work moves between personal, collective and ancestral memory.

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Working in photography, collage and fiction, it transmutes grief, longing and alienation into spaces of restoration, resistance and re-enchantment. Its layered compositions open onto allegorical landscapes shaped by journeys of body, mind and spirit, drawing on myth and ritual from the traditions I grew up with. A Garuda, the bird of rebirth, splits open to reveal a rangoli, the threshold drawing that invites blessing and protection. A haathi in festive cloth evokes Ganesha, invoked before departures and crossings. A carrom board becomes an altar of talismans from my coming of age. Standing on a map of the Himalayas, my feet are bound to my parents’ by crimson thread, like the Ganges falling from heaven into Shiva’s hair. My mother watches a murmuration of birds, a tradition shifting formation without disappearing, and at a sunset window grief turns bare branches into a Rakshasa.

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A companion flash fiction steeped in magical realism carries these presences into daily life, opening portals into interconnected worlds where individual and collective struggles are honored as part of a larger continuum, and domestic spaces are left suffused with the spectral traces. Ultimately, the series is an act of reclamation. Its universalist threads resist the exclusionary logics of nativism and xenophobia that demonize those displaced by colonial conquest, economic precarity and ecological collapse. It insists that the borders restricting our journeys, whether imposed by social hierarchy, geopolitics or empire, are constructs and constructs can be dismantled. In their place, it imagines forces that bind histories, geographies and futures together, offering both healing and unlearning, and reminding us that another world is still possible.

 

 

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Excerpts from the corresponding fiction (written to supplement this body of work):

"Sun Ra: There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You Of)" the words were emblazoned across her sweatshirt in Century Gothic, silkscreened in scarlet and magenta inks over a hypnotic cluster of sacred Egyptian symbols. The ankh, the Eye of Ra, the regal Horus falcon, the winged sun, the shen ring all in a jumbled procession across the fabric, receding and protruding through the inks.

She sat in a coveted seat at the very front of the top deck of the double-decker bus. For those prone to flights of fancy, the front seats are great enablers: observing the ebbs and flows of the world below becomes fertile ground for conjuring new worlds.

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Today there would be no Geeta Dutt, no Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, no Mohammad Rafi. On most other mornings, the muffled audio from her wired headphones softly serenaded fellow weary passengers with qawwalis and nostalgic Bollywood hits of an earlier era.

Without the music, her mind made its own devotions. Through the smeared window the landscape ran grey into grey and Isha, half-lidded, began to correct it. She dreamed a rangoli over the city: vermilion sifting through her fingers onto the ring road, turmeric pooling in the roundabouts, a lotus of crushed rice unfolding across the retail park.

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In the house facing hers, behind a window with a lace curtain, a churail was watching. She had lived there since before the houses agreed to stand in rows and behave. Her feet pointed backwards, an old grammar of grief, a body that walks toward the future while its soles insist on returning to the burial ground. She recognized Isha the way a mirror recognizes a face it has held before.