Phantasms of the Blue Sky is a body of work that embeds advocacy, tenderness, and cultural visibility into layered migration stories. Through multidimensional narratives, the series illuminates the act of journeying, whether diasporic, introspective, or speculative as a shared human experience. Rooted in my lived experience as a first-generation immigrant with ancestral ties to India and a syncretic, third-culture upbringing in Oman and America, the work navigates personal, collective, and ancestral memory.

 

Using photography and fiction, it transmutes grief, longing, and alienation into spaces of restoration, resistance, and re-enchantment. The layered compositions invite viewers to contemplate allegorical landscapes shaped by journeys of body, mind, and spirit. These collaged tableaux act as conduits for ancestral linkages and folk imaginaries, weaving together fragmented narratives. Their universalist threads resist exclusionary logics of nativism and xenophobia that demonize those displaced by colonial conquest, economic precarity, and ecological collapse. Paired with a flash-fiction piece infused with magical realism, the series counters alienation by creating portals into interconnected worlds where individual and collective struggles are honored as part of a larger continuum, suffused with spectral traces across domestic spaces and landscapes.

​

Ultimately, the series is an act of reclamation; an insistence that the borders imposed by social stratification, geopolitics, and empire are constructs that can be dismantled. It envisions forces that bind histories, geographies, and futures together, offering healing and unlearning while reminding us that another world remains possible.

 

 

--

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

"Sun Ra There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You Of)” were the words emblazoned across her sweatshirt. In a Century Gothic typeface, the words were silkscreened with scarlet and magenta inks on top of a hypnotic cluster of sacred Egyptian symbols. The ankh, the eye of Ra (Udjat eye), the regal Horus falcon, the winged sun, the shen ring––all appeared in a jumbled procession on the surface of the fabric, receding and protruding through the inks."

 

"Isha sat three rows behind the stranger, in the grips of a bleary eyed hypnagogic journey as the bus whizzed past busy intersections and thoroughfares of the city, although at this hour, they were only beginning to take their nascent shapes.....she managed to leave behind her bottle of naproxen and her headphones, vital auxiliaries that kept her satiated and alert on her long haul commutes. Today, there was to be no Geeta Dutt, no Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, no Mohammad Rafi. On most other days, the muffled audio from her wired headphones softly serenaded other weary passengers with qawalis and nostalgic erstwhile Bollywood hits. Only six more minutes had passed since she last checked the time as the bus braked suddenly, letting out a Banshee’s screech which accompanied a violent halt..."

 

"The visibility continued its slow descent as fog began creeping in from the sea. As she soldiered on in her mission to the corner shop, the fog became a blinding gessoed surface, primed for the projection of latent anxieties, grief, malaise and melancholia. Memories of her deceased husband and parents, her avoidant son, the aloof neighbor, the exacting night shifts and her callous and patronizing manager became a rolodex to cycle through, each one entangled with another."