Phantasms of the Blue Sky is a body of work that weaves advocacy, tenderness and cultural visibility into layered migration stories. Through multidimensional narratives, the series illuminates the act of 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 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, their universalist threads resisting the exclusionary logics of nativism and xenophobia that demonize those displaced by colonial conquest, economic precarity, and ecological collapse.

 

Paired with a flash-fiction piece steeped in magical realism, the series counters estrangement by opening portals into interconnected worlds where individual and collective struggles are honored as part of a larger continuum, and domestic spaces and landscapes are left suffused with the spectral traces of those who have departed and those still arriving.

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Ultimately, the series is an act of reclamation. It insists that the borders restricting our journeys whether imposed by social hierarchy, geopolitics or empire are construct 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.