Where are you

In the rather politically charged winter of 2022, when the Kingdom was changing Prime Minister’s at whim, I went to meet my partner. A doctor with the NHS, ours is a long distance relationship. On my first day, after a long journey to the former mill town, I woke up to three messages on my phone from her. The first is embossed on the flaming red cover, the second is on the opening page and the third is scattered across the small passages of text.

While she would be at work, I would cook, clean and wander aimlessly in my spare time. Think of it as an artist residency, of sorts. I came back to Mumbai and looked at our old family albums with images of trips taken during school vacations. Postcard sized single images in respective sleeves and accidental diptychs courtesy the photo lab owner. I followed a similar strategy while designing the book. Punctuated by short bursts of text, like those relatives coming back from a long “phoren” trip. The book is neither an accurate portrait of a city, the country nor is it an account of our relationship. It is somewhere on the periphery, like the outsider I was.