Letters of haunting

Through this work, I write labour and care-filled letters to my mother on her silk sarees through hand embroidery.These are letters of love, of frustration, longing, and reaching. I wish to address the perpetual longing in diasporic subjects for the mother, the mother tongue and the mother land. It is a love letter to the three mothers that make you whole. A floating embroidery technique is used so that the sarees may be viewed from both front and back. From the front, the letters appear full and from the back; dotted, empty and knotted up. The presence of the hand in the labor intensive process of hand embroidery implies how we may touch or not touch our mothers and grandmothers. The formal qualities of this work refers to themes of hybridity, double consciousness, fragmentation, longing, intergenerational translations, and knowledge transmissions. The work celebrates and highlights the often invisible and mute histories of migrants which I hope will resonate well with the community that experiences it. This project is for other brown bodies like mine who may have felt lost in their journeys of crossing borders, for Indians living in the diaspora.