Letters From Home

It is said that in 3 months after the passing of a person we forget their touch, and in 8 months we forget their laugh, in 12 months their voice. Resisting this depletion of memory is a very consuming process. But is also magical. When opening the bygones cupboards and we are hit by a whim of their fragrance, we go back to lying on their laps. But what if that is also taken away from a person. Letters from home is Zarina finding the last shreds of what would make her remember the incidental, often registered in the peripheral memory box.

This is a set of 8 prints made over the letters written but unsent by Zarina's sister. Freedom fight was essential. Colonisation had to be fought and won over. But there were more than anticipated collateral damages. Damages that can not be undone. Especially the partition. Families choosing to be ripped away from what they perceived as motherland. Perhaps it would have been easier if they were kicked out. But now, they made a choice. It is on them. They carry the pain of choosing one eye over the other.

What do we forget first. We remember their eyes, smile, their habits for a longer time than the places we once lived with them, the little geographies attached to them. We don't intentionally forget it, but it is stacked over by the other geographies we moved to. Survival of the fittest.

Letters written in Urdu, and she has printed the map of the village she used to play with her sister. She is not a woman with an artform to express, but a little girl striving to run through the village streets once again. The floor structure of the university her dad used to work as a professor at. She looked up at her dad, she wanted to remember her father for the legacy that he was not gifted to completely build. Their home that they left behind that she knows her kids would never go to on summer vacation, calling them as grandma's home. Her sister wrote letters in the agony of the passing of their parents, but Zarina was overwhelmed with the awareness that there would come another day when she would again leave their homes. This time, forever.

Zarina called herself part of a generation of artists she describes as "living in translation". The letters in Urdu is a translation of how partition has affected the people. But with this work she goes beyond translation. The home, the map, the floor plan are universal.

These are not letters, these are not just embossed prints. These are her attempts to keep what they left behind close to her heart. This is her life. This is beyond her religion, her nationality. This is her real identity.