The garden of Suktara, my ancestral home, remains anchored in my memory by an old neem tree. During my childhood winters, the garden would fill with fallen leaves like a dusting of snow—a magical, private hideout where my world began. As time passed and my family moved away, the house remained a silent witness to our departures. My grandfather passed away shortly after I left for Darjeeling to study, never knowing that I was finding my way toward photography.

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It was only when the pandemic shifted the world’s axis that I truly returned. What began as simple afternoon tea with my Amma (grandmother) evolved into a collaborative ritual of image-making. As I photographed her quiet movements and the way she inhabited the house, I felt the space between us closing. One afternoon, while standing beneath that same neem tree, I was struck by the "strangeness" of the drying leaves. They became a visceral metaphor for my work—a meditation on whether we are witnessing time that has already passed or the precious time we have left to live.

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Age is an alienating force; Amma felt she was no longer "contemporary," as if her relevance was fading with the light. In response, I sought to gift her the experience of being truly seen. I curated an exhibition of these photographs within her lived space, naming her the co-author of the narrative. To see her sign her own portraits and engage with those who came to witness her life was a transformative moment of my artistic practice.

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Home Stories is an ongoing exploration of this emotional architecture. It is a memoir of aging and alienation that seeks to turn the private isolation of a matriarch into a shared, immersive atmosphere—redefining the ancestral home not as a relic of the past, but as a living archive of confidence and being.