Crossroads

Crossroads (2020-2024) is an intimate visual narrative that explores the long-sustained bonding and sisterhood of my two maternal aunties, Gayatri and Swati, who have faced an entire life filled with psychological as well as social ostracism for being born with albinism in Kolkata, India. The siblings have spent their entire lives within the 19th-century-old residence in the northern part of Kolkata, where they were born and brought up. This residence is an eyewitness to their lives and played a major role as a space. Parallelly, it has become a sanctuary, a place of belonging for the sisters as well as confinement. It is the place where they finally started their dance and theatre school. To fight discrimination and sustain themselves, they embarked on a career in performance art, drawing on their expertise in Indian classical dance, song, and drama, which became an integral part of their lives. So, this is the place where the sisters dreamt of expressing their lives through creative expression, and I, as a photographer and their nephew, aim to visually articulate a memoir of the sisterhood, including the subtle dreams and hopes they still hold in this elderly age.