The Book of Day and The Book of Night are part-real, part-imagined album pages – and can be regarded also as diaries or log books in pictorial form – created by digitally collaging original with archival photographs. These album pages conflate the lives of my grandmother (émigré, avid album-keeper, and Urdu author) and of two women who occupied, before and after the Partition of India, the house at 11 Temple Road, Lahore, where these pages were first displayed. Mine is the fourth presence in these pages, as I fold into them my own experience of home – the obverse and reverse of it.
Each album page is accompanied by a wisp of text: observations I had on the arrangements of my grandmother’s albums, which I sought to convey as aphorisms — or the kind of intergenerational wisdom that one would expect a grandmother to pass down to a granddaughter.
For the installation of these works, as part of Imagined Archives, curated by Fatma Shah in 2021, I chose a particular room of the historic house. This room — with two similar but contrasting shelves set side by side into one of its walls — embodied those themes of incongruity and ambivalence that supported my exploration of counter-narratives (here, apropos of the Partition of India). A lot about the house itself encompassed polarity: it was originally one half of a duplex; it was one-time home to Indian-American author Ved Mehta, who went blind as a child, slipping from a world of light to a world of darkness; and it witnessed the Partition, the most conclusive bisecting of my ancestors’ lives.
