Needle and Thread
A photoseries expressing the gaping hole of loss, that cannot be fixed with needle and thread.
Grandmas provide home within hands, chests and stories. Grandma tells tails of ancestors, of hope, of fight, of partition, of being a backbone of a kingdom of people. Grandma wears white, with her rugged feet tough from farming, from loving and from giving. Grandma uses needle and thread to patch up clothes. But this needle and thread could not patch up heartbreak out of loss of you. This is in dedication of my beloved Ama.
Sore
to describe what I have lost,
would be analogous to the way a non believer feels dissatisfaction in this world,
to be searching for something that is not tangible,
but is so ever present around us,
this benevolance she gave to me,
sweeter than indian mangoes in the summer,
like that of a mothers joy over the cry her firstborn,
for she never birthed me but raised me these past years as if I was her own,
It would be analogous to the way the rain mourns to the ground of the love they can never obtain,
so tears can be found drowning the world,
forming an atlantic,
cannot justify or rightfully deny her existence,
It would be an injustice to call her my grandma,
Grandma would imply she was an elder that was aged and their was little interaction,
that you only saw her at christmas and holidays,
and the exchange that occured would be purely based around money,
Grandma would imply only blood relation,
that she was old and spoke very little,
that her tongue, this barrier got in the way,
yet ,
this was my Mother,
how could I deny,
that my home was her voice,
over a phone in crooked english and broken urdu,
enough to speak for hours,
enough to have tears running from even the thought of losing all that was her,
her spirit my envoloped chest,
belief and hope riddled into me by her thoughts,
patience and understand,
now could you count how many of those
drop you at first instance of differing thoughts,?
those that are so impatient, willing to throw relations because you differ,
never denied my reality in front of sacred word,
oh now but she,
would listen,
selfless love with no if’s and buts,
acceptance of the wholeness, of the journey,
of encrypted eyes with stories of horror,
and body filled with bruises,
my home now a broken gourd,
no gold of hers to glue back together,
no haldi or onion or garlic to put on sores to lessen the sharpness,
Now the Spirit of Mother earth dances in line with me,
Whirls around me to remind me that she never left,
she frees me with every step,
every art form I gravitate to,
she accepts and guides me through,
oh how sweet my Ama is,
to have me call her Mother,
I have finally been able to gift that name,
to someone who loved me so,
