SHADOWS IN THE SKY
[ESSAY]By Arushi Vats
I.
Darkness dissolves as ink in the sky, pomegranate seeds erupt in a mother’s hand, and pillars of concrete stand unmoving, caught in the stupor of progress. The rain remains as a scent, an exuberant disorder, a lingering drop in the frame.
In May 1866, Emily Dickinson writes to her friend Elizabeth Holland. Letter 318. She tucks a poetic gesture among the proceedings of her life at home. Between—
“Friday I tasted life. It was a vast morsel.”
and '"House" is being "cleaned." I prefer pestilence.’
appears, without hesitation or ceremony,
“I would eat evanescence slowly.”
The poet knows that even the taste of all that is fleeting, lingers briefly, then dissipates. One must hold the moment upon one’s tongue as slowly as one can, delay its departure. In that minutiae of distended time, a world is made and unmade.
In Akash Kalo Megh (Shadows in the Sky), Protick Sarkar excavates the circadian image, steeped in the minor durations that comprise the weft of biographical time—all the works on display germinate in his hometown of Dhaka, in the radius of the neighbourhood he has always lived in. Under the Dhaka sky, familiar images ripple against all that is altering at the speed of capital, scenes unfurl in lento in his mother’s home where time is not bent to history and tenderness and resilience abide, and in the prescient gaze of crows that move seamlessly from domestic architraves to the vast sky.
Drawing from the reservoir of lived time, Akash Kalo Megh dwells between the observed and that which escapes being known, the image and its ineluctable unconscious, the drenched sky and the light which arrives after the rain.
II.
In Stitched (2023), shot with the languor and quiet assurance of a home video, Sarkar beholds his mother’s life in the minutiae of the everyday, the threads of her many selves—a woman, a worker, a mother—are interlaced with remnants of her past; it is a portrait punctuated by both song and silence.
We first encounter Sarkar’s mother, Bina, as a reflected image; she is introduced through her own gaze, beholding herself. She appears to us in the monsoon, following the sound of a flight landing in the distance and the arrival of a crow on the window’s ledge. These portents of time, its familiarity and strangeness, its continuity in seasons and routines, and splintering in separations and reunions, are the substance of living. Nâzim Hikmet once made an inventory of desires, confiding in us all the things he didn’t know he loved—
“I didn’t know I liked rain
whether it falls like a fine net or splatters against the glass my
heart leaves me tangled up in a net or trapped inside a drop”
Stitched unfolds as a discovery of something innately known; understood now in the alphabet of grain and filament. The vignettes present scenes of a home that is talismanic—where each object, surface, act is bestowed with an inner world, a narratological impulse—with a gentleness that extends to the images themselves an interiority. Each frame holds its own history, forges its own relations, and marks its own time, tells us and withholds from us the many parts of Bina.
Woven into scenes of Bina’s home and her daily work of tending and nurturing—her selfhood and art, plants, family, and avian visitors— are brief interludes of Dhaka, a city churning and clamouring to survive. When Bina hums and plays the harmonium, it is along and against the metronome of Dhaka as the frequencies of azaan, sounds of children playing, and distant traffic melt into her breath. In close-ups soaked with affection, we see Bina embrace the rain, her eyes tracing in the raindrops the atlas of a life we are not called to grasp or speculate, but implored to simply be with its inward image.
On the terrace, humming among shadows at twilight, standing in the technicolour rain that forms pools in her eyes—Bina eats evanescence slowly.
III.
Through the window of his mother’s home, Sarkar observes a murder of crows—their oblique silhouettes as opaque, inscrutable, and enigmatic as their journeys in the sky. In a series of portraits, the crows are perched in stillness against a velvet sky, holding the dramaturgical depth Sarkar reveals in the crafting of each image. The crows are companions to his mother, sharing the threshold of the windows, the parapets of the terrace, places where boundaries evaporate. Not unlike a parent and child, this is the friendship that grows from shared hours, from the ineluctable fact of the other. In the poem God’s Mother, Anne Carson writes
“Naturalists tell us
that the hatching crow is fed by the male
but when it flies, by the mother.”
Parent and child, friend and stranger—the rain embraces all, turning the wheels of memory, washing the smog-cloaked air of Dhaka with a sense of release.
IV.
In the poem A First Monsoon Again (Bombay, July 2016), Arundhati Subramaniam unravels the knots of monsoon and memory—
“The first rains
are always
this plagiarism of yearning
every moment
an echo of another—"
Treading the orbit of this neighbourhood are encounters with scaffolds of an unfinished railway track that is suspended in time, stranded as lost echoes of a future deferred. The large concrete pillars are mirrored in the pools of rainwater that gathers at its bay. These are relics of the many stalled projects to be found in the megacities of the Global South, hurtling towards an anaesthetic future. Claws of construction cranes frozen mid-air dot the horizon against which Sarkar makes portraits of his partner Sarah, and others—a ritual of their walks through the detritus of development that skirts their neighbourhood, as life annotates even that which is forsaken. Small pools and muddy trails invert the verticality of these pillars and buildings, pinning them to the ground that they resist. In these pictures, Sarkar draws our eyes to where—as Walter Benjamin claimed in One-Way Street—the city is palpable: to the dirty pools that reflect its grand structures and bright signs. The megacity will write itself in palimpsests of cement and steel, and yet the rain will smudge its stony ink with the impertinence of something that is unfettered. However slight its trespass may appear to our eyes; however quietly its song may echo—in these images, it is undeniably here.