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A few summers ago, I was on an overnight train from Howrah to Koraput. As the train pulled into its final stop the next morning and I began gathering my luggage, I noticed something unusual. A weathered, anonymous diary was lying beneath the seat, tucked into a corner where bags are usually chained. There was no one around and probably it had been there for quite some time. I turned the pages and saw that the diary belonged to someone named Brinni. It made me wonder if she might be the woman from the upper berth with whom I had a brief conversation over dinner last night. I placed the diary into my bag and stepped off the train. I checked the list of passengers pasted on the compartment wall, but there was no one named Brinni.
A few days later, as I began going through the pages, I came across fragmented entries that included confessions, suicide notes, intimate reflections, and vivid descriptions of spaces, appearing as newspaper cuttings, handwritten notes, and margin commentaries. It's difficult to grasp who Brinni truly was—whether an amateur writer, an aspiring social scientist, an independent researcher, a PhD scholar, or a meticulous record keeper. But I soon realized that the diary reached beyond borders, gathering incidents from various countries, not of death itself, but of the memories people hold onto in their final moments, more like an exploration of thanatology. They seem to hover between psychological states, blurring the boundary where life turns into fiction and hinting at an underlying study of how personal and collective memories intertwine. They move along the fragile edge between memory and disappearance, leading us to come face to face with the timeless existential questions: What do we remember in our final breath? Which fragments of love, pain, regret, or joy stay with us the longest? What rises unbidden at the moment it is about to vanish forever?
The diary thus becomes a detailed record of lives shaped by systemic neglect and trauma, but are rarely documented in popular media. In a world still divided by race, class, gender, and religion, these pages hold what is mostly suppressed. Stories of gendered violence, workplace humiliation, homicide, the precarious lives of homosexuals, and everyday emotional dissatisfactions return again and again. The diary never separates the personal from the political. Instead, it shows how systems of power enter the psyche of our ordinary lives, influencing how people learn to endure.
Slowly, I became drawn to these entries and began retracing the journey mapped in the diary. Over time, the diary became a guide, leading me through landscapes and intimate spaces that held the essential details of these stories. The flower vase on the table of a seaside hotel room, people gathered at the bank of the Banki river during a summer evening, the crowded narrow lanes of an old small town where the houses lean against each other and silently overhear voices across the balconies, a high school classroom bench marked by the restless reflections of a teenage mind – it felt like reading a novel while walking through the town where the story was set.
As I travelled to create the visuals for each case, I couldn't help but notice how these spaces had changed with the passing years. Time had settled into their walls, floors, and corridors, leaving visible traces of what once was. While moving through these places, I often remembered reading Mohollar Bandor, Abu Halimer Ma ebong Amra by Shahidul Zahir in Dhaka in 2011. The story was written around 2000, nearly thirty years after the Liberation War, and I was encountering it another decade later. That distance created three overlapping layers of time inside the text, and the neighbourhood of Bhuter Goli in Puran(old) Dhaka moved through those layers with the traces of its people, appearing and disappearing across different moments of the town’s memory. At other times, the experience was similar to watching an Éric Rohmer film while travelling through Brittany, with my mind shifting between the film and the landscape unfolding outside.
I tried to allow the visuals to continue the stories rather than simply illustrate them. I reimagined the characters and the circumstances of their lives in the recent past, creating a parallel to what Brinni recorded, much as readers recreate worlds through their own inner visions.we need to talk in whispers (2023- ) delves into the emotional turbulence of such moments, exploring the space between desire and dread, dream and reality. At its core lies an engagement with the complexities of mental health, vulnerability, and the human psyche when confronted with the certainty of death. Through this process, I hope to foster empathy, deepen our collective understanding, and create a space for reflection on our lives, our hidden griefs, and the quiet strength we summon in the face of life’s inevitable end.