– Hello!
– (Silence)
– Hello? Are you there?
– (Silence returns)
– Hello? what happens to my voice? Does it not reach? Does it disappear? – (no voice. no breath. no interruption.)
– Hello. I wait for a moment that will never arrive.
‘Hello’ circles in our mind. It extends as a fragile thin hair into an uncertainty that breaks its habituation into an emptiness. It gives up being a usual greeting. It becomes wait. WAIT. WEIGHT. Heavy and impossible to escape notice. It asks questions before it offers itself. Its very utterance is a tremor to know separation. It reveals a distance.
– Hello.
– You say it as if it is nothing. How many attempts does it take for this word to arrive?
– Hello!
– I answer you as if I am answering myself.
– I deposit more than what this small word can carry. I have waited in a queue of invisible permissions and checkpoints.
– Hello?
– The distance has been drawn between us again.
– I hear you say, I am still here. The air still carries you.
Is distance merely spatial? Kashmir is a field of curfews, restrictions, communication and internet bans. Sometimes for days. Days that turn into months and years. These bans, curfews, checkpoints and bunkers create separations. The distance is not the miles but the impossibility to reach. It is produced, regulated and enforced into our mundane everyday through power structures, permissions and borders. Who may speak, and who may not. Who is heard, and who remains unheard. What voices are allowed and what remain suspended mid air. When communication is regulated through restrictions, surveillance and decisions, distenses solidify. It becomes a lived condition felt in the body, in time and in the rhythms of waiting.
– Do you remember how we used to speak without noticing the beginning. No hello. No waiting. No questions or insistence on being present.
– I remember an assertion that ‘we know you are listening.’
– Were we this measured? Everything seems fragile now.
– Hello.
– I called you that night. Nights later, I kept calling your number. It became a place for me to return, again and again. There is a ‘line’ between us that separates us. But I kept calling, again and again.
Each image is a frozen duration in the shades of longing and indifference. I kept remembering you, again.
and again
and again.
Each silence shapes differently.
– Hello, I cannot reach you.
– Something is deciding how I cannot reach you.
– Hello.
connecting | Medium: Stop-motion Video | Dimensions: (1920 x 1080 px) | Duration: 67sec | Year: 2020
The simple act of dialing a number is charged with uncertainty. Calling is no longer a routine. It is an active negotiation with absence and anxiety. Each call inhabits a terrain of enforced distance. Mute, still and banal. Each attempt holds within it the mechanics through which distance is administered. Every failed attempt conditions intimacy beyond one’s control.
The metallic voice repeats as if repetition could stand in for certainty. Even language is displaced from familiarity. This voice, flat and affectless, becomes only consistent respondent. It does not acknowledge me as the caller. It simply declares a condition: not reachable. It stretches its temporal limit indefinitely and politely into a ‘later’. Each repetition folds onto itself producing the same response, but never the same moment.
Time thickens as well into a continuous deferral. And ‘hello’ lingers unspoken, echoing within the act of dialing itself.
– Hello
you say it again.This time, there are voices that belong to us. They speak again.
– May I be sacrificed unto you, o son.
witness, witness, witness
– I had a promise to keep, o father. You wanted to tell me something.
witness, witness, witness
– I seek your forgiveness, father. If you are content, My Lord will be content with me. Remain pleased with me.
– Can I do anything for you?
– No
witness, witness, witness
– My voice stutters. I have a bullet in my head. Do you have my fathers contact? I seek your and his forgiveness.
witness, witness, witness
– If you cry, oh mother, I will fall. Be courageous and pray for us.
witness, witness, witness
– be kya kare? (what shall I do without you?)
– Patience.
witness, witness, witness
– Hello. (voice of a child, sobbing)
– (A mirroring voice)
Hello, why are you crying, my shade of heart. Don’t cry, O light of my eyes. It will burden and pain me in my final moments.
witness, witness, witness
– Hello. (a pause)
hello. (sobbing)
hello (mournful cries)
– Did you eat?
witness, witness, witness
– A promise to meet elsewhere, another time, another life.
– My life be sacrificed unto you, brother.
CALL ENDS
Last Calls | Medium: Audio | Duration: variable | Year: 2020
What happens to a word when it becomes the last one? How do we encounter a ‘hello’ that is answered as the final word with those who are no longer ‘reachable’? The ‘lines’ carry farewell voices and traverse distances only to turn them permanent and make separation irreversible. Who is living and who is dead? Each word turns into a persistant presence. The sound outlives the body that produced it. Listening becomes an act of witnessing, mourning as much as it is an act of connecting.
This politics of distance is also about power. To control distance is to control relation. How do I say I am here and when do I hear you are there. This condition to affirm presence is existential and feels precarious, contingent upon the possibility of being acknowledged by another.
what if I ask you to call someone just once as if it is the last time you can.
Imagine it. You hold a phone and do not know what to say first,
Hello
(or) I am sorry
(or) I never told you
(or) I still love you
(or) nothing
(or) tears roll down
(or) past re-plays superfast
(or) the guilt, regret and hesitations
(or) numbness to feel anything
(or) nothing at all
And listen to
the sound
of being there
for as long
as the line allows
– Hello
– Distance is not far. We wait for permissions. This distance has learned our habits.
– Why do we begin there? Why do we hold it in place?
– My voice arrives altered, delayed and dissipated. What is this space between us?
Times has stretches too much such even my memories doubt itself.
– Did I promise you any crossing or returns anywhere?
– Hello. (as if I say it to myself when I say it to you)
It is what I am left with, to resist this distance that keeps learning how to remain unseen and yet everywhere. I continue to call. To see what happens to the word on its way to you.
– Hello
– Will you come to my rescue if I ever loose to my own self?
Title: Last Call | Medium: Performative Installation | Year: 2026 (upcoming)
A poem on post-war surveillance
—Hello, warai chukha?
(Hello, are you well?)
a voice like a prayer asked too often,
but the answer is always the same.
—well, perhaps.
—You were expecting guests?
—Haan, mehmaan aa rahe hai.
But then other guests arrived,
pounding on the engraved wooden door
asking, Where are they?
—Who?
—Terrorists!
—It’s my daughter’s engagement!
Mehmaan, misunderstood, become
monsters conjured by mistranslation.
—Hello, they were calling again? What should we do?
—Pagah hasa tuluek taaesrai, te maklawokh.(We’ll
thud them tomorrow, and muffle it.) And the guests
come yet again
tuning the truth out of flesh
with boots and batons.
—What are you planning?
—Only a shelter from the downpour.
Tin sheets now wait on wooden
scaffolds, Like children with no fathers in
Kashmir.
Kashmir has grown ears with no face
and eyes with no tears. They don’t know
roofs or homes or the language of love and labor.