I come from a small town at the border of the states of Haryana and Punjab. It lies at a geographic and linguistic divide that, in post-Partition India, formed two Punjabs and two Punjabis. This is the border where my initial preoccupations with language began. I speak a dialect confined to my town, that can only be learned through erasure and mistranslation. A mistranslation can manifest as a wound, a hospital room, a torn spinal ligament, a sick doll, a discarded piece of silk. It can be a Punjabi word like baithak, which my grandfather used for a living room—a word that disappeared over time, replaced by the English drawing room, a colonial borrowing embraced by my father, but now abandoned even by native speakers. It is an unstable, leaky zone of chronologies, revealing intergenerational erasures within a word, within a body; returning the mother tongue as foreign over time. It is a space of semantic syndromes, postcolonial illness and its reconfigurations—or relapses. Here, I take the position of a translator: always ill, always waiting, always in transit. At once she is bed-bound and at the bedside, with poems and textiles.

The scale of my work is often that of miniatures—objects that ask to be held, seen, and read up close. Each one a reference to the material culture of those dispossessed by the clinic: small things, tender things, things for you and me.