Detached Home

By Saptarshi Bhowmick

Depicted: 香港中環吊燈 (Central Hong Kong Chandelier), 2021, Video Installation by Pipilotti Rist

It is foreign to me today, those lands ushered by stellar moon and those people, coal-rimmed yet beautiful.

I, like honeydew on an arid plant, gaze at them with a demeanour smile. Heaven knows how I was once one of themlaughing at a lame joke on a tribal marriage party, pacifying the dreams that once arised, when the sun kissed the daybreak to greet a warm and heartfelt ‘good morning’.

Returning to this lulling homeland that now seemed not so much like a home. I, a soul with detached naivety, was unable to muster enough remorse to feel, To feel what has been lost so far.

Driving to the outskirts with a carriage that carries me further from my home, I look back.

Photography

By Joy Chen

My mother found me under a cabbage. She tells me I was pink and wriggling. I imagine a worm but she says I was cuter. I imagine a piglet and she says “about that.”

She says I was crying until she scooped me and caressed my bald little head, nestled me into her warm chest. I stayed there for years listening to her heartbeat, curled and cradled in compassion, tuned to her cooing. But then I was told there was no more room I told myself I had grown too large, she had grown too weary. I had to move so I packed up my belongings in a little red cloth tied to a stick over my shoulder.

I took the next bus out of home and it took the next left after the post office and it followed the straight highways though all the conspiracy towns of the USA, along the Great Wall of China, we ran out of diesel three quarters of the way up the Big Ben and around the pyramids, where we had to pull over.

A cactus had needled a puncture in the tyre. We continued after a brief repair break.

I never left that bus.

I never tiptoed the Great Wall or scaled the pyramids or tasted sea water.

I saw from inside the beauty of outside but I never left that bus.

Until eventually I stopped off in a city only forty minutes away from where I started it was small, messy, but it was close and I made that my new chest I called it home But it’s not my mother’s