Tree of Life II

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But where are you really from?

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The question of belonging has echoed throughout my life—shifting shape as I moved from city to city in childhood, and later, across continents. London became a new home, even as the textured footprints of India remained imprinted beneath the surface.

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In this ongoing body of work, Tree of Life becomes a living metaphor—a space where memory, place, and identity interweave. By mapping green spaces across London and embellishing them with delicate blossom-like stitches, I inscribe fragments of history and personal memory into unfamiliar soil. The stitches themselves are cut from an old colonial map of India—an act both of reclamation and reconfiguration, stitching past into present.

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This work is both a cartography and an act of meditation—on migration, memory, and the layered, often uneasy, process of becoming. It speaks to the transient nature of identity: always shifting, taking new forms, and eventually moving toward formlessness.

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In asking, “But where are you really from?”, the work challenges fixed narratives of origin, and instead gestures toward a fluid, evolving sense of rootedness—one that may not lie in geography, but in the spaces we remake with memory, intention, and care.