ছোড়দি– My Elder Sister

ছোড়দি – My Elder Sister is an ongoing series of embroidered photo prints (each 420 × 594 mm, embroidery on archival photo print), revisiting fragments of childhood when imagination unfolded without boundaries. At six, alongside my cousin-sister, four years older, we invented entire worlds without toys or costumes—becoming doctors, teachers, princes, and princesses, borrowing gestures from everyday life and stories from books.

The house where these games once bloomed now stands abandoned, slowly reclaimed by nature. On these photographs, embroidered dialogues emerge like whispers, stitching together the vitality of those imagined worlds with what feels absent today—the unstructured, screen-free spaces where storytelling once thrived.

Inspired by the Kantha stitching tradition of West Bengal, where women threaded memory, longing, and survival into cloth, each piece blends embroidered storytelling with documentary photography. Presently showing four works from the series, this project will eventually unfold into twenty images—offering a quiet meditation on memory, place, and the fragile endurance of childhood imagination in a world that rarely pauses to listen.