Dhon (Two)
Ongoing Project
I moved to the village of Moira in North Goa in 2020 from Bombay, right after the first lockdown. After four months cooped up alone in an apartment, watching blue skies for the first time ever through the window in my room and then very quickly seeing it turn an even darker gray, I’d had enough. I was dissilussioned by fashion, and I realised I wasn’t built for the city. I’d spent my childhood summers in my father’s village in Kerala, and after college I spent a year in Ooty learning photography. Those formative memories were euphoric, spent in nature and watching as time slowed down. I found myself craving life away everything I was used to. Goa felt close enough to things, and free enough to let me breathe and feel safe.
I moved not knowing anybody in Goa. I was depressed in Bombay already, and here I was confused, wondering if I had left my career and made an exit, but an exit or entry to what? I had no idea. I spent a lot of time walking around my village. My first monsoon I spent a month cooped up in the house, watching a cyclone tear the aluminum sheets off my neighbors rooftop, watching trees fall down and change the landscape. And then the ghost town started to come alive, and I noticed that life didn’t stop.
The Goans went about their activities. I took a cue from that and got some rain gear, and started walking through the rains.
I had a regular route which deviated a bit everyday. On one such deviation, I came across an old stairway overgrown with grass and bush. I walked up to explore, inspired by the movie “Secret Garden”, hoping to land up in some other enchanted dimension.
I reached the top and found a wall marking the periphery of a house.
A face popped up from behind the wall and looked at me in a rather pleasant surprise.
“Hi! What are you doing here?”
And so I came to know Eugene, who has become my friend, who has adopted me as a friend of the family. I met her twin daughters Eulanda and Rustica, and Eugene’s mother-in-law Maria. Eugene extended an open invitation to me, so I kept going back. They kept taking me in, with so much warmth.
For a while, I couldn’t photograph them. It felt rude. And capitalistic, to make use of their hospitality and love to turn them into a story. When Eugene asked me to photograph the twins 21st birthday it was the moment I knew that they had accepted me in that role.
Four years and ongoing, the story revolves around the family, their home and their lives within the church and farming communities. An amalgamation of documentary images with staged photographs, the story has since become a love note to my friendship with Eugene and the family, and a documentation of the changing landscape of the the village around them within
a real estate boom.
There goes the mango trees and the chikoos, the old tea cups and saucers, and the ostrich eggs that an aunt sent from Africa for a wedding, and the family photographs and calendars, odd nick knacks collected since time immemorial. This fills me with great sadness, and conviction that these incredibly built old houses and the lives lived in them are to be immortalised through photography.
Dhon has received the Umrao Singh Sher-Gil Grant for Photography 2023 and the PHMuseum Women Photographer’s Grant 2023.