Sohrab Hura, India
Life is Elsewhere

Everything turns problematic, questionable, subject of analysis and doubt: Progress and Revolution. Youth. Motherhood. Even Man. And also Poetry...

- Life is Elsewhere (Milan Kundera)

It was in the summer of 1999 when my mother was diagnosed with an acute case of paranoid schizophrenia. I was 17 then. The doctors, in retrospect, had said that she had already started developing the symptoms many years prior to that. Symptoms that no one had noticed. But it was the break up with my father that caused her triggered her condition to suddenly surface and deteriorate. Over the years, the walls of our home started to peel off, people had stopped coming to our home because my mother was too scared to let anybody in and all that remained were the traces of a life that no longer existed. The initial years were spent hiding from the world. She, out of paranoia, and I, out of embarrassment and anger at who she had become. But after all these years I’ve realized that my mother had never stopped loving me.

Today, as I look back, I realize that who I am, what I feel, see and think, is connected to my relationship with my mother in a way stronger than I know. And in this work, I hope I am able to connect the relationship that I’ve had with my mother with the rest of my life.

Life is Elsewhere is a journal of my life, my family, my love, my friends, my travels, my sheer need to experience all that is going to disappear. In a way I’m attempting to connect my own life with the world that I see, with the hope to find my reality in it. Life is Elsewhere is a book of contradictions and doubts, of understandings, of laughter and forgetting, in which I am trying to constantly question myself by simply documenting the broken fragments of my life which might seem completely disconnected to one another. But I hope that in time I am able to piece together this wonderful jigsaw puzzle called life. And this journey will perhaps lead to the eventual reconciliation with my own life.