The longing to live and carry out rituals closest to the heart is something every immigrant knows. In a foreign land, the choice to step away from the comfort of one’s culture and familiar rhythms comes with a quiet loss—the loss of daily rituals that once anchored life. These rituals, so natural and almost invisible in their repetition, fade over time, yet they never truly vanish. They linger, waiting, as new habits slowly take their place, filling the hollow left behind.
The ritual I miss most is simple: stopping by the temple on my way to work, or whenever I set out toward the nearby city from my village. That pause, that act of entering a sacred space before stepping into the world, has stayed with me like a heartbeat.
This work is my way of reliving that ritual—by creating a temporary sacred landmark within the city, a place on the way. In the middle of the urban rush, it becomes a moment of stillness, where one can hand over burdens to the Divine and breathe in relief at the same time.
I call it Grbh, a word that means womb in Hindi. In a Hindu temple, the innermost sanctum is known as the Garbh Griha—the “womb house.” It is the source, the place where life begins. The womb offers unconditional support, nourishment, and energy for new life to emerge, and it is the first spark of consciousness. The Garbh Griha is its sacred echo, holding within it the concentrated presence of divine energy.
Grbh is an extraction of this idea: the sanctum without the monument, the essence without the grandeur. It is an anti-monument—plain, temporary, fragile, yet full of meaning. Built of earth and wood, it accepts its destiny of disintegration. In this, it becomes a metaphor for faith itself. Faith is not a stone that stands unchanged through centuries; it is more like mud—soft, vulnerable, always in need of care, repair, and renewal.
The structure is layered with mud over a wooden skeleton, standing bare beneath the sky. The mud is kept soft, so that after the first rain the surface thins, and with time the wooden bones begin to show. Light seeps through tiny cracks, filtering out from an oil lamp within. Day by day, the structure changes, revealing itself in new ways—never fixed, always alive.
In its fragility lies its strength. Grbh is both growth and decay, both shelter and exposure, a space where faith is allowed to breathe, falter, and be rebuilt.
