At the end of Episode 24 of Cowboy Bebop, an animation series, Faye Valentine, one of the protagonists, runs toward her childhood home. After 54 years of a cryogenic freeze, she has woken up and has no memory of her past. Much to her dismay when she reaches the site of her home, she finds only rubble where a structure once stood decades ago. She goes into the place, sits on the ground where her childhood bedroom would have been, and draws a rectangle from memory. This act of drawing indicates the interplay between memory and loss. Faye has lost the physical remains of her home, but she still holds the shape and feelings associated with that place. Therefore, is something truly lost if it holds space in our memory? But more importantly, what do we do with the loss that we encounter in our lives?

Aligarh-born artist Zarina (1937-2020), in her work Letters from Home (2004) and These Cities Blotted into the Wilderness (2003), presents this complex matter of memory and loss, seen in Faye’s narrative, as she examines themes of language, migration, geopolitics and meaning-making to show how art can help us negotiate rupture and departure to make sense of our multiplicities. Letters from Home, housed at Tate, is a display of eight monochromatic woodblock and metal-cut prints, showing the layouts of her homes on letters Zarina received from her older sister Rani. Rani was living in Karachi while Zarina moved to various cities due to her husband’s

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