বাস্তু

An interactive documentary without dialogue. A spatial memory of my grandmother's house in Kolkata, walked through room by room, guided by a cat.

The house is heavy and takes a moment to gather itself. Pour a cup of tea, look out your window a while — it will be ready when you scroll down.

Bastu is an interactive documentary without dialogue. It is a reconstruction of my grandmother's house in Kolkata, a space shaped by tireless women, caste practices, overcrowding, secrecy, and ordinary acts of care. Rather than telling a linear story, the work invites the audience to wander through a series of rooms guided by a cat, listening to fragments of domestic life.

Utensils scrape against concrete floors. Children hum while pretending to study. The television murmurs in the background. Bugs gather around incense smoke. Trams pass below the balcony. Somewhere, an aunt quietly opens a love letter thrown up from the street.

The house is both shelter and witness. It remembers everyone who passed through it.

Bastu is an attempt to archive a disappearing architecture of intimacy.

Bastu started as an experiment for the interactive documentary course I took during my second year of Digital Futures at OCAD, under the guidance of Prof. David Macintosh. The reason behind Bastu, which literally translates to living quarters, was to capture the unspoken narrative of living spaces. I was fascinated by the way homes preserve both personal and political histories. My grandmother's house was shared by two generations: one uprooted from their life and belonging, and another born into refuge and displacement. Home was a place where privacy was almost impossible and everybody lived inside everybody else's routines.

I wanted to capture the feeling of moving through that space rather than documenting it objectively. The project borrows from memory, family folklore, refugee histories, and the sensory overload of everyday domestic life.

The result is intentionally claustrophobic. Nostalgia here is not comfortable. It is crowded, noisy, and impossible to escape.

Bastu remains unfinished by design. I want to continue developing it as a longer interactive documentary that expands beyond a single house into a broader exploration of migration, memory, inherited trauma, and domestic space.

The long-term goal is to develop the project for exhibition.