Calcutta: Photographs by Buku Sarkar

After seventeen years away, I’ve done something most Indians of my generation don’t do—return back home. When people ask me where I’m from, I always stumble. I say, I was born in Calcutta but I grew up in New York. When you are young, your awareness of the larger city is limited. I have to admit, I know New York much more intimately than I feel I know Calcutta.

Calcutta is like an aging beauty—decayed and crumbling. But she has a soul. In a way that many other cities don’t.

I can’t say my work is documenting the city. I write fiction and by nature am not always interested in what is out there or representing what I see. There is always a narrative running in my mind which doesn’t necessarily correspond to what is real and I use the camera to express it. In that sense, I feel I’m always writing fiction with the camera.