Piscean Friends (Mumbai Fish Market)

Set into the living grain of wood, this layered collage reads like a palimpsest of a working waterfront—where the clocktower stands as both sentinel and metronome, measuring lives shaped by tide and trade. The composition stacks thresholds—fence, market tables, dock—so the viewer descends through crowded planes of labor and ritual, guided by warm, ember-like backlighting that turns everyday commerce into quiet iconography. Hand-tinted figures and the blunt civic command of the “DO NOT THROW GARBAGE” sign introduce a moral counterpoint: a fragile negotiation between sustenance and stewardship, abundance and neglect. Fish, baskets, and nets become more than objects; they are the vocabulary of survival, insisting that heritage is not nostalgia but an ongoing, bodily act.