An image began this project: a young girl my age, evacuated from a land in 1971. A love story between a girl and the land she never returned to, and the girl I am, who never knew either of them.
I never met my grandmother. I found her in old letters, in photographs, in stories my mother told me. I taste the recipes she carried across the border every time my mother cooks them. This was an attempt to understand her and the longing I feel for the home she left behind during the liberation war of 1971.
This is not an isolated story. It is the reality of a world where war keeps making sure more children are forced out of their homes, raised elsewhere, carrying the love for their dead grandmothers in photographs, letters, and food.
It is here that this project started coming together.
Blackbird
An online journal of literature and the arts
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Sree
Sree is a Kolkata-based writer and interdisciplinary artist with a Master's degree in film studies from Jadavpur University and six years of commercial writing experience, including the web series Brown (Zee5), directed by Abhinay Deo. Her work has been published in Outlook and Bombay Literary Magazine, among others. Her practice spans photography, film, fiction, creative nonfiction, and alternative archives. She develops a hybrid narrative framework by reconstructing desire, subaltern memory, displacement, and the intimate resistances of marginalised women's lives. She has been shortlisted for the Washington Square Review New Voices Award in Creative Non-Fiction, Epiphany Magazine's 2026 Breakout! Prize, the SLF Working Class Writers Grant, the HWR Khozem Merchant Non-Fiction Fellowship, the Rough Edges The Other Side Fellowship 2025, and the 2026 Rough Edges Lost and Found Documentary Fellowship, and longlisted for the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.
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