A photo essay documenting a return to my ancestral village in Chamoli, Garhwal. In Garhwali folklore, the cuckoo's call is said to sound like "kafal pakyo," the kafal berries have ripened. Every homecoming begins with kafal, gathered from the forest and offered in welcome. Sometimes it feels like the cuckoo isn't just marking the season, but calling out to everyone who has left the mountains for a different life, asking them to come home.
Photographed without a fixed agenda, this is an unhurried record of a landscape and a lineage, familiar yet unknown.
