Text by Rupleena Bose

The room is never empty. The evening is.

The silence of the unfulfilled promise is drowned by the sound from the box. The window has been shut. The conversations lie exhausted in the residues of the day.

The sound from the box never stops. The neon that tactfully hides dark corners is no longer an interruption. The stillness of those evenings can be shaken. The box carries promises and desires in another language—images travel in, loneliness is cured, worlds are created, imagination is abandoned, a spectator is born.

The voices of others crowd the ageing yellowed houses in relentless cities. Their stories are whispered into the wordless night. The secrets of others brings them together when the evenings draw them apart.

They were you and me. The city and the town, the silence and the loneliness, the words and the moments, the real and the unreal.

Huddled together, we forget our stories and watch unknown lives piece by piece, spread over hours, days, weeks, months. Their words become our own, we become prisoners trapped in the ruins where the imagination had been forsaken.

The window too has its stories, looking onto the street into lanes housing mundane truths. The sky stretches out, the clouds waiting to be drawn in patterns conjured over idle evenings. The clouds lose their battle.

Dreams are now crammed with pictures that overlook the quiet beauty of ordinary lives. The images never stop plundering. They hide their silences and fill up blank conversations.

They were you and me. The city and the town, the silence and the loneliness, the words and the moments, the real and the unreal.

Somewhere along an anonymous city path, a tiny square of light illuminates the dark abyss below.

All series from The TV
May 2010-July 2011
Digital