On the shelf: With artist Svabhu Kohli

There's a faint drumming on the tiled roof of Svabhu Kohli's 130-year-old house in Velha Goa. Here the drizzle knows many dialects. The Wi-Fi stutters, making Kohli walk across rooms holding their laptop like a lantern. The screen freezes on a half-peeled wall where one monsoon the paint chipped off to reveal the name of the man who built the house, Francis Guadalupe Perez. Kohli has left it as it is.

Their work, too, lives in this space between tending and letting be. An artist, Kohli gathers stories from the soil up; from myth and oral histories, from the teachings of mystics and naturalists, from the murmurs of disappearing forests. They ask: how do our bodies become maps of the places and people that raise us? What happens to a body when its ecology disappears? What stories do we tell ourselves about home when home keeps vanishing?

We are speaking, ostensibly, about their shelf. But as the connection cuts in and out, making them map different corners of their home, it becomes clear we are really talking about inheritance and loss, about what it means to build ritual in a country that has made the sacred violent. About the shelf as an altar, and the altar as an analog for processing grief, for staying tethered to love across distance and time, and for remembering that the land always lives in you.

Edited excerpts from our interview:

Beautiful Homes: You talk about bodies as maps. What does that mean when the landscape itself is disappearing?

Svabhu Kohli: In India in the last 20 years, there's been this massive loss of local habitats, ecology, storytelling, ways of life. It's been so drastic that it's left us culturally beheaded in many ways.  Look at Delhi, where I grew up. It was all oriented around the outdoors. Houses had courtyards, front yards, backyards, gardens. We slept on the terrace. All these physical somatic experiences have been culturally removed from the imagination of social behavior. To say that I slept on a terrace in the '90s (just 25-30 years ago) is something a child cannot even think of now because of air pollution, the heat crisis. How did this happen so fast? And what does it do to our bodies?

BH: This house, how did it find you?

SK: I was traveling in Goa, dreaming with my mother of a space to nurture somewhere in the world, when someone insisted I visit this region. On the drive, I felt a sense of coming home. The house hadn’t been lived in for years, but meeting the neighbours and the village showed me what would make it a home. Today, it’s home because of the warmth, care, and deep relationships I’ve found here.

BH: You come from a Partition family. How does that history live on your shelves?

SK: Making a home wherever you go was something we were raised with. We were told that the land lives in you. My altar is an invocation of that. It holds stories from Goa, the Aravallis, Atacama, Arunachal. Especially today when the world is so polarised about where you belong, where you come from, belonging can be something that can be built, shared, with so much respect.

BH: The shelf is right at the entrance and there's a mirror for you to see yourself amidst your valuables every time you leave the house. Tell me more of why you think of this as an altar.

SK: Everything sacred to me lives here. The earth and my ancestors are really who I connect to most. There are pieces that trace back to my lineage of Hakims (medicine men who worked with botanicals) from Rawalpindi. I think of them as magicians, and in many ways, my work continues theirs.

BH: You’re also returning the shells to the sea. What made you decide that?

SK: I picked these shells seven or eight years ago, before I’d learned much about tidal ecology. It seemed harmless. Recently, I was speaking to an ecologist, and learned that these shells are actually homes for mollusks. I was baffled that taking them could change the beach’s ecology. So, this November, when the sea retreats and mollusks look for homes, I’ll return them to Siridao Beach. It feels so freeing.

BH: So, there are ethics to altar-making.

SK: Absolutely. What we collect, where we collect from, why is it there? Is it to hold, to own, or just to keep for a little while? These are such important questions.

BH: There’s a photograph on your altar, weathered and worn, its image gone.

SK: It’s the only photograph of Beeji, my nani’s mother, whom I loved deeply. When my parents separated, a lot of photographs were destroyed. This came with me to Goa, and the humidity ate it out. The ink faded and she left the photograph. It taught me one of the most beautiful lessons, which is why it remains on my altar as a reminder that we carry the essence of people and things. If we're attached to materiality, we get stuck there. The idea is to transcend from there.