From the Banks of Ravi, my ancestral River, flows a story that is fluid like a vivid memory constantly in motion. Eating the past and the monsoon as it crosses borders. Changing, raging, making its way in, uninvited. Reflecting a truth my work is rooted in: that water, like memory, refuses to be contained and will always use reflections to bear witness.

During quiet hours of night barely illuminated by the moon hanging above a fractured land, the ancient river stands in quiet testimony to death. A keeper of secrets and grief. Silently negating the illusion that made up borders on paper can separate what the water remembers. It remembers running red. It remembers the weight of the floating bodies it carried across imaginary lines drawn up by war.

Its companion, the moon has risen to its throne in the sky, unfazed by the power games of man. untouched, unbordered, watching life play out as an inverted imprint over the same fields, the same fires, the same prayers whispered from across opposite sides of an artificial divide. In my images I use the moon’s light, as a quiet observer, a keeper of time, a silver eye that sees what history edits out. It does not choose sides. It simply shines with the truth.

Between the cracks of reality the river and the moon meet to speak in gestures about the truth. I am drawn to the spaces in between where everything becomes nothing. Where lands lose their name and memory spills into time. Where a shadow is both past and present. In these liminal places, the Ravi flows. The moon hovers. And they put on a show made of sadness and light.

Water is not just a subject, but a vessel. A moving archive of longing and return. And the moon, pulling at its surface, gathers the fragments. names unspoken, languages lost, songs half-remembered all washed away and given to the moon as gifts. To keep. It does not preserve them in stillness, but in movement. In shimmer. In the rhythm of light touching water.

These photographs are quiet meditations, attuned to what endures beyond the fractures of land and time. They lean gently into what eludes capture: the echoes that flow between memory and forgetting, carried in the murmur of rivers and reflected in the hush of
the moon.

Avani Rai is a photographer and filmmaker based in Mumbai.