ജEverything in contemporary artist Subodh Gupta’s work is about making home so permanent that there is no scope to forget. He is seeking redemption. That is why he is almost insistent about making ordinary bartans become something else. A Kafkaesque kind of transformation. Totally phantasmagoric and illusory and surreal. It is also terrifying and disturbing because there is a trajectory of loss. Like when Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka wakes up one morning and turns into an insect. Alienation is the theme there and here. We left home. “We carry home inside us,” says Gupta. At his retrospective at Bihar Museum called The Way Home curated by the director of the museum Anjani Singh, visitors see the familiar and ordinary mutate into things that are abstract and existential. In these works, there is that urgency stopping that which corrodes away that makes Gupta cast his memory of ordinary objects in ordinary steel, a material that lasts for decades, a middle-class aspiration once. There would be no rust. Only the light that it would reflect. And only the ordinary has the potential to become extraordinary. That’s how he is preserving what’s getting lost by the hour. That’s an emergency. Of loss. Trees, cars, motorbikes, buckets, tiffins, etc. Nothing so extinct yet but you know there will be that ending and you are at war against that eventuality. There is poetry in everyday things. Language is never sufficient. To write about what you feel when you see the steel utensils stuck together to form a bouquet that he calls guchchha that emerges from a bucket is an exercise in futility. No language can contain home.