Kolkata-based photographer's solo VR exhibition in Mumbai delves into his mother's disappearance

The audience is compared to this “ghost” or the shadow with a bird’s head and an exaggerated beak that watches TV, making it seem like a transition from the ending of the film on screen to the present time

From being underwater, navigating through a maze inside a deserted house, staring at a TV screen that plays live footage of last rites and a baby's birth, to seeing a "painting of a ghost" with a bird's head that tells you that the painting is actually, "you…staring at the TV," was an experience this writer has never gone through.

We have just finished watching Kolkata-based documentary photographer Soumya Sankar Bose's film, A Discreet Exit through Darkness. It's his first solo exhibition in the city and is a virtual reality (VR), non-animated feature length film. The 60-minute-long 360-degree offering, which can only be seen through a VR set, is accompanied by a series of haunting photographs. This project, his fourth one, delves into the disappearance of his mother from 1969 to 71.

The film is in the form of diary entries from the perspective of his grandfather, who tells us about their life, their house in Midnapore in West Bengal and the quest to find his nine-year-old daughter Chahanda, who disappears while on an errand to buy sweets. She returns three years later with no memory of where she has been all that time. No other information about how she came back, where she was before, now exists in public or personal memory. Through brilliant usage of sound, among other things, the film fits beautifully into the horror and thriller genre.

The hour-long VR film will draw you in completely, ensuring you don't look at your phone and is similar to a time machine. Pic/Sameer Markande

"The story was always in my head," says Bose. But it was only during the pandemic, when he was home with his family, did he begin working on it because, "otherwise it would be too late as many of my family members have already passed away".

We meet him at Experimenter, an art gallery in Colaba, where his exhibition will be on view till February 25. "There are so many layers, such as local politics and other happenings at the time, that I decided to make a film about the house where my mother grew up. It does not exist anymore, but stories about it live on through me."

Bose's grandfather, who was his main source, passed away before his mother returned. For this project, he imagined himself as him, and went to the places he thought his grandfather may have fine-combed for his mother.

The 32-year-old photographer confesses he is no journalist, but his research has been like one, and embellished with imagination and superstitions. "I mostly depend on oral history," he says, "I met friends, family, neighbours and tried to understand what happened, and how the house looked. I also went through newspaper archives."

Bose's grandmother, who is 90 now, and his mother, who is 62, will be coming to the city for the premiere. He confides how their inputs were very important to him.

His mother has no recollection of those three years due to prosopagnosia, the inability to recognise faces. "But you can feel her trauma and sense she hasn't been able to overcome it," he says. "She had mixed feelings [about the film]. She wasn't able to speak about the disappearance for a long time without being judged. And now finally, there's a sense of relief as she doesn't have to keep it a secret anymore."

His grandmother's reaction was amusing: She kept asking Bose where he found his grandfather's diary, which features in the film. However, it's an amalgamation of fiction, imagination and research. "She also thought that the narration was in my grandfather's voice," he says, "which is interesting because I have never heard his voice. She is also trying to connect to and look for herself in these memories."

A normal 2D film could not have done justice to Bose's vision, because, he says, "we needed something that gave two different perspectives of the same story. With 360 degree film, you are in that space for an hour, seeing the house and time -travelling to that period and coming back to see the photographs."

Bose's next project, his mother's perspective, will form the second chapter of this exhibition.