Home Is Where I Prefer to Die

When Portia Roy talks about migration, she doesn’t do it through statistics or theory. She tells you about her grandmother.

Her grandmother left Bangladesh in her twenties, caught in the upheaval of India's partition. She came to India, built a life, raised a family, and by every measure, made it work. But Roy remembers something else. Till the very last day of her life, her grandmother's one wish was to go back. Back to Bangladesh. Back to the place she had left nearly seventy years before.

She never made it back, because without a passport or birth certificate, the home she carried in her heart was, on paper, completely unreachable. Roy grew up with that story. And if you look closely at her work, you can feel it running quietly through all of it.

When Choice Is Not Really a Choice

Here is a question worth sitting with. How many migrations that look voluntary are actually free choices? Or are they decisions quietly shaped by circumstances that leave very little room for anything else?

Roy does not shy away from this. She uses her own life as an example. She grew up in rural India and came to Delhi to find work. "I don't like the city," she says plainly. "I always criticise it. But I don't have any option." Opportunities are concentrated in cities. And so people move, not because they want to, but because staying starts to feel impossible. "If I have a chance to earn money and maintain myself in the suburbs," she says, "I will go back."

It looks different from her grandmother's story on the surface. But something connects them. The decision to leave was never entirely free.

A Work Born from a Railway Track

One of the most powerful works in Not an Extra is Home is Where I Prefer to Die. To understand it, you need to know what it was made in response to.

During India's COVID lockdown, millions of migrant workers found themselves stranded overnight when factories shut and wages stopped. With nowhere to go and no way to get there, many began walking home, hundreds of miles, along empty railway tracks. At some point, exhausted and with nowhere else to rest, a group of workers stopped on the tracks to eat and sleep. A goods train struck them in the night. Most did not survive.

They were not walking towards comfort. They were not walking towards safety. There was no food waiting at home. No money either. "But at least there were some people whom you can maybe embrace fate with," Roy says. "It becomes easier."

They were walking towards people. That is all. And that tells you everything you need to know about what home really means.

Home Means Loved Ones. That Is It.

Roy's own sense of home is refreshingly simple. She has moved between cities for most of her adult life. Her husband, she mentions, has no fixed concept of home at all.

"Home is where my dog is, my daughter is, my husband is," she says, "and I have a studio. So that's all for me."

She left her childhood home at seventeen and has not looked back at a single address since. "Home means loved ones. That's it."

It is such a simple idea. And yet for so many of the people in Roy's work, it is the hardest thing in the world to hold onto.

In Not an Extra, the figures carved into plywood are searching, through all the exhaustion and uncertainty, for the feeling of not being alone. And when you understand that, the work hits very differently.

See the Work for Yourself

Home is Where I Prefer to Die is part of Not an Extra, a virtual exhibition by Portia Roy presented by Artlune in collaboration with Grapa, an independent art gallery based in Spain. The exhibition is open globally and free to access.

To explore the exhibition and register for upcoming events, visit us at https://www.artlune.com/projects/not-an-extra