A lot of your work deals with the cosmic, the metaphysical and the larger ideas of religion, truth and death. This same work will, almost eerily, straddle the concrete: in the case of Epilogue, it is rotis, but in the case of say, Public Notice 3, it was numbers, a symbol of man-made measure. Outside of your art, and in your life, how do you view or understand the relationship between the big Other and the smaller everyday?

To reconcile the world we see with eyes open and the world we see when we shut our eyes to look inwards is to match the sounds we hear around us with the sounds we create every moment through our biological rhythms. These serve as cosmic reminders of the still present.

The tight binding begins to loosen, the balance of the book is upset: heavier in one hand than the other, you know the story has been revealed, and this is the final note that comes after. An ellipsis. So that we sense the cyclical life of the story, so that it doesn’t quite end at the end. This is the Epilogue. The last, thin fragile piece of paper between thumb and index finger, each aware of the other in the imminent meeting of the part of yourself that began this journey with the part of yourself that is completing it.

And so Jitish Kallat’s piece, Eiplogue, holds taut the physical self and the self that thinks, analyses and feels. The part of you that looks and the part that sees.

22,000 moons, packed into a long, winding series of 753 frames, photographed and installed to hang along corridors recording the life—and finally the completion of it—of the artist’s father: 22,000 moons amounting to 62 years, from 1936 until 1998. The Epilogue comes then, as Epilogues normally do, over a decade later (2010), not as an afterthought, but as a tranquil observer distanced from the immediacy of turmoil, able to reflect on the patterns of the story.

The moons are made of rotis, in waxing and waning stages of being eaten, metaphorically depicting the essential dualities of existence: superfluity and scarcity, the cosmic and the earthly, the spatial and the temporal and light and dark. Isolated in frames, these dualities merge and a waning life becomes a waxing death. The light of the camera illuminates the darkness, a heavenly body made of cheese becomes an everyday bread made of wheat, and as you consume space, elongating the hallways, you track time.

If there were any truth found in what we imagine of death, then it is perhaps that death follows similar cycles as life. 753, adding to 15, one more than the 14 day lunar cycle, a sonnet extended, an epilogue. 22, like the Catch, a palindrome, caught, this way and that. Even in Death there is mathematics, and rhythm, a pattern that we and the things we create—art—by virtue of not-knowing more, must imitate.

So that when the last frame ends mid-cycle, it could be read both as a finality of something before, or as black space open to possibility. As if this epilogue might be a prologue for something else.

Jitish Kallat was born in 1974 and lives and works in Mumbai.

Himali Singh Soin lives inside a flower on The Fuschia Tree.