An ode, an inheritance, a fantasy.

Within the walls of her nearly 200-year-old ancestral home, Divya Cowasji turns to her family’s past to preserve the stories carried over generations. Part bedtime story, part collective memoir, There Are No Love Letters Here is an effort to memorialise a family history that inevitably splinters with the passage of time.

Inheriting an abundance of archives—the family album, oral histories and treasured objects left behind by those who have since passed—Cowasji begins to piece together the narratives they continue to hold. Soon realising the limited capacity of historical record, she turns to reimagination. Performing the characters embodied by her grandparents, grandaunts, and other relatives, Cowasji creates a porous dialogue between the past and present.

As both narrator and subject of the Cowasji-Illava family history, the author works through wit and humour to parse through the grief of losing many loved ones in the span of one year. Using her own body as an archive, often wearing clothes and accessories of those that came before her, she transforms her inheritance into a site of living history. Placed alongside writing that is both anecdotal and irreverent towards definitive accounts of the past, the photographs expand to celebrate the fragmented nature of memory.

While deeply rooted in one family’s Parsi-Indian experience, There Are No Love Letters Here reflects on broader themes of loss, the weight of ancestry, and the fallacy of a singular historical truth. A fine balance between documentary and fiction, There Are No Love Letters Here is an intergenerational dialogue of an artist with her spirited lineage. It is ultimately an inquiry into belonging—how do we carry those that came before us within ourselves?

Tanvi Mishra