My wife’s pregnancy was an extremely different experience for me. I was able to observe very closely the different feelings of a woman during her pregnancy. Whenever she felt any pain, she expressed it by saying that “God should allow every father to share half the mother’s pain”. This led me to start thinking about how much or what the duties of a father are in giving birth to a child.Finally, my son left his mother’s womb in September 2007. After forty-one days of his being in this world, I went to the workshop in Kolkata. There, I felt the absence of my child.

On the first day of the workshop, we visited every room and passage of the Chaudhuri Bari, the venue for our workshop. I was surprised to learn that, long ago, pregnant women used to temporarily live in separate rooms, usually with widows or servants. Here, they gave birth to their children. Hearing all this, I found myself bereft without my wife and child in this big mansion. Accordingly, I decided to install my work in a passage in front of the widows and servants room within the mansion, and attempted to express my affection towards my child and wife through performance. In the installation-performance piece, eggs are the symbol of creation and the straw sculpture of a pregnant man is the symbol of a father’s self-realization. In my performance I created special sound effects using the voices of different artists from different places, echoing “God should allow the father to share half the mother’s pain”.