Arya’s book of ten illustrated autobiographical essays tries to remember the way home
Kritika Arya’s book of ten illustrated autobiographical essays was self-published in India in 2023 and is now available internationally via Amazon. It begins with a chapter that explains her ‘puzzle strategy’: a way of understanding life as a young woman in her early thirties. It will be familiar to those who have assembled jigsaws: start with the edges; work your way towards the centre. Arya has now, in her thirties, realised that certain of the puzzle pieces that make up her life have been lost, discoloured or discarded, likely never to be found again. It is these empty spaces that are the subject of this memoir. And the biggest empty space surrounds the idea of home.
Born in Dubai to Indian parents from Rajasthan, Arya has her Indian citizenship by descent rather than by birth. After studying in the UK and being forced to leave because of visa issues, she has now lived in India for more than ten years. But isn’t quite sure if that’s ‘home’. During the course of the essays – which are presented in formats that span journal entries, lengthy SMS conversations with her sister and manuals for surviving the anxiety of facing uninvited, overinquisitive guests, and cover her childhood home, romantic relationships, education and career – it becomes clear that her ultimate goal is to find an emotional or intellectual rooting, in the absence of one that is spatial or geographical. And, as a reader, you are conditioned to help her, to look for the clues that could indicate where this might be: in six-year-old Arya’s toy detective kit, which she used to ‘investigate’ her siblings, friends and extended family; or in the corridor of her Dubai home, which held a makeshift wicket for playing cricket as well as a prayer room, mimicking most Indian households with a Rajasthani background.
As Arya matures and moves from one place to another, she convinces the reader that there is no state of permanence in the world, whether you try to locate that via a place, person, job, emotion or sensation caused by an illness. Anecdotes refer to Arya’s family’s struggle to remain rooted in her Rajasthani culture while living in Dubai. Arya feels the pressure to communicate well in Hindi, a language she acquired merely ‘by descent’ – while living in Dubai, her family spoke Hindi only at home. English was what she learned to speak, read and write at school. As she grows older, Arya notices that she becomes increasingly separated from home, via the memories of what it once seemed to be versus the way in which she perceives it now. She wants not to worry about that, as her father advises her, but she can’t.
For her, this search remains ongoing, as it does for many of her generation of millennials (including myself) who are descendants of generations for whom ‘home’ was equally in flux. As Arya seeks to construct a ‘home’ in her mind, she is led to confront issues relating to her mental health. As a result, Citizen by Descent is an honest and vivid account of young life among many self-help books too many millennials resort to for inspiration, tips or tricks that might help one to become the best version of oneself. While it might be considered a coming-of-age story, this is a collective one – narrated not just through Arya’s words, but through the works created by the artists who respond to her stories.
For example, her flat in London is depicted by Sri Lankan-British artist Annette Fernando (with whom Arya worked while studying at Central Saint Martins) in a pen-on-paper drawing that highlights Arya’s longing to remain in the city that she eventually left because she could not obtain the necessary visas. In the drawing, Arya lies with her laptop and indoor plants in a warehouselike setting full of construction tools. She is under constant threat of eviction because the apartment doesn’t meet building regulations. Emotions that accompany such threats, like fear and anxiety, are captured with rawness in the memoir, all of which make those emotions palpable to all readers who have lived in flux. And to those who have not.
Citizen by Descent by Kritika Arya. Self-published, £22 (hardcover)
From the April 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
