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PROFILE
In keeping with Hash's temperament, her world is defined in a dry, matter-of-fact way, confining itself to the definition of squares and triangles, diagonals and verticals, of empty spaces which mirror that sense of emptiness. The harsh rigour of this geometry is in conflict with emotions and feelings brought out by the words which Hashmi inscribes below the etchings and woodcuts, like a poet might do.

[image]
[caption] Flight Log. Cast paper, type 2 string. 1987. 8x10x6 inches. [/caption]

boundaries of houses, courtyards, gardens. I would love to glide - but if it caught in a thermal, if you hit an air pocket, you could go nowhere - you would just go around and around..."

Flight Log (1987) is a sculpted book of paper compressed together, which registers her sense of foreboding about her destiny and becomes in every sense symbolic of her past and future. With only four pages of minimal graphics in the book she lays out each page to face just one line of text, as delicate as a haiku, summing up in essence the story of her life:
1. I need to fly
2. got caught in the thermal
3. could never go back 
4. having lost the place to land - (an empty page with no image)

The House at Aligarh (1990) was the first of her series on homes, an attempt to reconstruct the past, her past, through the definition of her original home of her father in Aligarh. The series is "a recollection of (my) family members when we were children. Each print is dedicated to four siblings, and to the parents. All these family members were then alive, now there are three, and in different parts of the world..." The House with Four Walls (1991) followed almost immediately, recalling childhood anecdotes, ghosts and snakes and the old maid with one eye as though these has happened just the other day. Once more, each print and each page in this series is inscribed carefully with a line of text below - as though there is the fear that these little memories may slip away or be forgotten. Hence, with the square outline of the house, with horizontal and verticals and a few minimal forms, the past is revisited with a few words - ending with a prophecy which she could never have forgotten:
1. The house with four walls
2. The ghost stopped by the pillar
3. A snake came into the house
4. On long afternoons everyone slept
5. I run outside to play and burn my feet
6. One night we heard the owl in the trees
7. The one-eyed maid said we would have to move away...

For those who leave their homeland, the past is resurrected in many ways. Experiments conducted with the Tibetans, or for that matter with any people in exile, have shown that for 

[image]
[caption] From the portfolio House with Four Walls. Etching with Chine Colle. 1991. 9x8 inches. [[/caption]

them the past is more vividly real than the present. Their past is recreated through their rituals, their songs and their folklore, most graphically of all through their images and mandalas which mark out for them their sacred space. For Hashmi these explorations are equally a retrieval of sacred spaces, the construction of a mandala which in this case is often a floor plan. The House with Many Rooms (1993) is even more spare in its definition, composed of floor plans defining emptiness - of her return to the family home to find herself "knocking around empty rooms reverberating with so many memories".

It was a house that she could never visit again, condemned to be a home abandoned. She recalls, "when I came to live in 
34 THE ART NEWS MAGAZINE OF INDIA VOL V ISSUE I