We first meet her putting on bangles, aboard a bus that is ambling towards Mumbai from the hinterlands of Maharashtra. Shunned as a young widow in her village, she refuses to be a burden to her family, having decided instead to make a life in the big city. The unlikely protagonist of a simmering inter-class romantic drama, Ratna toils through the day as a full-time maid for her eponymous ‘Sir’ (dir. Rohena Gera, 2018). As the story progresses, we learn that she wants to pursue tailoring in her spare time, still nurturing her childhood dream of becoming a fashion designer. The city she now resides in, apart from a modicum of financial independence, provides her a place to desire from, and to be the person that can possess such a desire. To live in the city is to hold onto this dream; to go back would mean not only giving up on it for good, but also giving in to the identity that her birth and circumstance have tethered her to. Poignantly, the bangles—forbidden to widows back home—can freely adorn her hands here. “Hey maza aayushya aahe, mi konihi hou shaktey” she tells us, “This is my life, I can be anyone”.

The sheer ubiquity of migrant experiences makes them integral to understanding the metropolis in Southern contexts. One can find within cities of the Global South countless narratives such as Ratna’s. The site of the largest mass migration in history, the Indian subcontinent today witnesses high numbers of internal migration. Millions of Indians seasonally migrate to urban areas, and periodically return to the villages they call home. Forced by poverty or in search of opportunities, seeking social mobility or an escape from rural life, a range of colluding push and pull factors contribute to this phenomenon. Such circular migrants predominantly end up working in the vast informal sector, providing their labour to construction sites, industries, markets, homes; it can be surmised that no part of urban life remains untouched by them.

The city that lures migrants with the promise of opportunity and autonomy, however, accords them neither dignity nor a sense of belonging. In spite of their indispensable role in sustaining the urban economy, the lives and labour of migrant workers are abjectly invisibled. As a part of a huge, unorganised workforce, they are consistently rendered precarious, impoverished, and deprived of basic rights and necessities. Crammed informal settlements or match-box apartments with scant resources define the living experience of migrant workers. As with the urban poor, the architecture that supports the lives of migrant workers in the city is found to be at odds with the image of the urban, largely falling outside the ambit of civic authorities and the planning machinery. Ironically, the behemoths of steel, concrete and glass that so define this city and its built environment would be neither possible nor profitable without the labour that goes into constructing them. While the body of the migrant is extracted from and made useful, the person is erased and othered.

Against the experience of inhabiting the city with otherness, how does the search for  belonging, of claiming a ‘home’ for the self, find expression? Ratna’s room in the film makes for an excellent case-study: unlike other migrants, she lives in the ‘servant’s quarter’ of an affluent apartment in a high-rise residential tower, a tiny room tucked behind the kitchen. This room, however insignificant, affords Ratna a space that she can call her own. Juxtaposed against the designerly excess that pervades the rest of the house, it is relatively spartan: a bed, half a cupboard, a shelf and a clothesline. Yet her presence registers in the many ways she has appropriated it for herself: a picture frame on the wall, a vase with plastic flowers, a small shrine to many gods, a biscuit-box to tuck away her savings. It is here that we see her gleefully unravelling her newly acquired ‘tailoring ka saaman’, and later, her elation on stitching a new garment. The space encloses a myriad of traces from a landscape that stretches from her village to the city. Whether in the act of embellishing her wrists with bangles or her space with her possessions, these traces emerge to the surface, folding within them a sense of the self, of desiring, of belonging.

Migrant narratives—I use this term to encompass the act of embellishment as a kind of spatial story-telling—tell us much about displacement, but they can also tell us about how places travel. One can read in them fragments of the self left in places, and the fragments of places carried within oneself. The movement of these fragments across geographies produces both subjectivities and spatialities brimming with traces of places past. It is in the fragments that remain then, that one seeks to continue calling a place left behind, ‘home’. It is also with the fragments that remain, that one stages the domestic, to search for belonging in another. In the face of an architecture of the city that declares a full, unflinching, unapologetic presence, the act of embellishment can be thought of as the recurring imprint of the negative—a collective absence through which the marginalised, the invisibilized, the othered assert their belonging. The vocabulary of this imprint are the many fragments with which the mise-en-scène of everyday life is staged.