Welcome! Cheryl Mukherji is a renowned photographer, and MAYDAY is ecstatic to showcase her immersive art on our virtual walls. Cheryl is an Indian visual artist and writer based in Brooklyn, New York. In her work, Cheryl explores the idea of origin and inheritance, which is embedded in the figure of her mother and her presence in the family album, using photography, text, video, and printmaking. Cheryl was a finalist and the subsequent winner of the 97th Annual at the Print Center, Philadelphia, 2023 and a finalist at the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, 2022 at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian. Read Cheryl’s interview with Palak Godara to learn more about her creative process.
Take a scroll-stroll through Cheryl Mukherji’s colorfully intentional and striking photography below.
I Don’t Oil My Hair Anymore
Long afternoons spent in the verandah,
fingers dipped knuckle deep in Keo Karpin–
warmed in your palms,
p
o
u
r
e
d
onto my scalp,
hairbrushes perpetually greasy
and reeking of hair oil.
A ritual practised in silence,
lips parting only to remind me
my hair has thinned since you last moved your hands through them.
I lose more than I can replenish.
The house has birthed corners to hold my loose strands, only
to be swept out every morning from the bathroom mirror,
under the bed, rug, pillow,
twisted in shapes you cannot name yet so you call them by mine:
Shoma, tomar chool!
I sit away from the corners. Your faded floral nighty is tucked gently under me to hold the day’s loss. You hum as the oil trickles down my scalp, your voice shakes as you rub it in with your palms. You pause. You sing the word you remember, you go back to humming.
You make this ritual one-sided:
only you give, only you nourish,
only you wait patiently to rejoice when my hair finally makes ten loops on a braid.
My many long braids—never long enough.
You begin to narrate a story we have revisited before, about an afternoon like this, when you and Baba held my one-year-old self and shaved my head full of thick, black, curly hair infested with lice. It never grew back the same. Yet, I have had long hair, fried and split from sunburns in Delhi summers of my childhood, while you never grew yours long.
You cut it short, shorter,
the nape of your neck always warm in the sun,
enough to brush, not enough to grab onto.
I don’t oil my hair anymore.
I think about the evening ten summers ago–infested with grief–when you shaved your head completely. You wanted a change, another chance at growing something but I did not see it coming, even with your ever-thinning, sparse, grey hair, despite Nani’s illness—how it can come for you and me any day.
Were you always preparing me for the worst by performing it? I learn by imitation and not from mistakes.
I want to tell you: it was the softest you had seemed to me—in your rage, your sadness, your vengeance, your age, your strength, your beauty—so much that I feared becoming it.
I am becoming it.
