Look twice

From Mughal courts to supermarket aisles, Reya Ahmed's art brings together many lives, none of them quite as they seem.

- By ARMAN KHAN

Looking at an artwork by Reya Ahmed feels like trying to solve a puzzle.

Some associations make sense immediately, others leave you baffled. Eventually, it all clicks into place, but the journey you took to get there may only seem clear to you.

I forward pictures of the London-based artist's illustrations to see if my friends feel the same way. Together, we look at Groceries, which merges Ahmed's memory of accompanying her father to convenience stores in Kolkata with her present-day reality of trawling through London's supermarkets alone. On the surface, Groceries is many obvious things: a fish market, cans of tuna and a futile request not to feed the cats. But it is also about a daughter missing her father, the acute homesickness that washes over someone living away from their family when they reach for a tin of canned food and the universal truth of a cat not asking for food but demanding it.

My friends have various takeaways. Abhik Bhattacharjee, an educator who, like Ahmed, grew up in Kolkata, proffers a vivid description. "It looks like my Bengali aunt took acid, wandered into a Tesco supermarket and stepped out preaching the gospel of aloo, peyaj (onion, as it is spelt in