Every evening, after returning home from work, he would go to the local STD booth and call up someone – friend, mentor, beloved – spending, on an average, Rs 10/15 per call. It became a ritual that helped him deal with the initial sense of dislocation he felt after shifting base to New Delhi with his family in 1994. More than three decades later, he would share that anecdote with the audience who turned up for the preview of his latest solo.Meet Debasish Mukherjee; whose solo, ‘What Really is a Cloud?’, currently running at Gallery Akar Prakar, New Delhi, until March 6th, is a homage to his long relationship with the national capital. As is well known, memory, space, and displacement have been central to Mukherjee’s artistic practice. Much of his past work has drawn from the city of Benares, from where his mother’s family hailed and he was trained in art. Benares and Chapra, which he memorialised in his earlier solos, constituted his childhood and formative years; the second phase of his life began when he moved to New Delhi. What Really is a Cloud?, with Ranjit Hoskote as its curatorial advisor, looks back at this phase.In the artist’s own words, it “grew out of my three decades of living and working in New Delhi, years shaped by movement, memory, drifting, settling, and the quiet act of looking at the city afresh with new eyes. The exhibition is less an answer and more a lingering question, echoing Ghalib’s verse about place, time, and the unseen elements that shape our lives.”The phone calls did shape his earliest days in the city. One finds them in the installation titled ‘Countless Conversations’, featuring 365 hand receivers of the dial-phones of that era, covered with embroidered/painted textile, each conveying a telltale story – through lines from correspondence, poems, film posters, and newspaper clippings, among others. Telephonic conversations then could only hold the temporality of sound in real time, which vanished when the call ended. What remained were memories – of voices one loved or longed to hear, or quotidian concerns that made up the business of life.A Continuous Climb | Mixed Media Installation | Variable | 2026, by Debasish Mukherjee. Photo: Special arrangementPolitics is the beating heart of Delhi. It’s here that national governments rise and fall, and political careers are nurtured. On his arrival in the city, Mukherjee found the politics practised in the city too loud, performative and unavoidable. ‘Continuous Climb’ – with an ascending order of chairs, their upholstery bearing thumbprints as markers of identity, placed as a ladder on a L-shaped cropped and framed carpet – symbolise the vaulting ambition of those who thirst for power, and the costs with which they come. It also conveys the innate desire of many for the power, prestige and social status that a position of authority in any profession can bring.Delhi has been in existence over a millennium, the seat of power of successive kingdoms whose rise and fall it has been a witness to. As it has been to countless generations who have lived their ordinary lives and died without a trace. ‘Samay’ is a reminder of this palimpsest of time that is Delhi: 12 carved bricks, alternately placed horizontally and vertically, render the remnants of time – with the ones lying carved with decorative Mughal motifs, and those standing representing architectural features. They are placed within metal structures, denoting new architecture, and the ceaseless indiscriminate new constructions in the city, often demolishing heritage buildings.If the bricks of ‘Samay’ reference historical time, the six alluring women in ‘Mystic Sundaris’ contextualise the popular culture of contemporary times – by playfully transposing the popular art of colonial Calcutta (chromolithographs and oleographs of Chorebagan and Kansaripara Art Studios) onto contemporary VOGUE India covers. Implicit in this artwork, with the portraits of the ‘Sundaris’ executed in layers, is the suggestion that Indian art and culture is very rich, diverse and can do without any external validation. It can be its own benchmark.‘Mystic Sundaris’ and ‘Samay’, by Debasish Mukherjee. Photo: Special arrangementFashion, like all other industries, contribute to ecological damage. ‘Once I was a River’ – reclaimed fabric framed in wood – is both a reference to toxic waste generated by factories and also a pointer to how sustainable practices can save our environment. It is painful to see how carelessly we have treated our natural resources, taking endlessly, restoring little. This work reflects on the present condition of rivers like the Sahibi river and the Hindon river, once life-giving, now burdened by pollution, encroachment, and neglect. Their fading currents mirror our collective choices. What suffers is not only water, but memory, ecology, and the fragile balance between human life and nature.‘Channels’ is yet another meditation on pollution in Delhi, making this subject a central concern of the artist in this solo. An old TV set, cast in cement, shows changing visuals like flipping through channels –with a series of popular Hindi film songs down the decades being disrupted with a repetitive visual of a factory chimney spewing smoke into the sky, underlining the indifference to the continuing problem of pollution in the city.River has been an important part of Mukherjee’s imaginary, having lived most of his life in cities by the river. In this solo, ‘River’ is a sprawling installation of 72 frames, done in graphite on fabric, evoking a moonlit Jamuna with its waters an ethereal silver. This romantic association of the river somewhat assuages the artist’s anxieties about pollution, and underlines the contradictory realities we often live with.The River (Set of 72) | Graphite on Fabric | 9 x 9 in (each) | 2026, by Debasish Mukherjee. Photo: Special arrangementThe sculptures in What Really is a Cloud? give a strong sense of built environment and the physical presence of the city. Mukherjee describes the show as “a conceptual journal” of his journey, which comes alive for his viewers through material objects that are used in everyday life – brick, phone, magazine, TV, chair, cabinet. Cabinets have a strong presence in Mukherjee’s practice. What they contain is not just objects but memory – of a person, or an entire city. In the title work of this show, we have an installation – in mixed media – of a row of ten cabinets with stacked pieces of newspaper, on the edge of which are texts that are visible only when seen up close. They happen to be ten poems by Ghalib. But the installation itself conveys a landscape or rather, skyscape of clouds, that dramatize a line – ‘Abr kyā chīz hai, havā kyā hai?’ (‘What really is a cloud, what is the wind?’) – from another ghazal of Ghalib, which famously opens with: ‘Dil-e nādān tujhe huā kyā hai?’ (‘Fool heart, what’s the matter with you?’).Abr Kya Chiz Hai (Set of 10) | Mixed Media Installation | 60 x 9 x 4 in (each) | 2026, by Debasish Mukherjee. Photo: Special arrangementMukherjee fell in love with Ghalib in his formative years, and would frequently visit the poet’s home after his relocation to Delhi. His immersion in ghazals – both as text and performance – over the decades, has made him revisit earlier favourites like Dil-e nādān; and in his evolved interpretation of the verses of this ghazal, the canopy of the sky is not a universal dome over all humanity – rather, each individual has his own sky, his own sense of the vast unknown and his connection with it. That’s a delicate asset that is perhaps more accessible than one’s claim to land, but needs to be protected nevertheless. The little drawers in the installation protect that sky. And its clouds, full of memories.What Really is a Cloud? continues Mukherjee’s signature style of abstract and minimalist art, which he has been exhibiting for a decade now. It’s a striking show in a landmark year.Rituparna Roy is a writer based in Kolkata. She can be reached at royrituparna.com