When you remind Gill that her collection of photographs stops shy of making potent socio-political statements at times and leaves you struggling to extract a single emotion from a single frame at others, she explains that The Americans was never meant to provide answers. It was designed to baffle you with questions —- ones that have their answers hidden in the asking, and others, which are spoken about just in our minds.

Therefore, while one of Gill’s frames (titled Indian Festival. San Francisco 2002) capture motley moods typical of upwardly mobile teenagers who could be from any corner of an Indian metropolis if San Francisco is not mentioned, another captures an aged, presumably Punjabi lady, trying to bring order to a mess of cushions around her. The subtexts of confusion and crises, comfortably reside alongside stories of reconciliation, of picking of broken threads to figure out a new fabric. Gill, however, confesses to not consciously reproducing her personal mental narrative in her series of photographs. “It’s like writing a book. You just half know what lies ahead. The other stories come up in the making,” she explains.

The bits and pieces of lives made out in profiles of gauntly posing shop-hands, cleaning men, and ailing hospital inmates or the myriad emotions of a celebrating CA, a partying techie, or a clueless toddler spontaneously captured by Gill right on cue, explore themes of identity, narratives of memory and quirks of whims. “I wanted to find what goes on in the head, and how it contradicts or reinforces what surrounds an immigrant’s physical experience. There’s a lot of class realities and village-city conflict thrown in with the predictable questions about nostalgia in its simplest and the simplified forms,” says Gill.