Lexi travels the streets of Hong Kong, dodging cars and bright lights in the night’s pleasant breeze. Hong Kong used to be colder, but Lexi moved here for the warmth. Lexias pardalis, or the Archduke butterfly, originally hails from India. As a second-generation immigrant to Hong Kong, she comes from a family that has been moving everywhere in search of warmth.Â
What does it mean to move on from violence when memory itself is a site of conflict? In Gujarat, the legacy of the 2002 pogrom has been carefully, even violently, curated into the official memory of the state, one that erases as much as it remembers. What remains is not reconciliation, but a selective memorisation that excludes the lived trauma of the Muslim community.