पुनरागमन (Punaragaman) – Return

The work explores the tension between modernity and tradition in contemporary India.

(पुनरागमन — Hindi for "Return")

"Punaragaman" is Neve's third mural in Mumbai, painted in December 2025 during his third visit to the city. It depicts a modern Indian woman — punk, tattooed, with striking dark eye makeup and a bindi — whose face is reflected and fragmented across a shattered mirror. Each shard reveals a different version of her: layered, plural, unresolved. Traditional symbols — the bindi, ancient iconography — overlap and collide with the markers of a new generation: tattoos, blue hair, a defiant gaze. In the broken mirror, neither image is whole. The woman looks at herself and finds a reflection she doesn't fully recognise — a self made of contradictions, of inherited identity and chosen identity, of a future that hasn't yet taken a definite shape. The title "Punaragaman" — return — carries a double meaning: it is Neve's own return to Mumbai, a city he keeps coming back to, and the return of a question the work poses to its viewer: who do you find when you look in the mirror?