London completed the geographical arc of Zarina’s life. In her final years, family life returned to the foreground without resolving the lifelong question of where home resided.
Zarina with family · London
With family again
A final home
From 2018, Zarina spent increasing time in London with family. Her health was changing, but so too was the rhythm of everyday life: after decades lived at great distance, she was again close to relatives across several generations.
London was not Aligarh and it was not New York. The city did not replace either one. Instead, it became another lived address within the larger structure through which Zarina had long understood home: a place made by relationships, memory, and the knowledge that no return is complete.
2018–2020
Work in the company of memory
Zarina remained connected to exhibitions and the circulation of her work, including Frieze Masters in London in 2018. Works from Homes I Made / A Life in Nine Lines placed earlier addresses around her once more.
She died in London on 25 April 2020. The city belongs to the story not as an epilogue detached from the others, but as the last of the places through which her life and work continued to ask what it means to belong.
