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A painting by Hafsa Imran
An empty road, two yellow lines, and only one direction: forward, towards home.
Musafir (The Road Home) is a painting by Lahore artist Hafsa Imran. An empty road with two yellow centre lines runs between tall evergreen trees towards blue mountains. Its title is the Urdu word for a traveller.
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Look closely
A road runs straight up the canvas from the bottom edge, two bright yellow lines down its centre and long blue shadows lying across it.
Tall evergreen trees crowd both sides, painted in short strokes of dark green lit with yellow, with a strip of bright grass along the verge.
Far ahead the road narrows to a point and disappears into the trees below blue mountains, under a deep blue sky with white clouds. There is no one on it: no car, no house, no person.
The story
Abdullah ibn Umar remembered the moment the Prophet, peace be upon him, took hold of his shoulder and told him: "Be in this world as if you were a stranger or a traveller." The saying is recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari.
The scholars who explain it draw the difference carefully. A stranger at least stops somewhere. A traveller does not settle at all: he passes through, and his one concern is to reach home.
Hafsa's road is empty. There is no car, no house and no person in the painting, only the road and where it goes. We stand where the traveller stands, at the very start, and the two yellow lines pull the eye forward to the point where the road disappears.
The shadows lie across the way like stretches still to cross. The trees on either side are evergreen, the kind that do not lose their colour in any season.
In Urdu the traveller is the musafir, a word that runs through Pakistani poetry and song. For Pakistanis living abroad it carries a second meaning: everyone who has packed a bag and left home is a musafir, and every road they take also points back.
The hadith turns the idea around once more. The traveller's home is not the place he left. It is the place he is going.
The description and reading on this page are written by the Bloom & Beyond studio. They are our reading of the painting, not a statement by the artist.
Ask about the work
Collectors, curators, writers and anyone the painting has stayed with can message the studio directly. Hafsa reads every message.
All artwork and photographs © Hafsa Imran. Please ask before reusing them.
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