səl̓ilw̓ət – Mother Inlet (2026)
Medium: Sound work (field recording + voice) Duration: 1 min 35 sec
Instructions for listening
This piece can be listened to two ways.
- Best experienced through headphones, with eyes closed, unhurried. In this medium it is intimate, the inlet moves between your ears, and the voice sits close, almost inside you.
- Play aloud in a room, where the voice and waves scatter off the walls and disperses, becoming something larger and more diffuse around you.
One way draws you in, the other lets it surround you.
Gallery of səl̓ilw̓ət from Crab Park (left) for you to scroll through.
For five years I’ve lived in the Downtown Eastside, where the sirens rarely stop and my century-old building stays damp. Most evenings I walk to Crab Park — the one place here with direct access to səl̓ilw̓ət (settler name: Burrard Inlet). From the shoreline I’ve watched the Port of Vancouver’s Centerm Expansion dredge and fill the water: the inlet arrested by land reclamation, sliced by cruise ships, scarred by pilings, churned by propellers, filmed with oil and grease. I keep wondering how Mother Inlet witnesses so much and stays so calm, present, absorbing it all. Her waves become healing, washing over the rage I carry.
Accordingly, this piece is built from recordings made across many visits: Mother Inlet soft and chuckling, then loud and roaring, and the industrial port always seeping through. Over that foundation, spoken phrases erode in and out. I wanted it to hold what she holds for me: a vessel for anyone carrying rage, grief, and exhaustion with nowhere to put it. Step in, let it wash over you, step out feeling something has shifted.
FIRE AND WATER
My first ‘real’ encounter with the Downtown Eastside (DTES) was witnessing two ambulances, one advance life unit and a fire truck corner a man whose tent had likely caught fire. Sirens blaring, their flashing lights bounced off the grimy windows of my single-room occupancy (SRO) apartment as the responders in blue laughed and nudged each other. Only one paused to offer the DTES man a bottle of water.
Since then, the neighbourhood pulls me in as I watch from my tiny SRO—a supposed step up, with years spent living in musty basement suites with low popcorn ceilings. What I failed to see, however, was how my move from East Vancouver to the DTES was just another statistical slip. Like so many others, I too was swept along by unseen currents, draining down cracks of postal codes until finally deposited at the mouth of V6A, a physics in liquidities.1
I’ve always preferred water analogies to fire, even though the two elements were held equally sacred growing up in my mother’s village in India. I can still picture the clusters of huts surrounded by lush fields, narrow red paths lined with neem trees, and the scent of earth after monsoon rains. Ma would gesture toward the fire crackling in our hearth, calling it the primordial energy, the heartbeat of our home. But it was water, she said, which represented timeless Source, existence itself.
But here, without my mother’s presence to guide me, I find myself clinging to liquid more than ever. Each night, I walk to Crab Park, my refuge from all the noise, treading along the beach, where scattered driftwood never arrived, but washed up in the DTES.
I observe the so-called “Expansion Project”—an initiative to extend Vancouver Fraser Port Authority’s territory in front of Crab Park, by rapidly infilling the freely flowing inlet waters with sand and gravel. Meanwhile, near Carnegie, I watch marches protesting the sluggish redevelopment of the Balmoral and Regent Hotels—vital land urgently needed for low-income housing.
In attending such gatherings, I’ve been making an effort to engage more with my DTES community. This year, I connected with groups like the DTES Writers Collective, the Carnegie Housing Project, Our Homes Can’t Wait Collective, and also spent time writing at Oppenheimer Park. In the process, I met sage community members who’ve sparked a curious flame within me, which rises like a drumming heartbeat.
In fact, for me the flame burns brightest on February 14th, when I document the DTES Women’s Memorial March to honour the lives of missing and murdered Indigenous women in V6A and throughout Canada. I witness fiery rage, courage, embodied in the women who lead the way with roses, their regalia swirling in rhythm with the beating drums. DTES comes alive with chants, banners held high, rising together with the smoke of smudge.
As the day draws to a close, I am burning with emotions of injustice. Seeking relief, I return to Crab Park in the evening to cool myself, bringing flowers to the Inlet as offerings. As I release them into the waters, I pray for the presence of Source, and hope She is watching over us in the DTES.
And I know She is, for each time I offer flowers to Mother Inlet, she has always sent back waves.
[1] V6A is the first half of the postal codes for Vancouver’s Strathcona, Chinatown, and Downtown Eastside areas.
Artist Bio
Pari Mokradi (he/they) is a South Asian artist of Indian origin from West Bengal, where water and fish shaped their early relationship to land, memory, and storytelling. Now a settler based in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish Peoples, Pari uses narrative as a tool for reimagining relations through acts of witnessing.
Their interdisciplinary practice explores land and belonging through community-based approaches shaped by in-between identities, ancestral knowledge, and lived experience. Pari is the author of DTES Watching (2025), a debut chapbook that explores the tensions between public and private infrastructures in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Alongside its launch, they developed and facilitated Land-based Storytelling, a workshop inspired by Sarah de Leeuw’s Skeena and presented at the DTES Writers Festival. Pari is also a contributor to Off the Map (2025), a Vancouver-based anthology of stories and poetry about lived experiences of mental health.
Pari welcomes opportunities for community-based and interdisciplinary collaboration.
Website: https://parimokradi.com | Instagram: @pari.mokradi
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