​Some festivals illuminate streets; others illuminate the heart. Día de los Muertos—Mexico’s Day of the Dead—is a festival that does both. It is not a mourning but a reunion, not a farewell but a joyous homecoming. When Anhad arrived in Mexico during this extraordinary celebration, he expected colour. What he encountered was something far more powerful—a nation that refuses to let its dead be forgotten.

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From November 1 to 2, Mexico becomes a masterpiece painted in flame-orange cempasúchil flowers. Their petals scatter across streets and cemeteries like drops of liquid sun, forming fragrant pathways believed to guide ancestral spirits back to the homes they once inhabited. It is as if the entire country draws a breath together—waiting, watching, inviting.

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Here, death is not a shadow lurking in silence. It is a guest of honour.

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Families transform their living rooms into glowing sanctuaries called ofrendas, multi-tiered altars where photographs of the departed sit beside lit candles, favourite foods, cigarettes, tequila, and shimmering sugar skulls. These are not symbolic gestures—they are acts of love. A grandmother leaves her late husband’s beloved mole; a child places his father’s guitar pick beside a glass of mezcal; laughter sparkles as memories rise like incense. The living offer what the dead enjoyed, as if taste, scent, and affection might reach across the veil.

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Anhad’s camera captures       these moments—the flicker of a candle reflected in a sepia photograph, the bright colour and fragrance of the marigolds, the roads lined with colourful hangings and strewn with petals, people dressed in costumes, the living rooms transformed for the celebration, friends writing calaveras literarias, cheeky, irreverent poems that tease the living about their inevitable appointment with mortality. It is impossible not to smile. Death, in Mexico, is not an enemy. It is a familiar companion, stripped of fear by humour, music, and ritual.

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And then come the nights.

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Cemeteries burst into light. Families gather around graves, telling stories, singing songs, sharing pan de muerto—the sweet bread of remembrance—beneath skies pierced with stars. Children play between tombs as though they were playgrounds, unburdened by the weight adults attach to endings. It is surreal, almost mythic: a liminal space where grief dances with celebration, where absence feels warm, not cold.

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What astonishes most is the emotion beneath the spectacle. Día de los Muertos insists that memory is not passive—it is alive, enacted, fed, sung to, and cherished. The festival is a defiant declaration that those who shaped us never truly depart.

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In many cultures, we whisper about death. the Mexicans serenade it.

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As Anhad’s photographs reveal, this is not a festival of ghosts—it is a festival of love. It transforms loss into ritual, sorrow into storytelling, death into continuity. It reminds us that remembrance is a choice, a practice, a celebration.

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And it leaves us with a revelation as bright as marigold petals in the night:

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The dead do not disappear. They return when called. And on these sacred days in November, Mexico calls—joyfully, exuberantly, beautifully.