Drawn from longing, not from life
Never Been Abroad
All the places I have never been.
I am in my forties, and I have never once been abroad — not from fear, not from lack of means; it simply never happened. So I have learned to travel the only way left to me: through other people’s photographs, through old books and films, and through the charcoal my mind makes of places I will most likely never see. This is where I keep them.
About
I was born and raised on the outskirts of Calcutta, and have spent more of my life away from it than in it — a stranger, by now, in a good many of my own country’s towns, and a foreigner in none of them. My passport is on its third renewal and has never been stamped. I stopped apologising for that a while ago, and started writing the places down instead.
