Author: iSab
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Puri
Puri is a great pilgrimage temple town on the Bay of Bengal — a giant wooden chariot festival, an ancient temple and the open sea; the one place all my people go.
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Sikkim
Sikkim is the small green Himalayan state that was its own Buddhist kingdom within living memory — wet ridges, roofed monasteries in pine, cardamom and cloud.
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Lucknow
Lucknow is the city of nawabi refinement — courtly manners, faded palaces, and above all the food; a cuisine I can name dish by dish and have never tasted at source.
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Bali
Bali is a small green Hindu island set in a vast Muslim sea — terraced rice, water temples, a volcano over the fields, and my own faith met in a strange far form.
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Dhanushkodi
Dhanushkodi is a ghost town at the very tip of India — washed away by a cyclone and never rebuilt, where the land thins to a finger of sand pointing at Sri Lanka.
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Singapore
An engineered tropical city-state — order, glass and greenery conjured out of equatorial swamp in a single lifetime; the cleanest, most arrived city there is.
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Tehran
Ancient Persia at the foot of snow mountains — a place the world only shows me through its politics. I want the older thing beneath: gardens, blue tile, tea.
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Andaman & Nicobar Islands
The most remote, least-India-feeling part of India — turquoise sea, jungle, an old prison — and yet out there, a thousand miles at sea, I would hear my own Bengali.
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Hyderabad
An old Deccan city of a vanished sultanate — a four-arched monument, a hill-fort of whispers, and a biryani I have wanted my whole life and never tasted at source.
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Mexico City
A vast modern city sinking slowly into the drowned lake-capital of a vanished empire — the dead kept close to the living, two volcanoes on the edge of sight.