Author: iSab
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Berlin
Berlin is a city cut in half and stitched back together within living memory — its hardest history left out in the streets rather than shut in a museum.
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Lisbon
Lisbon is a city of light and tiles at the western edge of Europe — a faded sea-empire that once sailed off the end of the map, and the man who never sailed at all.
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Rome
Rome is the city half my schoolbooks came from — a living town built on and out of the ancient world, antiquity underfoot among the traffic, never seen.
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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.
