Author: iSab
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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.
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Udaipur
White palaces on still lakes in a dry, hard state — a palace that seems to float on the water. An improbable softness in the desert, half romance and half mirage.
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Amsterdam
Amsterdam is a city built below the sea and held at a tilt — ring canals, leaning gabled houses, bicycles past counting. I dream of all that cool water from the hot plains.
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Meghalaya
The wettest corner of my own country — a high green plateau where people grow bridges from living roots and the rain is a character. As foreign to me as abroad.
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Paris
The most pictured city on earth, the world’s default dream of elsewhere — I have seen Paris ten thousand times and not once. Saturation is its own distance.
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Alleppey
Alleppey is a green water-country of lagoons, canals and rice fields below the sea, crossed by houseboats — a short journey south, and I have only seen it in photos.
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Auckland
A city built across dozens of dead volcanoes, strung between two oceans at the far edge of everything — as far as Sydney, and then further still.
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Coonoor
Coonoor and the blue Nilgiri hills sit a short climb above places I have actually been in the South — and I never once went up. The near-miss kind of longing.
