Author: iSab
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Toronto
Toronto is a flat, orderly city on the shore of an inland sea — the whole world resettled politely along a frozen lake, the New-World city so many like me went to.
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Ho Chi Minh City
Ho Chi Minh City — the old Saigon — a hot riverine city of a million scooters and French-colonial bones, shadowed by a war I grew up watching on the news.
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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.
