Author: iSab
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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.
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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.
