Author: iSab
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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.
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Vancouver
A young city where the mountains come straight down to the sea — glass towers under snow peaks, rainforest and ocean pressing in at the green edge of the New World.
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Hampi
Hampi is a whole vanished capital gone back to boulders and river, in my own country, reachable by an ordinary train — and somehow never reached.
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Reykjavík
I was born into heat and crowd, so the place I dream of hardest is the emptiest one: Reykjavík, a bright little town at the rim of the world under far too much sky.
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Sydney
Sydney sits on the far underside of the planet — the longest flight there is, the seasons and the stars turned upside down. I dream of it for the distance alone.
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Jaisalmer
A golden fort I first met in black and white, as a boy who could not picture the gold. It took me twenty years to see the colour, and I still have not stood in it.
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London
The foreign city I know best without ever seeing it — read my whole life in a borrowed language I made my own. I write even this in the tongue it sent us.
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Jerusalem
A single walled hill that three faiths trace to the same root and have fought over for millennia. I come from outside all three, and I would like, once, to stand on it.
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Darjeeling
The one time a Darjeeling trip in my family was ever real, I cancelled it — by being conceived. My own state’s hill station, and I have still never been.
