Continent: Asia
The continent I live at the edge of and still have not crossed into. From the water at Istanbul to the stacked lights of Hong Kong, these are the Asian cities I know from other people’s photographs rather than my own feet.
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Maldives
The Maldives is the place I keep as a thin bright ring of sand on a great deal of blue water — a country built almost entirely of the sea around it.
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Siem Reap
Siem Reap holds the largest temple ever built — raised to the gods I grew up with in Bengal, and standing in a country I have never once reached.
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Phuket
Phuket is the abroad other people bring back — a coast of drowned mountains standing straight up out of the sea, a short crossing I never made.
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Manila
Manila reached me the way weather reaches you through a shut window — a pressure, a colour of light, a sea at the end of every imagined street.
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Tokyo
The largest crowd on earth moves through Tokyo in silence, without touching — a strange marvel for a man raised in crowds that press, lean and talk.
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Jakarta
Jakarta is a sinking megacity its own country is abandoning — thirty million people running out of time, and I keep assuming I can go later.
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Colombo
The tea in my cup has come from the island behind Colombo all my life — the abroad I taste every morning and have still never once been to see.
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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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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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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.
