You can draw cities on maps, but they truly exist in memory

Indian Express

a day ago

The city, for me, was never just the sum of its buildings, roads, or skylines. These were its costumes, perhaps. The choreography was elsewhere — in the stories, the silences, the discoveries. As someone who moved every few years — six schools, two colleges, and a map dotted with places such as Asansol, Patna, Madras, Bidar, Ooty, Bagdogra, Chabua, Gwalior, Bhatinda, Noida, Delhi, London, Mumbai, and Doha — my memory of any place was rarely geographic. It was always narrative.
Some of these cities were still in rehearsal — aspiring, awkward, on the cusp of cityhood. Others were old performers, already exhausted by the glare. And yet, what remained with me wasn't their roads or rivers, but what happened in their shadows — stories whispered in school corridors, passed around during lunch breaks, or folded into goodbyes.
Bagdogra, for instance, came to me with the story of the Teesta. A mighty, indignant river — never just water, always mood. At nine, a classmate warned me, eyes wide, 'If the Teesta gets angry, she floods everything.' The way children personify nature is poetic instinct. Later, I would learn that Teesta had indeed raged before — in the 1960s — drowning parts of Jalpaiguri. My friend believed it was because people had made her angry. We all promised not to throw garbage into her waters. That was childhood environmentalism before hashtags.
Driving into Bagdogra from Jalpaiguri, my parents told me of the tea estates — neat rows of green ambition — and of how workers had long come from Nepal and nearby states to pluck dreams from bushes. Our Nepali house help had her own version of that migration, told with less romance and more tiredness.
It was also in Bagdogra where I first heard of Naxalbari — barely 10 km away — tossed around by older students predicting a bandh. I didn't understand the politics, only the tension.
Chabua, in Assam, brought with it a slow, spreading loneliness. At school — a remote convent tucked deep into nowhere — I didn't look or sound like anyone else. A few classmates called me 'Lalu-Kalu' — a mocking blend of my home state's then-chief minister and my skin tone.
But amid this discomfort, there was Barkha Gogoi — the youngest daughter of a local doctor. Every afternoon, Barkha stayed back with me at the school gate until the buses came. She made the wait feel less endless.
One day, when I mispronounced the town's name in my — for lack of a better word — North Indian accent, she gently corrected me: 'It's Chah-bua — the place where tea is planted.' As I tried to get the consonants and vowels right, she added: This was where India's first tea garden was established by the British. History, I was beginning to learn, was often hidden in everyday conversations.
Barkha and I bonded over English classes. She always topped the exams and loved speaking in full, perfectly-formed sentences. It made me feel seen. She also introduced me to the word ULFA — the insurgent group active in the region during the '90s. When school was cancelled for security reasons, she would call our landline and whisper stories she had overheard at her home: Extortion, missing men, gunshots. She told them with the same calm clarity with which she recited William Wordsworth.
Gwalior felt like a small big city. It was less than a year after the Kargil War. Our fathers were finally home, and a quiet relief settled over every household. Life was allowed to return to its small dramas. Everyone spoke and understood Hindi, which instantly put me at ease.
For the first time, we began venturing beyond the Air Force station —stepping into markets, visiting forts, even eating at restaurants now and then. Gwalior's geographical proximity to Delhi gave it an added aspirational glow.
In the town, we were shown schools and colleges where Atal Bihari Vajpayee had once studied. The idea that the Prime Minister had walked the same streets made us feel proud. Elite, even.
At math tuition, where I went with a few friends and a boyfriend(ish) named after a famous aircraft designer — one who helped shape the MiG fighter jets — our stories quietly unfolded. One afternoon, we arrived in matching T-shirts, a coincidence I chose to believe was fate. Bored in class, we blushed and whispered about the Scindias and the Maratha wars, and old royals becoming politicians. Later, as we cycled home, one hand on the handlebar, the other in his, I made a quiet promise to ditch maths, and read more history.
Mumbai, years later, felt like breath. After Delhi's caution and curfews, it offered me oxygen. Friends spoke of 2 am cab rides taken solo, of 'no need for a male friend to drop me home'. That freedom felt revolutionary. In Mumbai, I learned to move without fear, to feel safe without reason. Safety became the city's story.
In Invisible Cities (1972), Italo Calvino writes of cities imagined by Marco Polo, which are all, in the end, reflections of one's inner world. That is how I remember cities — not as physical locations but as emotional cartographies. I remember someone correcting my pronunciation. Someone sharing a river's myth. A classroom where I was made fun of. A phone call during a curfew. A T-shirt worn by two awkward teens.
Cities, to me, are not places. They are plots. You can draw them on maps, but they truly exist in memory — messy, moving, and always unfinished.
The writer is a journalist based in Doha, Qatar