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Indian Express
5 days ago
- Indian Express
You can draw cities on maps, but they truly exist in memory
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
The Hindu
25-04-2025
- Politics
- The Hindu
India's decision on Indus casts shadow on renewal of Indo-Bangladesh Ganga Water Treaty: Top Bangladesh water expert
NEW DELHI India's decision to hold the Indus Waters Treaty with Pakistan 'in abeyance' has proved that India will not hesitate to use water as a 'weapon' in case political relations with common riparian neighbours nosedive, a leading water expert of Bangladesh has remarked. Speaking to The Hindu, Prof. Aninun Nishat, a leading water resource and climate change specialist in Dhaka said the decision to freeze the Indus Waters Treaty has 'cast a shadow' on the prospects of renewal of the 1996 Ganga Waters Agreement. 'When Dhaka signed the Indo-Bangladesh Ganga Water Treaty, there were doubts on our side on whether India would really share Ganga's waters as promised as the actual control of the river is with India. The Indus Waters Treaty is a big treaty that was ratified by the Indian parliament. Critics here can cite the decision on Indus and argue that India's assurances on the Ganga equally has no value,' said Prof. Nishat who has been part of several river-related discussions between India and Bangladesh. The Indo-Bangladesh Ganga Water Treaty was signed on December 12, 1996 between Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina during what was the first prime ministerial tenure of Sheikh Hasina. The treaty provides Bangladesh with a minimum flow of water during the lean seasons and it can be renewed with 'mutual consent' after three decades. Accordingly, the treaty will come up for renewal in 2026. 'Renewal of the Ganga treaty will come up next year but if India continues to hold the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance then it will create doubts about India's willingness on sharing of river waters with Bangladesh,' said Prof. Nishat. The renewal of the Indo-Bangladesh Ganga Water Treaty has featured in official talks between the two on multiple occasions in the recent past. The matter came up during the June 2024 India visit by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina which was her last state visit before the uprising of July-August 2024 that led to her flight from Bangladesh. Subsequently, the interim government under Chief Advisor Prof. Mohammed Yunus has maintained the dialogue on Ganga. A meeting of the technical teams of the Joint Rivers Commission of India and Bangladesh was held in Kolkata on March 6, 2025 where the main subject of discussion was the Indo-Bangladesh Ganga Water Treaty. The Bangladesh team also visited the joint observation site at Farakka on this occasion. Prof. Nishat said treaties are legal documents and it is generally understood that such documents would remain unaffected by political sentiments. 'But in the case of Indus, it appears that the political sentiment can affect the legal document,' said Prof. Nishat hinting that India is not averse to using water as a 'weapon' if political differences increase. 'Apart from Ganga, Bangladesh also has the issue of the sharing of Teesta's waters and Dhaka has agreed to China's participation in management of Teesta in Bangladesh,' the professor said, explaining that political differences between Bangladesh and India have been increasing in recent months. Under the interim government led by Prof. Yunus, which is against many initiatives of the Hasina era, Dhaka has warmed up its relations with China as well as Pakistan. Last week, Pakistan and Bangladesh had a rare Foreign Secretary-level talk in Dhaka which was to be followed by a visit of the Foreign Minister of Pakistan Ishaq Dar who has courted controversy by describing the terrorists responsible for the massacre in Pahalgam as 'freedom fighters'. Mr. Dar's visit to Dhaka has been cancelled for the time being in view of the prevailing India-Pak tension.
