writing the city
Highlights
Writing Wall – Playful Cities
Just what do we mean by playfulness, certainly more than just children’s play in formal playgrounds. Playfulness is something for everyone of all ages, but how can you spread a little playfulness across a whole borough? Tower Hamletsleads London as a healthy borough, with a green grid strategy that focusses developers on creating new public space, and
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Of gaddhas and ghumna: Women traversing life and landscape in the city
As I journeyed through the city with these women, I had been thinking a lot about landscapes. When the parts of the story no longer seemed to coalesce into a plot, I thought about how incongruous things can hang together in a place, in an atmosphere. And so, I found that the antidote to my own growing vertigo was to join these women on excursions (ghumna) around the city. Though these outings happened infrequently, to go ghumna was a favourite activity of many of the women I spent time with. These women, who hailed from poor, predominantly Muslim neighbourhoods such as Nizamuddin Basti, Okhla, and Jaitpur, spent much time plotting the next opportunity to go ghumna, often concocting elaborate cover-ups for family members.… Continue reading Of gaddhas and ghumna: Women traversing life and landscape in the city →
The House of Dreams
If you’re walking near the dargah of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya in the neighbourhood of Nizamuddin Basti in Delhi, you might cross, but not notice, a grey door with a grey metal flower knob and no signage. If you are passing by on a Tuesday afternoon, you will, most likely, notice a group of children in descending order of height gathered outside the grey door. The children dart in every five minutes, running up the stairs behind the door that lead to the first and second floors of the building. They leave trails of chips, flowers, coins, plastic toys, and small footwear in their wake. … Continue reading The House of Dreams →
The Birth and Death of Atlas Cycles
The imagination of the cycle itself was integral to the fabrication of the middle class. The cycle was a fashionable form of transport—it was youthful and romantic, projecting an image of its male consumer as neither affluent nor entirely downtrodden. While in post-Independence India, the cycle become a popular means of mobility for the working class, Atlas Cycles targeted the middle class more than the working-class masses and presented a certain aestheticized use of the cycle.… Continue reading The Birth and Death of Atlas Cycles →
The Years
I know it is weird to divide my almost three decades in the city into before, during, not-quite-over, and after the pandemic, but I find myself increasingly slicing and muddling my life into these time frames. Conversations, memories, friendships, the logbook of losses, mood swings, even dreams, appear to be structured by these frames. This piece reflects on my years in the city and grapples with the relationship between longing and loss, forgetting and remembering, even as I know well that this relationship is unstable and contradictory and can never be resolved. This relationship does not dwell in the realm of my imagination. I live and feel it, and I will forever draw and redraw its contours and trajectories, mourning the impossibility of returning to that which is lost, and often not knowing what it is that I long for. There is no cure for this affliction. … Continue reading The Years →