Tuesday, January 17, 2006

My father's map

Before I came away to Delhi at the end of the summer of 2001, my father gave me a book of maps of the city. It had one large map as a centrefold, to provide a bird’s eye view and other, smaller ones, on each page, giving details of each grid within the larger map. I took it from him without reflection and packed it into my suitcase, and for the two years I was at Delhi, it stood on the bookshelf at the foot of my bed. I took it down occasionally when there were friends to be visited, and monuments or theatre-halls or restaurants to be placed spatially so we could pay a fair price for the auto-rickshaw rides. Sometimes, on a Sunday afternoon, I would spread it out on my bed to study it. The periphery of Delhi plunged off at the edge of my small bed like a pre-Magellanic vision of a flat world; imagination was stretched thin at Rohini and Ghaziabad; taxis plummeted into a void once the Qutab Minar had disappeared into the southern horizon. And for two years, I planned weekend expeditions and weekday walks within the world of my bed-map, till the roads, gardens and tombs fictionalised on it became real with the flesh of memories and the blood of many rosy sunsets. Looking back, I feel thankful to the person whose small and thoughtful gesture charted for me a new world to discover and love.

4 Comments:

Blogger Sudipta Chatterjee said...

Wow! Nice post. I liked the part about things coming to life suddenly in your memory instead of obscure symbols --- read like Helen Keller getting her first understanding of 'Water'. You seem to have a nice blog here. :)

P.S.- Came here from Prerona's blog.

5:10 AM  
Blogger Acroyali said...

lovely post!

1:35 PM  
Blogger Prerona said...

hey ... i loved the way you have written this! it says everything yet it is so neat and compact. bravo!

incidentally, my mom loves delhi. so we used to go there often. she is v good at finding her way there. but to me delhi has always been a huge geographical puzzle. i'm always lost there

:)

11:32 PM  
Blogger desperate housewife said...

Thanks people!

6:15 PM  

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