A Map of Memory and Loss
As a student of history who curates heritage walks, I am often puzzled by why we love the cities we love. Like any other kind of affection, this too is not without contradictions; it is fraught with complexities and shifting social terrain. How do we remember cities that are constantly evolving, slipping away from their past selves? The Mumbai of the present, for instance, is almost alien to the Bombay of the 1970s. How do we reconcile with the loss of a city’s culture, or in some senses, the loss of an entire civilisation?
These questions lingered with me as I read Ananya Vajpeyi’s Place: Intimate Encounters with Cities. Vajpeyi navigates these themes by placing herself, and her vulnerabilities, at the narrative’s core. While the 13 cities she explores might seem to sit on the periphery, they act as active interlocutors, coming alive as one moves through these essays. Vajpeyi operates not just as a traveller, but as an emotional cartographer, mapping both external landscapes and internal tumult. The essays were written across roughly two decades, and they read as a set of personal pieces rather than a single continuous narrative.
Ananya Vajpeyi
Place: Intimate Encounters with Cities
Women Unlimited, 2025
Framed by W.G. Sebald’s observation that post-war ruin is often shielded by a “tacit agreement” of silence, Vajpeyi steps into the former Eastern Bloc. Exploring Dresden and its Nazi history, she intertwines the city’s collective trauma with her own memories of past and present, of estranged partners and loved ones. The joining of private grief and political history runs subliminally but powerfully through the book. Reflecting on her time in New York in 2001, she examines how the falling of the Twin Towers altered her relationship with the city. Invoking James Baldwin’s notion that people are trapped in history and history is trapped in them, Vajpeyi suggests the same is true of people and places – whether she is writing about New York, Zionism or the devastation of Gaza. Elsewhere she is equally alert to politics closer to home, including contested public spaces and the daily realities of Kashmir.
Her identity as a historian crystallises in her exploration of the Indo-Persian sublime. Delhi, she observes, is inextricably tied to its most extraordinary poet, Amir Khusro. She writes of Khusro that “it was the heat that gave him words, the rain that gave him music”. To write about Delhi is to write about a palimpsest; within it lie many historical cities. Vajpeyi captures the lived contradictions of the city today, juxtaposing the sacred, irretrievable past of Nizamuddin with the stark poverty of the present. Intriguingly, she traces this same Indo-Persian sublime all the way to a studio in Manhattan and Brooklyn, connecting Khusro’s medieval poetry with the contemporary art of Shahzia Sikander.
The narrative then turns to Bangalore, which Vajpeyi describes as a city of many meanings. She arrived there to read Sanskrit texts, a pursuit that might sound counterintuitive in a city known today as India’s Silicon Valley. Yet the technological boom in Bangalore is relatively recent. The city was historically part of older political formations and remained within the kingdom of Mysore until 1956. What she remembers most clearly from that period is not just scholarship, but emotion, recalling crying in the rickety Tata vehicle she drove several times a week from her flat in Jayanagar to the Purnaprajna Vidyapeetha.
Travel, Vajpeyi writes, is synonymous with life itself. Having lived in 15 cities over five decades, she understands travel as both movement and reflection – a way to make new memories while letting go of old ones. But her journeys are also shadowed by loss. In Lost City, an essay centred on Vancouver, she echoes Ashis Nandy’s writings on cities lost to war, disaster or migration. Each loss, as writer John Vaillant suggests, feels like the ending of a world. Written five months after her mother’s passing, Vajpeyi reflects on the disorientation of becoming a “forty-six-year-old orphan”.
Returning to her childhood home to sort through her parents’ belongings over three years, she reaches a realisation: we possess nothing, beginning with the people we love. Reading this chapter brought me back to my own sense of unmooring after losing my father to COVID-19. It forces the reader to confront how we process grief, a question Vajpeyi extends to Gaza, warning via the Mahabharata that the seeds of our destruction lie in the unforgiving hatred we nurture towards our kin.
At times the book can feel crowded with names and references, and some turns between the personal and the political arrive quickly. What makes Place compelling is that one does not encounter two separate selves, the traveller and the historian. Instead, a single, fluid voice bridges personal reflection and intellectual inquiry. We see this when she recounts her father, poet Kailash Vajpeyi, travelling across 1970s Europe, to meet figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Samuel Beckett among others. The meeting between Beckett and Kailash Vajpeyi, later described by him in the Times of India in 1971, is one of the most fascinating episodes in the chapter. She mirrors this in her own 2014 pursuit of philosopher Giorgio Agamben in Venice, reminding us of a time when writers sought each other out across continents to share intellectual communion.
Ananya Vajpeyi.
The dual vision shines in her exploration of Mumbai. While tracing Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s intellectual footprint, she recalls her father’s memories of Bombay in the 1960s, a nerve centre of progressive culture where figures like S.H. Raza, F.N. Souza, M.F. Husain, Tyeb Mehta, Saadat Hasan Manto, Ismat Chughtai, Sahir Ludhianvi, Shailendra, Gulzar and Raj Kapoor could inhabit the same vibrant moment. She contrasts this richness with the turbulent political history that transformed Bombay into Mumbai, marked by the 1992 Babri Masjid demolition, the 1993 riots and the 2008 terrorist attack.
The final chapter turns to Banaras. Vajpeyi recalls how her mother once told her father that they would grow old together in Kashi and attain moksha there. Her father was less enthusiastic, joking that they could accomplish the same thing at home.
Ultimately, Place: Intimate Encounters with Cities is part memoir and part meditation on cities and memory. It is also a book about grief, travel, history and belonging. I must confess that I particularly enjoyed the way Vajpeyi ends the book with a reference to Buknu. Perhaps that detail stayed with me because I come from Kanpur, but to understand that reference, you will have to read the book.
Eshan Sharma is a history researcher, documentary filmmaker and the founder of Karwaan: The Heritage Exploration Initiative.
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