In her new book, Ananya Vajpeyi gives travel a new meaning

How can you not fall in love with a book that has lines like these?

“Amir Khusro, the greatest poet of Indo-Persian culture in medieval times, wrote his verses and composed his tunes in Delhi. It was the heat that gave him words, the rain that gave him music.”

Place: Intimate Encounters with Cities, the latest work by Ananya Vajpeyi, is filled with such sentences that capture intense memories, encounters, thoughts and prognoses. It takes you on a guided tour of cities – from New York to Delhi, Varanasi to Venice, and Amsterdam to Istanbul and beyond. In the end, you emerge cleansed, experiencing soul-stirring and intellectual sketches of these cities, its people, history, secrets and emotions.

The author was in New York along with her then partner in the days leading to the 9/11 attack as a 29-year-old “desperately” wanting to be a writer. She narrates how the incident changed her, altered/dashed her hopes and those around the world – all that is brought to the fore with a stunning brilliance that you typically encounter only in the works of whom we generally consider the masters. The author connects her experiences of the time to the current chaos and regressive policies of Trump on students protesting against one of the gravest crimes in recent memory. “It is as if the buildings which were hit on 9/11 have been falling and falling in slow motion, ever since then, eventually taking down everything with them—Wall Street, the ivory towers of the city’s many fabled universities, the trees in Bryant Park and the pillars of the NYPL, the undulating landscapes and generous water bodies of Central Park and Prospect Park, the treasures at the Met and the Guggenheim, the imposing clocks of Grand Central and the foibles and follies of the High Line.”

You come across in this book a certain rare understanding of the cities under review. In Istanbul, where the author often tends to spend her time restlessly, punished by thoughts she doesn’t exactly reveal, she copes and simultaneously stays creative by walking long distances. It appears that she does these long walks as a withdrawal into history. Admirably, she also achieves the feat of mapping on foot a micro-cartography of Beyoğlu, a municipality in Istanbul.

For Vajpeyi, the recurring question from all these journeys is: How do we lose what we lose? Why do we love whom we love? Perhaps she leaves it to the reader to find the answers.

The author, who dwells on intellectual influences and even interviews with people, and on one occasion in Venice with an author as reclusive as Giorgio Agamben (in 2014), also rues how a new tide of similar political trends has buffeted across of her favourite cities, changing the halo these places had acquired in her mind.

For someone who has started travelling long before she could remember, when she was not yet six months old after her parents shifted for three years from India to Mexico City to teach, Vajpeyi, perpetually warm-hearted, digs into memories about her father who had met in his tours abroad writers of the stature of Samuel Beckett. She finds decades co-existing and experiences matching with those of her father, the late poet Kailash Vajpeyi, in her own travels overseas. She writes with remarkable empathy for people and places, and the brutal frankness of her words stand out when she writes about cities, its people, art, music, architecture and more.

Readers would do well not to miss what she has to say about “cosmopolitan contempt” in Mumbai for the great scholar and reformer Dr BR Ambedkar.

I can vouch for the fact that in reading this book, I was doing myself a favour, acquiring, in the process, rare insights about human nature, love and geographies.