Jawaharlal Nehru was still the prime minister of India. The space age had begun earlier with Yuri Gagarin walking in space, the no man’s vast region of zero gravity and weightlessness. But it would take a few more years for Neil Armstrong to step foot on the surface of the moon. The world had not seen a heart transplant yet; both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were still alive and well. It was also the year of the Tokyo Olympics. The 10-second barrier for the one hundred meters sprint was still not breached. Global warming was not a buzzword then, and the annihilation of the left in Indonesia was not on anyone’s radar. The air over New Delhi was still healthy to breathe in and children continued to walk to their local schools without the danger of menacing traffic. Though tensions were emerging, neighboring countries India and Pakistan had not yet fought a major war. The plastic coating of the land, rivers, lakes and seas was not in anybody’s mind. Fidel, Che, Ho, and Mao were alive, commanding great respect, with dreams of revolution in young minds still flowering in different countries including India.

That year was 1964. In spring my uncle retired from the army; uncle, aunt and I moved from New Delhi to the southern city of Trivandrum, the capital of Kerala State. It was a sleepy but interesting city with steam locomotives, yellow and green double-decker buses, and fire engines painted in bright-red with huge brass bells atop their roofs. Most school kids walked to their local schools and played in the nearby parks after school hours. Cricket was our most popular sport, but we also played volleyball and football.

There were very few private cars on the road. They were a luxury, and no one in our Fort subdivision owned a car. Most government vehicles were jeeps; only government ministers and top officials were assigned cars to move around on official business; in most instances these were ambassador-make cars. Whenever a private car was sighted in our street all the kids gathered in the porches to greet and wave at the car and its privileged occupants. One or two signature black and yellow painted taxicabs were stationed at a few street corners. The three-wheeler autos or tuk-tuks which became ubiquitous a decade later had not yet entered the city precincts. One could occasionally spot a Royal Enfield Bullet or an Yezdi motorcycle on the roads, but scooters were hard to find.

Cine actress Lakshmi had an uncle living in our street. She would visit her uncle’s house which was diagonally across from our house once every few months, chauffeured in her Fiat car. Word would somehow spread quickly that she was inside her uncle’s home. Everyone in our street—men, women, children, old and young alike—would drop everything they were doing to gather on their front porches with their gazes narrowly focused on the only house that mattered then, waiting for the beauty star to emerge from that house and get into the parked car.

We looked forward to one other type of vehicle; this was the one which excited us most while growing up. It announced its arrival with a characteristic ringing of the bell and verbal shouts of stick and cone ice cream. In the mid-sixties the colorful ice cream vehicle was cycle-driven. Like children following the pied-piper of Hamlin, we all ran behind the slow-moving ice cream van. Some of us had coins to buy ice cream treats on our own, otherwise parents were typically forced to oblige—by the excitement, enthusiasm, and the charged atmosphere. By the late sixties the ice cream van became a motorized vehicle.

Another spectacle that charmed us in those days was the hand-pulled caravan of three or four carts with huge cutouts of popular movie stars and mega posters of movies being released in nearby theaters. The well-decorated carts were brought out at dusk to maximize the impact of light and sound effects augmenting the visuals. Petromax lights, fluorescent tubes, and loudspeakers teamed up to provide a moving sight and sound spectacle. Over the years diesel vans replaced the hand-drawn carts.

The two places I visited frequently in my daily life were the park in our neighborhood and our local public school with its open concept classrooms bearing thatched roofs, large playgrounds, and a green campus with giant canopy trees. These humongous tropical trees—banyan, tamarind, mango, and jackfruit—hosted songbirds during the day and featured hooting owls at night. A few other places that garnered our interest and attention were the museum complex, Shangumugham beach, and the Trivandrum Central train station. The museum compound was a large green space with a mix of mature rare and common tropical trees showcasing tremendous biodiversity. The museum campus also housed the Trivandrum Zoo and the Napier art museum.

The Shangumugham beachfront was a pristine locale in the sixties. The blue skies, blue waters, and crystal cane-sugar-like sand dotted with scattered seashells of various shapes and sizes made it a fun place to frolic as kids. I can still recall the mesmerizing sunsets over a clear horizon from those days. That was all before global warming, plastics, and broad-based pollution changed the façade of the beach.

The Central train station was small with just three platforms. Slowly, trains were extended south to reach Nagercoil and then to Cape Comorin. The Central station was a humble but elegant building and its early twentieth century construction and British colonial era neoclassical architecture exuded joy. The cute steam engines with their signature light and sound effects, mimicking in their own characteristic ways the nature’s fury of lightning and thunder, exerted their majestic presence in the railway station and its vicinity. They were like lions in a forest commanding other animals and establishing their dominance over the terrain. The steam engines left memorable imprints in generations of children who grew up watching their mighty presence while reminding them in certain ways of the marvelous dinosaurs that giant-walked the earth in a bygone era.

The zoological garden, the Zoo enclosure, or merely the Zoo was a mixed bag. It was mostly a sad place with most of the animals and birds locked up in cramped spaces. The lion, rhino, and the hippopotamus had more space to move around but I am sure they also felt constrained. On the other hand, there was immense plant diversity with a multitude of huge trees. But the captive birds and animals of all sizes and shapes looking distressed presented a sad sight with no cheer in the air in spite of the occasional gentle breeze. During a visit to the zoo with my uncle one time I noticed a sudden commotion and then we saw people gathering in front of the enclosure housing a few apes. I went to take a peek at the source of the fun and excitement, and found two apes making out. Some folks were clapping, others were making strange noises, and a few kids started throwing stones. It was an eerie sight. I was probably ten or eleven at the time and my uncle came and pulled me away.

Growing up I found the city eminently walkable. The pedestrian friendliness or the foot-worthiness of a city is defined by three characteristic features. The walkways and footbridges, the automobile density including road conditions, and the vastness of a city determine the foot-friendliness. From a size point of view cities like Trivandrum, San Francisco, or Amsterdam are highly walkable. You could get to one end of the town from another quite comfortably on foot within the hour. But cities like New York, New Delhi, Madras, Calcutta, Bombay, or London are all well spread out and expansive, hence less walkable.

In the sixties I walked regularly to my local school, the main Chala market, the YMCA in the heart of the city to play ping pong, the Central train station, the museum, and the Shangumugham beach. In the seventies, I walked to the Government Arts college, the University college, and the British Council and the State Central libraries. The medical school was not easily walkable from my old home near the East Fort, but became foot-friendly once I moved to a more central part of the city. In the eighties I started walking regularly to my medical school.

The city was also quite bike-friendly during those days. I used to bike to even distant suburban towns such as Nedumangad, Neyyattinkara, Balaramapuram, and Kovalam. There were public transport buses competing for road space along with tipper lorries but there weren’t many cars on the road. Then gradually, over the years, scooters, motor cycles, and cars started filling up the roads, initially the main thoroughfares, and then the feeder roads. Once while biking near my home, I was hit by a car from behind. I flew from the bike and landed on my face, elbows, and knees. With blood slowly oozing from my bruises, and a persistent wind adding sting to the pain, my friend and I walked to the medical college hospital to get my wounds cleaned up and dressed.

***

The Indian Coffee House strategically located in the heart of the city was housed in a delectable single story circular tiled building with old-world charm, and an open plan. It was always crowded, more so, in the afternoons and evenings. The coffee house was patronized by college students, office goers, and families alike. It was also a favorite haunt of mine during my college days and beyond. Friendships were made and broken there; some dates matured into long-term relationships and even marriages while many didn’t even go beyond the first. I also had my debut date there; I ordered coffee and she had tea. When I then suggested ice cream for both, she politely declined and settled for banana fries. I craved ice cream so much that I got a cup for myself. Children who came with their parents grew up, became adults, started new families who then took their turns at the cane chairs and tables there. You could hear literature, politics, personal stories, and all forms of gossip there. In many ways it represented an abstraction of city life and day-to-day happenings of a large cross-section of the town populace.

I was walking by the coffee house; I felt hungry and thirsty and was involuntarily drawn in. I felt in my pockets and realized that I had just enough change for a cup of coffee. This was before the credit card era when all such transactions were cash only. I sat down and ordered a cup of coffee hoping that a friend might walk in and I would be able to eat something. Fortunately, while I was finishing up my coffee, Asok, a medical school classmate of mine, walked in and said hello. He then proceeded to order mutton omelets for both of us.

Growing up in a poor conservative family there were very few books in our home. I can only recall an old Wren & Martin English grammar book lying around the house. Otherwise, we only had school textbooks. My dad subscribed to a daily newspaper and that was my sole window to the nation and the world. Subsequently, as a teenager, when I finally became a member of the British Council Library in the city center, a whole new worldview of books and periodicals opened up to me. I had never seen rows and rows of immaculately bound books of various sizes and shapes arranged meticulously on shiny wooden shelves showcasing a wide spectrum of curated knowledge representing the sciences and the humanities.

***

Memory is history. The historical record of the world, a nation, a city, or even a small village is based on the collective memory of its inhabitants past and present. Historians abstract and compile these recorded and stored memories for their history books. Likewise, each person’s individual memory is their personal history. An individual’s memory bank holds her autobiography. Loss of memory, whether collective or individual, creates gaps and holes in the historical record of a people or a person.

Growing up you form memories. As you age, the process continues and you accumulate and store life experiences as recorded memory. When you reach a certain age, and that can vary with people, it happened to me in my sixties—a definitive feeling creeps in, that you’ve nothing to lose but your memories.

These layers of memory, like ring patterns in tree trunks, and sediments and fossils in rock formations, is what gives you that homely feeling in the town you grew up. The town becomes the home you left behind and came back to. When you bump into an old buddy, or meet a member of the extended family from the past, the familiarity coated with warmth comes from the times spent together. Towns, places, locations, and even buildings kindle similar emotions in us.

Your most familiar town, the hometown, is your greatest storyteller. When you trace the memory trails of your hometown—your childhood home, playground, streets, elementary, middle, and high schools, colleges, and other places you inhabited, played, walked, and studied—start telling you vivid stories from the past. These are stories of your lived life, your cherished memories, your own personal town stories. There are two broad categories of stored memories—the fossilized and the encapsulated. Painful events of the past get repressed, suppressed and fossilized. These may also be occasionally triggered during walks in our hometown making us aware of some of the hidden pain from our past. If these painful stories start dominating us, we may have to move out of our hometown in search of solace in a new place.

Fortunately, most memories are of the encapsulated type. A stroll through town could rekindle those memories which then could start flowing like a stream or might gradually grow tender shoots. These are the stories annotating and highlighting your life with coatings of joy intermingled with streaks of sorrow and sadness. Your hometown must be able to tell these stories of your life. For that to happen freeform or unencumbered, people and places are needed. They are the friends and acquaintances from the past, and the places that served as haunts; they provide context and shape to your lived and remembered lives, and maximize the overlap between them. Friends and buddies could move or even depart permanently, but places need to be preserved and maintained for your stories to come to life.

***

My first day in fifth grade after moving to Trivandrum from New Delhi started on a promising note with fun possibilities. It was a co-ed classroom, about thirty or so kids with boys and girls more or less represented equally. During lunch break the girls asked me to play with them. I happily joined their “tag” game. When I got back the boys gathered together and started booing me. That turned out to be my first and last day playing with the girls in middle school.

Exactly seven years later after I had turned seventeen and joined medical school, strangely, something similar happened. Decades have gone by but I am still not able to comprehend it clearly. Here was my first week of medical school, co-ed, a total strength of hundred and eighty students. This time around boys outnumbered girls, the ratio being one hundred and ten to seventy. The first week of classes, after a long day when all the lectures were over, I went for a walk around the campus with a group of girls from my class. It was a warm wintery afternoon and a gentle breeze was blowing. We were all excited to be in medical school; it was a sea change from our high school environs and all of us were brimming with high hopes and great aspirations. The only problem was that we didn’t know clearly what to expect. We took a long stroll exploring the campus pausing in between to chat about the change in gravitas we all felt. After joining medical school, it seemed as if the atmospheric pressure had suddenly shot up. Finally, we headed to the Indian Coffee House on campus for a cup of coffee and snacks. We sat chatting there for an hour or so. When I got back, a bunch of boys in my class who were observing us, seemed visibly annoyed and teased me as though I had broken some social code or norm. I still don’t get it.

Over the years new institutes have sprung up on the medical school campus—the Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology, the Regional Cancer Center, a new casualty wing for the main hospital, and a few specialty blocks. But the old college buildings and a lot of the green space inside the campus seem to have survived. How long they would be able to hold on, only time can tell.

***

The declaration of a country-wide political emergency in the summer of 1975 by prime minister Indira Gandhi resulting in the curtailment of civil and democratic rights of society, and the muzzling of the press, was a watershed moment in the history of independent India. The decision to oppose the emergency and campaign against it taken by my friends and I, by pasting posters in public places, would eventually spawn many stories by connecting and blending persons, places, and events. The first crop of public posters in the city—withdraw the bloody emergency, restore civil and democratic rights, release all political prisoners unconditionally, throw emergency into the Arabian sea—got us arrested, interrogated, and locked up in the Cantonment police station in the heart of the city, for a few days. The cops then raided our townhome on Burma Road near the medical school campus and hauled away our books and papers. The confiscated collection included works by Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, War and Peace, A Tale of Two Cities, On the Origin of Species, Gray’s Anatomy, and many others.

We had rented the townhome from a retired elementary school headmistress. She was widowed and lived with her son and daughter-in-law, a lawyer, in a single-family home at the end of the road near our townhome. After the raid the cops tried their best to get our elderly landlady to cancel our lease and throw us out of the house. Fortunately, she didn’t budge—they are good students, well-behaved too; they have also been current with their rent payments; they may have their political opinions, I don’t have a problem with that. She assertively told these to the officer straight to his face. It would’ve been difficult if not impossible to rent another place after the raid given the fear hanging like a dense mist over the society following the declaration of emergency. Likewise, their efforts to suspend or expel us from the medical school for protesting the declaration of emergency also didn’t succeed.

The Regional Cancer Center located in the medical school campus is an esteemed institution that serves tens of thousands of cancer patients in a year. When I walk by the RCC it tells me the story of its foundation stone laying ceremony. During the Emergency the Prime Minister flew down from New Delhi to Trivandrum to lay the first stone for the RCC building. Long before the PM’s plane landed in the city, my fellow activist Venu and I were picked up by the cops and taken to the police station with jurisdiction over the medical college campus. Since there was no place to lock us up in that police station, we were transferred to the Vanchiyoor police station near the district court premises and locked up there with common criminals for two days and nights.

We only had some loose change on us as coins when we were picked up. Possibly because we were medical students, the police officer in charge of the medical college police station who arrested us got us some snacks and a cup of tea before the handover. As lockup cells are temporary holding pens there is no budgetary provision for food. But that was the least of our worries. In one corner of the dark grim room with very little daylight was a hole in the floor for nature’s calls. There was no running water; house flies and mosquitoes were swarming the place. A faint zero-watt bulb was hanging from the ceiling covered in dust and cobwebs. A large spider was keeping busy creating some new web art. There were also a couple of geckos on the dirty walls to keep company; observing their climbing skills was humbling. A duty constable handed over the day’s newspaper through the vertical iron bars of the heavy metal door with a solemn command—read it and then spread it on the floor when you guys want to lie down. Even this courtesy was not extended to the hapless nonpolitical inmates locked up along with us. We took turns at reading the paper and then chatted about various things till midnight. During all this time mosquitoes were making a meal of us. By 2 am we spread the paper on the rough dirty concrete floor and lay down but couldn’t manage to get any sleep.

The next morning the new cop on duty got us a cup of tea. Pressing my face to the bars on one side of the heavy and rusting iron door I could see people walking on the main road leading to the court house. We saw hurried office goers and lawyers, and also school children in small groups talking and laughing, and proceeding to their destinations. From the grim setting of a lockup room with daylight hesitantly seeping in through the metal bars, the sight of school kids laughing and chatting excitedly came as a big relief to our psyches.

I was suddenly reminded of a scene described in Notes from the Gallows by Julius Fucik. The police commissar takes Fucik, a political prisoner, on a tour of Prague in his police car. Stopping the car near the city’s central plaza he tells Fucik, See the crowds of people going about their business of life—families with children having a picnic and playing in the park, and workers and office professionals leaving their workplaces and heading home—nobody cares about your writings or activism. They don’t even notice that you have been picked up and removed from their midst. Life just goes on as usual for them. But watching the children walking to school in the morning, and returning home late afternoon, passing by the police station, gave us much solace during the days we spent locked up there. When the prime minister’s plane took off and gained cruising altitude, we were quietly let go. After starving for more than two days we craved two basic things—good food and human contact. We went home, showered and then headed to a nice restaurant for a sumptuous meal. I felt that it was probably the best meal of my life. We then headed to the Shangumugham beach early afternoon to breathe fresh air, observe people, and finally view the setting sun. Watching people sunning or carousing amongst the waves, or just sitting and chatting in groups, I noticed the eerie similarities with the Prague scenes. Yes, nobody knew we had been locked up and subsequently let go. I appreciated the immense joys of being free, and wondered how folks like Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and countless others incarcerated for many years, even decades, coped with their predicament. I felt an immense regard for their conviction and fighting spirit, their belief and trust in humanity. The collage of the setting sun, the blue sky with spreading orange streaks, the warm blue waters with waves dancing on top, the light-brown sand with scattered seashells, and scurrying little crabs trying to hide in the wet sand with all the people bearing witness, in some strange way, gave us hope and much needed inspiration to continue our struggle. Life appeared beautiful. I thought that mother nature, in its own caring way, was consoling us.

***

A small city may not have the luxury of many public spaces. But these are the places which facilitate serendipitous meetings apart from planned get togethers. In addition to plazas, public parks, beaches, river walks and town squares, the train and bus stations, museums, performance venues, public libraries, restaurants and the like serve as gathering places for townsfolk to meet, greet, and interact. All these spaces, places, institutions, and halls play a key role in preventing a city’s populace from becoming alienated from one another and also from the city. These are the places that spawn both transient and lasting memories. These stored memory capsules become the stories that a town unwraps and rekindles, when you footprint your hometown years later.

Change comes to a city slowly at first and then it accelerates like a train starting to move and then picking up speed. First the century-old General Post Office building and then the iconic coffee house on MG road were disappeared. Over the years the pristine cane sugar sand beaches of Kovalam and Shangumugham became browned and turned into brown sugar beaches. Kovalam became a commercial tourist hub, and the warming sea started eroding and eating up the Shangumugham beach.

The walkability of the city suffered as the vehicles on the roads started to increase and multiply. Streets where cars were a rarity and only saw a Yezdi or Bullet motorcycle once or twice a month slowly started seeing many makes and models of cars, scooters, and motorcycles of all shapes and sizes. Again, it started as a trickle and then gradually became a flood.

In elementary, middle, and high schools, and colleges, you are growing up with peers; these are the best places for making life-long friendships and more; and for incubating long-lasting memories. I lost my elementary school in New Delhi when we moved south to Trivandrum in my fourth grade; lost my childhood friends, the locality, and the city. The middle and high, the government Central High School, Trivandrum came under attack a decade ago; the real estate mafia wanted to demolish the school and develop it into a shopping complex. It was thwarted due to protests from students, teachers, and school alums. This was a decade ago and the school has been in disrepair since then. How long the school can be saved and sustained is anybody’s guess.

For me the middle and high schools were one and the same. It was a public school and not well-resourced in terms of buildings, labs, equipment, or books. What it lacked in those spheres it compensated for by its rich natural resources, and loving and caring teachers. The school campus was one of the largest in the city with more than five acres of campus, mostly green with hundreds of mature trees. There was a regulation-size Football-cum-Cricket ground, and sandpits for athletics. In middle school we played a strange improvised version of volleyball with smaller lightweight balls similar in size to a tennis ball. The goal post at one end without the netting served as the volleyball net and post. We played morning before class, during lunch break, and after school—volleyball, kabaddi, or konnikali, a version of tag, hopping on a single leg. During some recesses we practiced long jump, high jump, or track. On weekends we played football, or full-day Cricket matches. Endowed with a massive tree cover and large playgrounds, the school was a magnet for various school festivals, music and art competitions, and a variety of cultural performances.

It was our local school and we walked to school with neighborhood kids and classmates. The school was a seamless extension of our home, street and subdivision. You could say we grew up very slowly into adults in that environment. I still carry the memory traces and mental imprints from those days as anecdotes, tiny stories, and prank blurbs from that large colorful school canvas of life. Giant canopy trees, thatched classrooms, a coed institution—young energetic boys and girls, and good teachers, with funny nicknames for most if not all—made our school an exciting place for learning and understanding life and relationships with nuance, texture, and various shades of colors.

The deterioration of the school environment was gradual at first and then accelerated like old houses and old people aging and withering; I found nothing graceful about it. Many good teachers left the school or retired. Students in general, especially from middle class families, started chasing private schools with successive governments encouraging the trend or by simply looking the other way. The student enrollment dropped, and the school authorities neglected the maintenance of the existing buildings and premises.

The real estate mafia and the inept city authorities were watching and observing like vultures perched on tree tops to swoop in at the right moment. And they did with plans for a parking lot and shopping complex by demolishing and bulldozing the school. Soon, the students and teachers of the school, alumni, and influential civil society members were up in arms. Only their outrage has managed to stave off the permanent destruction and disappearance of the school with its links to the spiritual museum of meshed and amalgamated childhood, boyhood, girlhood memories, intricately and delicately woven like a treasured Persian rug and stored away in the minds of generations of students and also teachers who made the school an extension of their home, and walked and felt its grounds with little but growing hands and feet.

Thekke theruvu aka the South Street runs perpendicular to the street we lived in. It opens into the MG road and at the intersection of the two roads stands the brick red vetti muricha kotta or the cut-and-split fort. When I walk down that street which has become very congested by traffic these days, I am reminded of the long hours we spent standing in line in front of the ration shop, a public distribution facility for rationed groceries—rice, wheat, sugar, kerosene oil, cooking oil and more. I had heard that in many cities there were food riots in the sixties but we only faced long queues. But purchasing these food staples spending anywhere from two to four hours was the first step. Over the next few days, we would then pick out the adulterants from rice and wheat—rice grains with the husk, small pebble-like stones, and black particulate matter mixed in with the wheat. Fortunately, we didn’t have to pick apart cane sugar but invariably it came mixed with atta or wheat flour.

***

I walked through college campuses in town I knew well from my student days and also as an activist. Gone were the gatherings and groupings of students engaged in animated discussions about anything and everything under the Sun—art, literature, current affairs, politics, music, movies, films. Students seemed scattered, distributed; you couldn’t find many groups; mostly they were on the phone talking or pecking at it. It was a sea change from the seventies and eighties. I didn’t see any of the campus unrest which was always palpable in the old days even when simmering quietly under the radar before bursting out. I realized that mobile phones and social media had changed the campus atmosphere in strange and fundamental ways. It seemed that the strength you felt as a student by being together in a student collective on campus had considerably eroded. The students came across more and more as individuals with their private concerns without any signs and symptoms of collective endeavors on campus. It was a deflating experience. It could be the calm before the storm, I consoled myself. Clouds are bound to gather again, changing from gray to dark, and then black. It ought to give way to thunder and lightning releasing all the pent-up energy in the process, I tried to enlighten myself.

Can the city be retrieved, regained and restored to its old charm, I asked silently, sadly. Certain things could be contained, maybe, even reversed, I patted myself. I didn’t find any good answers. In my unease, my thoughts wandered to what my medical school professor used to say to the loved ones of patients with dementia—you might see some improvement on a case-by-case basis. Unfortunately, we are dealing with a degenerative condition of the brain here. Many patients do not recover well in spite of our best efforts. But try we will.

The century-old General Post Office is gone. The iconic open air Indian Coffee House in the heart of the city with its tall tales, gossip, heart breaks, camaraderie and what not was disappeared. The sugar white sands of Kovalam and Shangumugham beaches are now coffee colored. The blue waters and blue skies only make a few guest appearances in the large canvas of a year. The air is polluted; the streams and rivers have become drains, they rarely flow. It is all ugly concrete and when it rains the city floods. Anywhere you turn scooters, motor cycles, and automobiles screech past you honking and billowing smoke. Walkways where they exist are filled with cars. Most trees that dotted road peripheries are long gone with the resident songbirds and their unsung songs, and the night owls and their silenced hoots too. When I dare to walk the city amidst the urban sprawl, whenever I pause to catch my breath, I hear a whisper, a soft cry, maybe of long-lost trees, dead songbirds or the voices of children who didn’t make it; it could even be the distress call of the city goddess—I can’t breathe, get me some fresh air; I am thirsty, give me some spring water to drink; make me a safe and secure path, I want to live.

I suddenly felt my legs weakening and my knees buckled forcing me to sit down with my back resting on a tree trunk. I became winded and sweat began to pour out from everywhere, even through pores I never knew existed. I felt like a heaving statue oozing its innards hearing the sad song of a bird perched on a tree branch above it. I couldn’t shake away this culpable feeling. We’re passing down a cracked baton to the younger generation. We couldn’t preserve many beautiful spaces in the city or stave off the urban sprawl. They wouldn’t even know the city exuded such charm in its past; would they care and would it really matter? I got up slowly holding onto the tree trunk for support with both hands and gradually walked with shuffled steps towards my home, the only real home I knew.

 

Subramani trained as a physician in India and then moved to the US to pursue graduate studies. Currently, he splits his time between his adopted and native lands. He started writing after feeling the urge to share the memories of certain life experiences and perspectives which could not be done within the bounds of normal day-to-day interactions. He is a co-editor of the Textbook of SARS-CoV2 and Covid-19 published by Elsevier in 2022.