The act of walking is poetry in itself; it has a rhythm and a mix of unfamiliar and familiar paths that lead you to your destination, which stays in your memory, like a poem. You stay, and just observe. Meera Ganapathi’s How to Forget is all about it, an ode to walking.
The book is strange and difficult to categorise. It is neither a poetry collection nor a work of non-fiction prose, but something more. It resembles a kind of scrapbook filled with poems, anecdotes, memoirs, and musings collated to offer the reader a gentle, pleasing walk. Ganapathi writes about her first walk, when she was just three years old, with a kind of melancholy. She also shares stories from her pedometer and about learning to walk again after the birth of her child.
Walking or loitering is an act of revolt for many women in India. “Three out of five women in India need permission to go to the grocery store. My Grandma’s map was a curious thing; she never went anywhere alone – not once in her entire life,” Ganapathi writes. “My map allows me access to everywhere. Everywhere that’s not too dark, not too sparsely populated, not too crowded, not too far away, not too shady, not too ‘too’.”
Ganapathi offers fascinating insights about walking for women in a metro city. She spoke with women walkers, who hardly walked in isolation. ‘As a woman, where do you walk alone?’ She posed this question at Bandstand in Mumbai. The responses were a mix of societal pressures and personal choices: ‘Where there are enough people.’ ‘I prefer to walk around parks, Jogger’s Park is good, but it’s too crowded now. Katrina also comes there sometimes.’ ‘I always take the main roads to work. If I had money, I’d take an auto instead.’ Stalking, which is also a form of walking, also features in the book. The author particularly likes to write about how women behave while walking.
For Ganapathi, walking helps one discover the same place in a multitude of ways. “I walk in all the same places, and the places are different every day.” At a time when human interaction is limited to phone screens, “making an actual conversation with a person you barely know sounds tiring.” And once middle age arrives, a walk is often the only option to rediscover yourself, others, and the world around you.
Walking is a slower, more engaging act than one might assume. It is about listening to your heart, letting extreme emotions settle as an instrument to buy time. Ganapathi knows this very well. This is why the book speaks to walkers in their language. It may not give you a dopamine hit, may not excite you, but it is about life happening around you.
Love and walking have an interesting connection. Lovers go for walks, and when a person in love walks alone, they can not help but think about love. In her Notes From My Daily Walks, Ganapathi records reflections on love. “I tell you I love you because of the ordinariness of everything we do together. We make beds, discuss how pink guavas are superior to green ones and I love you for this, because it isn’t rare, and yet it is precious.”
One should read this book the way one reads love letters, with no expectations beyond a smile and a sense of remembrance. Because reading, too, is a kind of walking into uncharted terrain. And this book is that unfamiliar, newly inaugurated park in your vicinity. You should go there and simply stroll around.