Here is a book that offers up a pleasantly tricky problem of definition at the very outset: Meera Ganapathi, author of several children’s books and editor of the literary publication The Soup, has published her first collection for adults. How to Forget is subtitled “a book of short steps and long walks”; it resembles, in some places, a fragmented, diaristic patchwork on walking as self-discovery. In others, it is a collection of poetry, spare and observant, intercut with images and prose from the various locations the author has called home. Each of these entries — and there are over 50 across the book’s hundred-odd pages — fixate on the space between the memory, desire and the corporeal act of walking through a city, refracted through various specificities of place and time.
In describing it as so, though Ganapathi never uses the term, one tethers the author to a broader, largely European tradition of the ‘flaneuse’: of women observing, traversing through and idling around urban landscapes, disrupting their hierarchies of gender in the process. Ganapathi’s flaneusing in this book, particularly in how she renders Bombay, is richly descriptive, bringing out the dreamy, tactile pleasures of the cities she occupies. Yet these images can often also feel trite and overused, adorned with the familiar platitudes of Internet-writing.
I don’t mean ‘Internet-writing’ derisively. There are forms of writing native to the Internet that have continually expanded our sense of form and language, alive to the capacious pleasures of both. There are several moments where Ganapathi’s writing rises to meet them: to take just one instance, a character’s voice “melts like Iodex into her phone — black, clean and balmy”.
Too often, however, both the prose and poetry seem in thrall to the seductions of the image. Ganapathi has a gift for crafting clean, beautiful, uncomplicated dioramas of urban life, which unfold like ephemeral fragments — an Instagram carousel of familiar yet aspirational comforts: Why walk through a morning/when you can listen to it/in birds, milk men, doorbells and/schoolchildren stuffed into waiting autos… In this book, the grime of the city is passing, its tribulations momentary and trivial. On The Soup’s website, Ganapathi describes one of the motivations behind the site as “creating a comforting corner on the Internet”; similarly constructed are these poems, which seem quite self-consciously premised on their abilities to mollify and settle a reader.
Whispered smilingly to the reader in the ASMR-voice of the Internet are sanitised, fleeting images of upper-middle-class nostalgia. Such a listing of desires, as in the poem ‘What I want my child to know and have as a child’ dodges the question of critique or conflict, instead refashioning the relationship between poet and reader under the umbrella of ‘relatability’.
In doing so, these distractive and inward fragments end up centrifuging the curiosity of the reader back to the short-lived fascinations of personality. Though they are pleasant to look at, they slip all too easily from memory.
How to Forget
By Meera Ganapathi
HarperCollins
pp. 120; Rs 599