A year ago, if any of you were to ask me how I spent most of my time in Paris, I’d have to lie.
“I was mostly just walking” is an absurd thing to say, yet that was exactly what I was doing, and for the most part, it was fudging great.
I was walking across the city, noticing the changes scent, faces, and angles at which the sun shone as I moved closer home. It was a rather unproductive task, to walk the same path, cross the same street, over and over again. I had so many places to see and so many people to meet. But what I was looking for was not newness, it was a deep awareness of how I was feeling. I was walking in pursuit of nothing.
I’ve never been one to enjoy walking. It’s always made me deeply uncomfortable, as if I were an intrusion, taking up space and interrupting the city’s chaos.
Out of all the things, it was Shilpa Phadke’s Why Loiter?, a book so close to home, written by someone who taught in the same classrooms a decade before I studied in them, that revealed to me the seat of this uncomfortable feeling. I had never walked, because walking was not safe. Mumbai had never invited me to walk, it only gave me an impression of safety by restricting my movement.
But while I was reading this book, I was not in Mumbai, I was in Paris. Yet, the discomfort was still lingering. Paris wasn’t home, I was an outsider, I looked different, I didn’t even speak the same language as everyone else, and so, I began to occupy less and less space, shrinking till I wasn’t visible.
I barely felt at home in my apartment, and here I was trying to make this city my own. And so very stubbornly, I decided that if I was to access public space in a city, it was going to be this one, and if I was ever going to do it, it was going to be now. And so I began walking.
I took these photographs on my trusty Canon A1, mostly while walking from my favourite analog photography store in Gare du Nord to my tiny studio apartment in the 15th arrondissement, an hour and a half by foot across Paris.
Day after day, I taught myself how to walk, slowly, with my chin up, and a smile on my face. No texting no music. I was trying to grow comfortable with not showcasing a sense of purpose. I was explicitly refusing the rules that told me how to behave, I was loitering on the streets at ungodly hours of the night, stopping and staring when everyone around seemed to be in a rush, I was doing nothing when productivity was all that was expected of me. I wasn’t becoming better, smarter, or stronger, I was just walking.
What I was trying to do, however, was ask myself some questions. What does it mean to be productive? What does it mean to put your time, mind and energy into something? Does exploration cut it? Do I need to achieve something out of my productivity? Or is paying attention, and being aware enough?
As my foot trails grew more circuitous, I realized that I was walking to be present, but also, to slip away into the cobbled crevices of this alien city. This is everything that I saw and sensed, heard and encountered.
okay chalo 