Lessons in Geography
My father is a geography teacher. One of my earliest memories of childhood revolves around the two of us sitting at the dining table, busy wrapping my school books in brown paper, and Appa telling me how the mighty Himalayas broke into smaller hills in the crook of India’s arm, somewhere in the north east, just like a slice of cake crumbling down. ‘And where the Himalayas end, you have the smaller hills — Khasi, Garo, and Jaintia, in Meghalaya; the Lushai hills in Mizoram and Tripura’, he said, his eyes twinkling. ‘Of course, Meghalaya is the abode of clouds’, he continued, ‘Your quiz books would tell you that the wettest place on earth is Cherrapunji and it is in Meghalaya. But that is not so. It is actually a place called Mawsynram, a few miles away from Cherrapunji’. He whipped out an old tattered atlas and we spent the next couple of hours pouring over a map of north eastern India and her neighbors. We traced the Brahmaputra from its glacial origins high up in Tibet, swirling southward through the Tibetan plateau, spilling over Indian soil in Arunachal Pradesh, and flowing southward still. The river cuts across Assam and the Shillong plateau, and moves onto Bangladesh where it splits into two. The westward flowing branch merges with a tributary of the Ganga known as Jomuna, and here the river is known as the Padma. The eastward flowing branch marches along as the Meghna. The two branches finally converge near Chandpur in south east Bangladesh and from there flow along to the great ocean, where they dissolve into nothingness.
Thus began my love affair with maps. I spent hours pouring over them, maps of southern India, northern India, south east Asia, north America, south America…every page of my atlas was thoroughly scoured through. I had been a quiet child, often preferring to sit with my books and maps rather than running around. I had come across a geography puzzle which required you to guess words in a story. Clues would be given, but you would have to have a map before you to deduce the word. I loved spending my time on this, and I thought it’d be a good idea to write some myself. So, off I went:
John lived with his p b̶_ _ _ _ _ _ (Sea that is a part of the Arctic Ocean, north of Norway and Russia). He liked dogs, so for his birthday, he begged them to buy him a golden _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ (Sea that is part of the Atlantic Ocean, sandwiched between Greenland and Canada). Of course, John was a _ _ _ _ i̶s̶l̶a̶v̶a̶. (Capital of Slovakia) So he threw a tantrum and got what he wanted. But being the b̶u̶d̶a̶ _ _ _ _ (Capital of Hungary) he was, he couldn’t care properly for the poor dog, and soon it was _ _ _ _ (Sea west of Israel and Jordan).
(I added in a moral for good measure too.)
Moral: Do not buy dogs if you cannot take care of them and leave them howling in S̶ _ _ _ _ (East of Portugal).
I soon outgrew those stories. But my fascination for maps still lives. I think it has to do with a sense of wonder at the world we live in, how vast the globe is. In a world where one being constantly busy is a sign of self importance, a boost to the ego, a feeling that you are indispensable, those maps are a gentle reminder to me — the world doesn’t run around you.
