Zoom Level
This is a prose poem I wrote in 2018 about a high school teacher who inspired the love of maps and geography on which I have built much of my career in tech so far.
Mr. Madani’s classes began in near silence. He walked in to our habitual singsong greeting, cutting it off midway and motioning us to sit. He took the duster and gently scuffed at what remained on the board after the previous teacher had hastily erased it when the bell rang, clearing our minds of runaway polynomial terms, of the catalyst in some exothermic reaction, of the year a war ended, of a fragment of the longitudinal section of our own sanitised entrails. He took off and cleaned his glasses and put them back on. He picked a new piece of chalk out of his pocket, broke off the tip and threw it into the dustbin. And then, he began to draw.
First, in deliberate squiggles, the Sinai region — Egypt’s stalled attempt to leak out of Africa — then in straighter, screechier strokes, the angled jut of the Arabian peninsula, then cautiously, again, a western turn towards the Gulf of Persia, with a steep climb up to the Emirates, and a rapid slide down, a steady approach towards the unsightly outgrowth of Qatar and Bahrain, the eastward bend around Kuwait and then the smooth scratchy curves as he hastened to reach India. It was here that all sounds, even of my breath, receded, as Mr. Madani slowed to render, in tender detail, every inch of our country’s coastline as if he had shaped it himself, beginning with the dog snout and hanging jaw of Gujarat. I always took issue with the way he slanted the Deccan ever so slightly to the right, but he had earned this right to style. He approximated the many thousand fingers of the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta to jagged little teeth, but there was no other way. Burma, the supplicant hands of Thailand and Malaysia, Cambodia, China’s protuberant belly. Then he returned for the islands — Sri Lanka’s teardrop, Taiwan, and whatever parts of Indonesia and the Philippines time permitted.
Only then would he go to his desk, wordlessly bidding us to do what we knew came next. Thirty-something copies of Monsoon Asia — as uncommonly literary a name for a Geography textbook as ever existed — all opened in quick succession, some in their tattering original purple covers, some hardbound in anonymous floral and geometric patterns, some handed down from older brothers and sisters, others acquired anew, some with notes or rude drawings in the margins, heavily highlighted or underlined, others unblemished, all filling the room with that hauntingly specific smell of paper and spine glue I’ve been chasing all my life afterwards and never managed to find. Mr. Madani didn’t need the textbook. He was just daring us to fact-check what had lived in his head for three decades.
It didn’t matter what we were learning about any given week. Mr. Madani always began with this map of Asia. He grounded us in our surroundings, from a single, immovable, nearly divine, perspective. Twenty years later, we would all be spoiled by little blue dots and pinch-to-zoom and the yellow Street View man that we could grab and cruelly dangle by the ear and drop around the world at will. But this is the canvas on which he shaded in the Hindu Kush mountains, labeled the Aral sea and pinpointed Hong Kong and Bhopal on the Tropic of Cancer. He traced the Southwest monsoon and its weary, depleted, Northeast retreat over Punjab and Madras. He taught us about the windward and leeward sides of the Western Ghats and why Bombay received well over two hundred centimetres of rain and Pune barely a third of that. He transported us city kids to the agricultural and mineral heartland, rattling off the Rabi and Kharif crops, how much water rice and wheat and bajra and jowar and cotton needed to grow in what kind of soil. We derived an inexplicable sense of pride from when our various home states were rich in mica or bauxite or manganese ore. We unfolded topographic maps of barren stretches of Rajasthan and learned how to identify lime or brick kilns. None of those things, those now forgotten and heavily trod on bits of knowledge, required Mr. Madani’s ritual prologue and yet it commanded the silence of thirty-something fifteen-year-olds for five whole minutes — a silence just as meditative for us as it was for him.
