A BOUQUET OF MARVELS

AATISH TASEER's new collection of essays is part memoir and part travelogue

- Manjula Padmanabhan

Exiled from India in 2019, Aatish Taseer sets out to write a series of wonderfully evocative travel essays. Commissioned by T: The New York Times Style magazine, they were clearly also a form of therapy, helping the author process his sense of outrage and loss.

The first of these journeys is to Istanbul, where he reconnects with memories of when he travelled as a straight man with a girlfriend while struggling to conceal his attraction to beautiful young men. The second journey begins with being introduced, as a teenager in his mother's home in New Delhi, to an extraordinary scent called oudh. The description is so intense, so extreme, it made my own nose ache with longing.