Footnotes for Freedom

The narrative blends poetry, memoir, and musings into a tender ode to the intimate act of walking

- By MAYANK JAIN PARICHHA

The act of walking is poetry in itself; it has a rhythm and a mix of unfamiliar and familiar paths that lead you to your destination, which stays in your memory, like a poem. You stay, and just observe. Meera Ganapathi’s How to Forget is all about it, an ode to walking.

The book is strange and difficult to categorise. It is neither a poetry collection nor a work of nonfiction prose, but something more. It resembles a kind of scrapbook filled with poems, anecdotes, memoirs, and musings collated to offer the reader a gentle, pleasing walk. Ganapathi writes about her first walk, when she was just three years old, with a kind of melancholy. She also shares stories from her pedometer and about learning to walk again after the birth of her child.