The Walker’s Guide to Clues and Signs

“We wanted to push the boundaries when it came to expression. So, I approached Sarnath and asked him if he would explore sound; he readily agreed. It made sense to ask him to look at the city because he’s always been one to capture urban idiosyncrasies so well,” says Mehta.

Tracking down these stories is Banerjee’s fictional, laid-off fact-checker, Birjis Bahri, who conducts interviews with other fictional characters; their stories might be outlandish and macabre but point towards the very real maladies that plague us: loneliness, insomnia, feelings of irrelevance. “These personal histories tell us about the history of where and how we live. People like myths because they are neatly presented and easy to digest. History isn’t popular because history demands an examination of the patterns in the world around you. A society needs to know how to interrogate itself,” says Banerjee. It doesn’t need to be without humour, though: such as the tragedy of Shehri Adamkhor (narrated by Ruchir Joshi with Banerjee playing Birjis), a man struggling with his newly-emerged cannibalistic tendencies — only to be diagnosed with anxiety.

The first listening room offers dim lighting, six chairs around a coffee table, and a glass cabinet where a number of objects from the museum’s permanent collection are on display. When Shehri describes his urge to eat his friends, the painted, disembodied head of a man of unknown provenance stares at the listener. One also can’t stop thinking about the illustration of the man from Tikopia, from James Cowles Prichard’s The Natural History of Man (1848), on display in BDL’s central hall: colonial historians were often quick to term indigenous populations as primal and savage.

“I must credit Tasneem and Himanshu for pulling out texts such as this one and A Description of the East India Coasts of Malabar and Cormandel with their Adjacent Kingdoms & Provinces (1703) by Philip Baldaeus, which inspired the series of drawings on the western Indian coast’s Dutch colonial history, which is a part of Spectral Times. There’s a saying — ‘They won because they had better stories’ — and I wanted to enchant the museum in a way that anybody could form connections and think up their own stories,” says Banerjee, who refers to Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects as one of the influences for Spectral Times. “That was a legendary approach to look at the world through fragments. But why should white men be the only ones to have the confidence to travel the world and tell us about our history?”

And so we come to Doab Dil (Penguin Randon House India), his latest book, which shrugged off any brief that might have been assigned to it. It takes its name from the Persian words, do ab, two rivers; doab refers to the fertile tract of land in between them where civilisations flourish. “It’s a white man’s book. Okay, it’s a little off-white. As a brown man, do I always have to write about subaltern topics? The third world gaze does not have to restrict itself to third world topics. So this is a book about the books I’ve been reading; books about reading, walking, gardens and nature,” says Banerjee.

A few years ago, he began reading non-fiction in earnest, much to his own surprise, consuming titles as varied as The Peregrine by JA Baker, Walden by Henry David Thoreau, Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane and more. What resulted is a book that is a long, imaginative walk through cities and countries — from Scotland, England to Japan via Berlin, and Karachi and Gurgaon — in bright, bold colours.

“A garden, for me, is a place of enquiry. Walking through public spaces in any part of the world will tell you about its history, its class system, its gender politics. I can make my own associations and write my own stories. I find that I’m not all that interested in human beings anymore. I am looking for sentience in the natural world, in objects,” says Banerjee.