Place by Ananya Vajpeyi and the art of understanding cities

There are books about cities, and then there are books that allow cities to look back at us. Place: Intimate Encounters with Cities by Ananya Vajpeyi belongs firmly to the latter.

It is not a travelogue, not a memoir, not an academic exercise in cartography or culture—yet it is all of these at once. It is a book that understands place not as geography but as an ethical condition, a state of attention, a lifelong apprenticeship in listening.

I first understood Ananya not through her formidable intellect—though that has never been in doubt—but through her presence. Long before the accolades, before the professorships and prizes, she arrived as a young woman into my family’s orbit, a senior in high school, head girl, my brother’s classmate.

She came to stay at our farm in Hebron, New York—four hours from Manhattan, three from Montreal—nestled between the Green Mountains of Vermont and the Adirondacks. There, amid long silences, early light, shared meals, and unspectacular days, I encountered the Ananya who inhabits this book: layered, endlessly humane, soft-spoken yet unsparing, intellectually restless and emotionally exacting.

Place is a collection of essays written over twenty-five years, spanning thirteen cities across India and the world—New York, Banaras, Dresden among them—yet it resists the easy seductions of nostalgia or spectacle.

Vajpeyi does not arrive in cities to conquer them with description; she approaches them as one might approach a text—slowly, reverently, alert to subtext, shadow, and silence. Each city becomes a palimpsest where history, memory, politics, language, love, and loss are layered so densely that one reads not forward but inward.

What distinguishes this book is its refusal to separate the personal from the political, the scholarly from the sensual. Vajpeyi writes with a rare double consciousness: the rigour of an intellectual historian and the vulnerability of someone unafraid to be altered by what she encounters. Cities, in her hands, are not backdrops but interlocutors. They argue with her, wound her, console her, demand accountability. She listens back.

Place: Intimate Encounters with Cities by Ananya Vajpeyi. (Source: amazon.in)

There is an ethical seriousness running through these essays that feels almost unfashionable today. In an age of speed, branding, and curated belonging, Place insists on difficulty. It asks what it means to love a city without possessing it, to belong without erasure, to remember without romanticising. Vajpeyi is acutely aware that cities are built as much on exclusions as on aspirations. Her writing acknowledges fractures—of class, caste, faith, language—without flattening them into theory or slogan.

And yet, this is not a grim book. It is animated by curiosity, by affection, by a deep faith in thought as a form of care. Vajpeyi’s prose is elegant without being ornamental, intimate without being indulgent. She allows ideas to breathe. She trusts the reader. There is warmth here—what William Dalrymple rightly calls her “disarming honesty”—and a generosity that feels increasingly rare in contemporary writing.

Reading Place reminded me of something I learned in Hebron watching Ananya move through the day: that attention is a moral act. Whether she is writing about Banaras or Berlin, Delhi or Dresden, Vajpeyi shows us that to truly encounter a place requires patience, humility, and the willingness to be unsettled. Cities, she suggests, do not exist to affirm us. They exist to test us.

This is why Place feels like a gift. It offers no itineraries, no shortcuts, no performative belonging. Instead, it offers companionship—for readers who love cities not as destinations but as ongoing conversations; for those who understand that identity is always provisional, shaped as much by where we have been as by what we carry forward.

In the end, Place is not about cities alone. It is about how a thinking, feeling human being moves through the world with care. It is about learning how to stand somewhere—ethically, intellectually, emotionally—without claiming ownership. It is about presence.

And that, perhaps, is the deepest aftertaste this book leaves behind: the quiet insistence that where we are matters only if we are truly there.