It’s been less than a week since I landed in India and the fieldwork for my book kicks off next week, right after Ganesh Chaturthi. My mother asked me to spend these few days home before I disappear again, and I couldn’t refuse. The timing feels right — beginning this journey just as the elephant-headed god of new beginnings has been welcomed and celebrated.
This is my first Ganesh Chaturthi in India in over a decade. I’ll have more to say about the festival once it’s done, but for now, it’s been something else: a hodgepodge of understanding customs and traditions I’d half-forgotten, letting my parents tell me stories, becoming a child again, pestering them with ‘why this and why that’ about every small ritual.
Below is a piece I’d written a month ago, right before I moved out of my flat in Putney. Looking back at it now from this rainy Goan afternoon filled with marigolds and ghee lamps, London feels both impossibly distant and intimately close, the way all places do when you’ve just left them behind …
I step out of my house and turn toward Putney High Street. It’s always the same route: past the Thai joint, the smell of basil, peanuts, and oil already in the air, dodging kids on roller skates and hurried passersby who seem permanently late to something. At the intersection by Putney Bridge, I wait for the light to turn green alongside runners who jog on the spot like they’re on invisible treadmills, unwilling to lose momentum, god forbid, for fifteen seconds.
I cross, turn left, and walk westward past Putney Pier until the Thames emerges — that moody little river that never quite knows if it wants to be shallow or full. I pass couples with dogs, or babies, or both, walking past the posh rowing clubs with their summer parties on the open balconies, all cigarettes and Pimm’s and linen shirts. The pavement turns to gravel, the Victorian houses retreat, and suddenly I’m surrounded by trees.
It’s here that the noise of the high street fades, and another city begins.
I only started this walk a few months ago. Spring was arriving, and I was already beginning to say goodbye to London in small ways: figuring out what to do with my lease, ticking off old to-do lists, sending those “let’s meet before I go” texts, and getting myself ready to contemplate the next chapter. I didn’t expect a new ritual to form in the middle of all that.
But it did.1
For someone who is almost always plugged in — podcasts on the Tube, audiobooks on my cycle rides, music in the gym — this became one of the only parts of my life where I let the world in, unfiltered. Yes, there were times I would listen to music, and sometimes I would even carry a notebook so as to not let my thoughts trail out behind me like a loose thread. But mostly, I just listened … to the rustling of leaves overhead. To the wind pushing through the branches, dipping them low during high tide so the stems missed the water but the leaves floated on its surface as if two long-lost lovers finally meeting if only for a brief little kiss.
There’s something about walking without digital input — what the Japanese call shinrin-yoku, forest bathing — that changes the quality of thought. The mind at three miles an hour, as Rebecca Solnit once put it, finds its own particular rhythm. Maybe that’s why Dickens, unable to sleep, used to walk twenty miles through London in the night. Why Virginia Woolf found that “to walk alone in London is the greatest rest.” The Thames path has been collecting footsteps and thoughts for centuries.
A mile or so in, the green and metal of Hammersmith Bridge appears. It looks almost regal when it’s quiet. Cars haven’t been allowed here since 2019 — something about structural concerns — which means it’s become one of London’s few truly pedestrian river crossings. Just us, crossing something old, heavy, and half-forgotten. A rare democratic space for the bipedal in a city that’s increasingly carved up and sold off.
Across the bridge, it feels like another London, for the north bank always feels more alive. This is where I joined a rowing club three years ago, in a short-lived bid to be sporty before I found cycling. And this is where, now, I dodge past a stream of Southwest London types (I’ll leave their descriptions to your imagination), walking past the River Café, levitating gently through the crowd. A friend of mine once ran into Dua Lipa there and so every time I pass it, I scan the faces of the guests.2
The path on this side snakes and narrows. The pubs start to spill over and there’s usually at least one run club that overtakes me just as I pass that one island in the middle of the river where a hundred seagulls seem to gather solely for the purpose of shitting. I sometimes stop to take a photo, but more often I just walk.
And somewhere along this stretch, I see a grand Victorian mansion rise up on the southern skyline, with Harrods Furniture Depository painted across it in bold, old-fashioned typeset. You only really notice the stunning red-brick façade from across the water; a reminder, once again, of how perspective works.
Walking equal lengths of the river on either side teaches you something.
When you’re beside the thing, right up close, you often don’t see its full shape. You miss the contours, the scale, the beauty. But when you cross over — when you’re looking back from the other bank — suddenly it all comes into view.
The red walls glow brighter, the outlines are clearer, and the picture makes more sense.
The other side isn’t greener, as they say. It’s just more visible.
And maybe that’s why, now that I’m at the threshold between staying and leaving — on the metaphoric bridge between two cities, two continents, and two chapters — I know that my memories of London will probably become sharper, kinder, even prettier than some of the moments felt while I was inside them.
You only ever really see the place once you start to walk away.
I always, always, end up at that park. I never remember its name, but I know it by its alcoves — small wooden benches tucked into green spaces just shy of the bridge. Sometimes they’re empty, other times, they’re full of characters: elderly couples sitting side by side in silence, one head resting gently on the other’s shoulder; two friends gossiping like the world depends on it; a girl with paintbrushes out, trying to catch the light with her bristles the way I try to hold all I see with memory.
I think that’s when it hits me. Not all at once, but in fragments. That this is probably one of the last times I’ll do this. And that knowledge doesn’t bring sadness so much as it brings attention.
It reminds me of two other memories tied to this walk, though neither are mine. Two of my closest friends made this path their own once, in their own London seasons. One lived near Barons Court, the same friend who once bumped into Dua Lipa, and another who knew this stretch far before I could even tell Putney from Islington. I find it poetic that we’ve shared this little sliver of the city, each of us at different times and with different heartaches and hopes. Their era of the walk ended. And now, mine will too.
Recently I have felt like I have overstayed London, but that wasn’t always the case.
When I first moved here, I remember writing in my diary that this was one of the first places I truly felt at home. I’ve lived in many cities in many countries, and in all of them I felt welcomed. But the logic of welcome always presupposes that you are not from there — that you are still finding your feet.
London was different. From the very first moment I walked its streets, I didn’t feel like an outsider. That’s the beauty of certain cities — of multicultural cities, raised by multicultural kids — for anyone can belong. Anyone can be a Londoner, just as anyone can be a New Yorker. The place doesn’t ask for proof. It simply lets you in by letting you be. Ignorance is sometimes the truest form of acceptance — what Jane Jacobs called “eyes on the street” — the paradox where urban anonymity ends up creating freedom.
As I make the final turn, back toward Putney Bridge, the loop begins to close. The bridge rises in the distance. I glance at the benches one last time and ask myself: Is one free? Do I want to sit and jot something down? Do I call my mum? Or do I just keep walking, like I always do?
This walk — this silly, perfect walk — has become my anchor in a season of change.
Perhaps that’s what a real goodbye is like. Not to pluck away and transpose to another land, but to return, again and again, until the place, the path, the moment, begins to loosen its hold. Not suddenly, not even visibly, but just enough to let you go.
It’s the instinct of the migrant (or perhaps the romantic), I think, to build something sacred in the middle of something temporary.
Knowing full well that even if I saw one, I wouldn’t recognise an English celebrity if they handed me their CV and slapped me with it.
So beautiful Nishad. I’m attending my first Ganesh celebration tomorrow in Mauritius so I’ll wave to you across the water :) Antonia