Book Title: How to Forget
Author: Meera Ganapathi
Publisher: HarperCollins India
Number of Pages: 120
ISBN: 978-9365692518
Date Published: May 30, 2025
Price: INR 406
Book Excerpt
A Museum of Shoes
Pg. 91 – 93
Exhibit one: Paati’s Chappals, Size 6
A thin slice of slippers
blue and white, Bata, 6 inches
only half visible under the bed
the feet they held are long gone
but only after leaving the impression
of walking inside, outside, within and around
a much-loved home (they never went anywhere else).
Exhibit Two: Action Shoes, circa 1993
There’s a memory from 1993
where he’s four or was he six?
he just likes walking everywhere
because with every step he takes
his shoes light up as if they know
of all the secrets pressed inside him.
Exhibit Three: Chappal Symbolism
All of us watched the long march of migrant workers across the country as they emerged from the cities, in socially distanced lines making their way back home—an invisible task force suddenly visible much to the shame and shock of a nation that had forgotten them. What we may or may not have known is of the Chappal Bank. Yes, a Bank of Slippers, in all sizes. The spokesperson of this bank, one Mr Ajay Narayan Lal, said, ‘We will be launching a counter for distributing slippers to the poor, for which we have procured in sufficient quantity Hawaii slippers for both men and women which will be provided free of cost.’ And it may seem like an odd thing to do in the middle of a pandemic and hunger and anxiety and fear, but it was a kindness you know? A kindness distributed along with lemon water and sattu, to people with blistered and bleeding feet who had walked halfway across the country just to get home.
Later, much later, broken, torn, worn out slippers across empty roads and streets became a symbol of the longest and loneliest migration in modern times. And look how easily we’ve forgotten again.
Exhibit four: The Witch
When you’re little, people tell you things and one thing I was told vehemently was that you can spot witches by their feet alone one foot’s straight and normal and nice and the other is twisted right to the back but witches walk straight and you’ll never know unless you look at their feet…
so each time I was punished by my maths teacher and made to kneel on the cold hard cement floor
(punished for laughing)
I’d look at my straight-walking cruel-talking
maths teacher’s feet, peeking under her chiffon saris
long toenails painted blood red, slippers golden or pink
and I knew then, two into fifty/fifty into ten,
she was a witch—only witches hate laughter.
Exhibit Five: First crush
Outside tuition class
he looks for her
within a small hill of
hastily piled shoes
and there she is…
white canvas sneakers
her socks spilling out
like long green tongues.
Exhibit Six: Almost Famous
On the shoe rack in 6/2 Royal Road
next to the tired sandals with gold straps
behind stiff and brown leather shoes
is a pair of grey, scuffed spikes that
nearly ran at the Asian Games in 2002.
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Excerpted with permission from How to Forget by Meera Ganapathi, published by HarperCollins India.
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