This is a memory trail. Prompted by leaving. By moving from place to place, city to city, across countries and continents.

And at the edge of that journey — a new beginning, an old end — always the questions: how do the places you’ve lived in mark you? How do you mark them?

We accomplish this variously. Languish at our favourite cafés. Roam city streets filled with strange exhilarated melancholy. Linger at our choicest restaurants. Take night drives, long and aimless, capturing movie-still memories of lamp-lit roads and illuminated windows. Unless, of course, you happen to be one who prefers to never/hardly leave. But if you are a bit of a rover, restless and rootless, what do you leave in your wake? How do you map your journey? For Ila, in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines , the world she inhabits is reduced to a series of airports —‘Oh yes, Cairo, the ladies is way on the other side of the departure lounge.’

As I pack my life into boxes, again, I find myself thinking of my own markers. I was a semi-urban child, growing up between Shillong and various tea estates in Assam. My father was transferred every few years from one to the next (possibly fuelling my own adult wanderlust), and my ‘fixed points’ were the planters’ club libraries. Dusty rooms filled with the oddest collections of books, curated not so much by design but mostly by whoever happened to retire and donate. At Thakurbari, ensconced on tall, throne-like chairs (allegedly from a Freemason society), I discovered Asterix and Anne of Green Gables . (Fewer memories of North Lakhimpur as our terrifically isolated tea estate was two hours away from anywhere.) At Margherita, brightly lit and more orderly, I picked up, with the indiscrimination of youth, Ben Okri and Danielle Steel.

In the 1990s, Shillong had no claims of being a city. But compared to Assam’s beautiful desolation, it was quite the bustling urban hub. It had a few cinemas, a crowded Tibetan market, Chinese restaurants, and some good bookshops. Ratna’s Mascot, in particular, on the main road in Police Bazaar, a one-room space that to a nine-year-old seemed cavernous. At the display windows were dusty coffee table books on the Indian Air Force, encyclopaedias, and world atlases, but the good stuff was at the back. We spent hours here, my sister and I, significantly bulking up our Enid Blyton collection with each visit, buying birthdays gifts for each other, and ourselves. Later, I’d visit with saved pocket-money to pick up one Agatha Christie at a time. All that’s changed of the place is the name — now charmingly called Ka Ibadasuk Books Agency. Since Shillong is home of eternal leaving and return, I always drop in if I pass by, glad it’s still there, despite many alarming signs in the past that it might shut for good.

Perhaps having lived in north Delhi means I’ll always carry a greater fondness for Connaught Place more than any other spot in the city. Its white, paan-spit splattered Dantian circles. In between visits to the British Council Library and Volga, our favourite student bar, we’d loiter at The Bookworm. Head upstairs to the theatre section, and leaf through Tom Stoppard plays, which we couldn’t afford. With jazz, always jazz, playing in the background. When it shut in 2008, I remember travelling there, like many others, not for the heart-breaking ‘all books at 70 per cent discount’, but to say farewell.

Living in London, where people joke that you pay to breathe, meant book-shopping more often than not translated into ‘leaf longingly through and place back on shelf’. I’ve always loved visiting Foyles (over 2 lakh titles at their new location), but recently studying near Russell Square meant discovering smaller, more specialist places in Bloomsbury. The shadowy depths of Scoob Books, with its tottering second-hand bargain piles (Venus in Furs for 50p), and friendly student staff. The one and only Gay’s The Word, allegedly the country’s first (and last surviving) queer literature stockist. Or the elegant London Review Bookshop, where you are guaranteed never to find a seat in the café, but will be enamoured by the poetry collection. An entire wall-length shelf of verse from around the world.

At Brighton by the sea, I’ve been loyal to City Books, conveniently placed down the road, around the corner. And it is everything an independent bookshop should be — small, quirky, lovely, packed with the good and rare. Here, I found my most beloved book of the year, Diriye Osman’s Fairytales for Lost Children . A bunch of beautifully illustrated Andrea Camilleri’s Montalbano series. And more. Vintage postcards of Brighton in the 1950s. A local literary magazine called What the Dickens ? A lenticular print bookmark of a waving orangutan.

We leave behind bookshops like old loves, laden with the knowledge of their familiarities and oddities. All their secret corners and hidden treasures. Sometimes, we return, and find they’re no longer there, where they used to be. That they’ve changed or moved or disappeared mysteriously.

This is a memory trail. Prompted by leaving. By moving from place to place.

( Janice Pariat’s novel Seahorse will be published in November )

Follow on Twitter @janicepariat

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