I walk. I try to enforce the rule—I must walk to any distance shorter than three kilometres, even if I have access to alternatives. As I walk, the paths accumulate memories. They become ingrained in the mental map of the city.
Probably the most vivid of all meta memory of footpaths are the ones with other persons—oh I remember that moment from this corner of the street with her; here—right here we had a fight, here she held my hand, here we soaked in rain—all these.
All these memory embraces everything on the way, the chaos on the street, stare of the people, extended hands of the beggars, the photos I took, the phone calls I received or texts I read, smell of flowers, smell of food, smell of garbage, the sound—the street quarrels, honks and yells; and also the sound that goes into the ear through the earphones while I walk these paths. Those sounds are integral parts of the memory and experience of the footpaths. I often remember certain footpaths from the episodes of podcasts I listened on those pavements. The feelings of those audible stories mix with the memory of the footpaths.
I remember Gulshan Lake footpaths following the Banani-11 bridge with the first season of Serial the podcast on the case of Adnan Syed, some of the internal roads of Banani with the BBC Sound sci-fi thriller The Cipher. The audio descriptions and actions from Cipher in the streets of Dublin or Boston have been entangled with the footpaths of Banani.
When I walk these walks without a headphone, on a random day, sudden flashes of these imaginary scenes from the podcasts come in to mind. Those figmental flashbacks add to the milieu of the streets.
