Book Review: ‘How to Forget’ by Meera Ganapathi

Book Title: How to Forget: A Book of Short Steps and Long Walks
Author: Meera Ganapathi
Publisher: HarperCollins India
Number of Pages: 120
ISBN: 978-9365692518
Date Published: May 30, 2025
Price: INR 389

Book Review

In “How to Forget“, Meera Ganapathi does not simply write—she ‘wanders’. Each piece in this collection meanders like a thoughtful stroll at twilight, where memory floats like dust motes in golden light. Though the title whispers the promise of erasure, the book tenderly delivers the opposite: a revival of forgotten scents, faces glimpsed in passing, and emotions long folded away in the quiet corners of the self. Meera’s words settle softly into the reader’s consciousness, reshaping perception, inviting one to see anew—with a gaze both tender and unwavering.

Neither strictly prose nor purely poetry, the fifty-five pieces in this collection defy formal boundaries, much like the spontaneous routes of an aimless walk. A single sentence unfurls across a page like a ribbon of thought; a paragraph crouches silently beside a black-and-white photograph, urging the eye to linger. And all the while, the reader is gently led—not with urgency, but with rhythm, with breath. Meera’s style is like the act of walking itself: immersive, meditative, and strangely cleansing. Here, walking becomes a metaphor, not for movement, but for meaning. Not for distance covered, but for attention paid.

There is a distinct feminine resonance in Meera’s gaze—a patient attentiveness to what is small and significant. In moments where she reflects on women trailing behind their partners or muses on the secret rituals of childhood, there is a quiet feminism that does not seek to shout, but simply to show. These are not grand declarations but intimate reckonings, whispered truths of gender, grief, and gentle resistance. Her piece ‘Moisturize the Night’ lingers long after reading, like dew on the skin, reminding one that softness, too, can be a force of change. With lyrical restraint, she illuminates the invisible labour of remembering and the tender art of letting go.

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By the final page, “How to Forget” feels less like a book and more like a companion. It does not instruct or demand; it walks beside the reader, steady and serene. And when it ends, it doesn’t really end. It nudges you to step outside, to walk without a destination, to notice—the rustling of leaves, the glint of an old memory, the scent of rain on stone. In reclaiming the lost art of mindful observation, Meera Ganapathi returns literature to its primal place—as something elemental, something enduring. In her hands, writing is not performance but pilgrimage.

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