Childhood exists in a country all its own—a place we've all inhabited but can never fully return to. It's a landscape of firsts: first friendships, first heartbreaks, first discoveries. The borders of this country are barely noticeable in youth, but gradually solidify until one day, we find ourselves firmly on the other side, looking back across an unbridgeable distance.

Memory becomes our only passport back—unreliable documents that fade and shift, embellish and diminish. The streets we once roamed seem smaller when revisited, yet in other ways, memories magnify—a summer afternoon stretches into eternity, the taste of a long-ago ice cream becomes more vivid than yesterday's dinner.

In my childhood, Guwahati was a living map marked by landmarks invisible to strangers: the spot where I fell from a bicycle; the tree whose branches formed a perfect reading nook; the shortcut past a dog whose bark was worse than his bite....