The City I Can No Longer Love
How grief disrupts one’s cognitive mapping of familiar environments, and how cities continue to evolve, even when individuals remain emotionally tethered to a past version of them.
Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan conceptualized topophilia as the emotional connection one feels toward a place—an attachment shaped by memories, sensory experiences, and social relationships. For most of my life, Lucknow has embodied this attachment. It is not just my birthplace; it is the map of my childhood, the rhythm of my formative years, and the background score to every milestone I have ever reached. It has shaped my identity, my intellectual pursuits, and my sense of belonging.
But place attachment is not immutable. It can fracture under the weight of grief, shift under the burden of loss, and become unrecognizable when the people who once made it feel like home are no longer present.
The death of my father in August 2024 irreversibly altered my relationship with Lucknow. Once a city I cherished, it has transformed into a space of unbearable grief—a labyrinth I can no longer navigate, both literally and metaphorically. My father was my compass, my Google Maps before Google Maps existed. He knew every shortcut, every hidden alley, and every turn that would lead us home more quickly. Now, I find myself lost, not only in the streets of Lucknow but also in the very essence of the city itself.
This essay examines how personal loss alters spatial perception, how grief disrupts an individual’s cognitive mapping of familiar environments, and how cities—both materially and symbolically—continue to evolve, even as individuals remain emotionally connected to their past versions.
Lucknow: A City That Continues Without Me
Scholars of urban studies have long examined how cities are in a state of constant flux, shaped by migration, economic shifts, and evolving social structures. However, grief imposes a subjective psychological stasis that contrasts sharply with this dynamism.
When I returned to Lucknow for the first time after my father’s passing, I expected the city to look the same, and it did. However, it didn’t feel the same. The roads appeared more congested, the skyline more cluttered, and the markets noisier. While these changes were likely genuine—urban landscapes evolve over time—but I was also conscious that my altered perception was shaped by my grief.
My father had been a part of this city since the 1970s. Lucknow was both his making and his final resting place. He knew it like the back of his hand. He had a shortcut for everything. Roads that others avoided because of traffic; he would take effortlessly. He could anticipate the precise moment to turn into a lane to avoid a red light. He made the city bend to his will. When I was with him, I never had to think about where we were going; he always knew the way.
Now, when I am in Lucknow, I don't know the way to anywhere. I rely on Google Maps even for places I have visited countless times. Ironically, my name, Disha, means direction in Hindi, but in Lucknow, I feel directionless. Without my father, the city has become a maze I cannot escape, a riddle I can no longer solve.
I tried to reclaim the city by exploring spaces unconnected to my father. The logic was simple: if familiar locations evoked painful memories, perhaps unfamiliar ones could help me reestablish a neutral or even positive relationship with Lucknow. But each new experience only intensified my sense of detachment. Public spaces that once felt lively now appeared hollow, each unfamiliar corner feeling more like an erasure of the past rather than an assertion of the present.
This reaction aligns with the concept of solastalgia, a term coined by environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht to describe the distress experienced when one's home environment changes in ways that feel disorienting or alienating. In my case, it was not just Lucknow's physical transformation that unsettled me, but the realization that the city was moving on without my father—and, in a way, without me.
The Weight of Memory in Urban Spaces
Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space, argues that homes and familiar places are repositories of memory, with walls, streets, and objects silently witnessing the lives that unfold within them. Grief, however, transforms these places into haunted spaces. Lucknow, for me, has become a landscape of loss. My father is absent, yet his presence pervades the city in intangible ways.
He lingers in the aroma of kebabs in Aminabad and in the crowded markets where he excelled at bargaining. He had a knack for finding the best sales, the kind that no one else knew about. He would take me along, navigating the chaos of the bazaars with the precision of someone who belonged to this city in a way no one else did. He could spot the best products, the hidden gems no one else would notice.
He made sure I experienced everything new about Lucknow. If a new bookstore opened, we were there on the first day. If a café launched, he made me try it. He wanted me to see the city as something alive, something constantly becoming. But now, every new thing about Lucknow feels like a betrayal. A restaurant I haven't eaten at with him feels like proof that time is moving forward, that the city is leaving him behind. That I am leaving him behind.
The emotional geography of a city is deeply personal; different individuals experience the same space in vastly different ways. While my mother continues to view Lucknow as a place of comfort—a repository of decades of shared experiences with my father—for me, Lucknow remains a wound that refuses to heal.
Place Attachment and the Disruption of Temporal Continuity
The emotional bonds individuals form with locations can make grief more acute, particularly when the lost loved one was integral to one's experiences of that place. For me, Lucknow is not just a city; it is a past that I can no longer touch, a time when my father was alive.
Grief disrupts temporal continuity. I exist in a version of Lucknow that no longer exists, stuck in an earlier era even as the city itself continues to develop. This incongruence—between a static personal memory and an evolving urban landscape—renders my presence in Lucknow an exercise in cognitive and emotional dissonance.
The Challenge of Grieving in a Familiar Space
One of the lesser-discussed aspects of grief is its unpredictability. Since my father’s death, I have not cried. This absence of overt emotional expression does not indicate a lack of grief but rather its different manifestations. Some scholars refer to this as disenfranchised grief, where an individual’s mourning does not conform to societal expectations, leading to internalized distress.
Lucknow amplifies this experience. Unlike in Delhi, where my academic and professional commitments provide a structured escape, Lucknow forces an unmediated confrontation with loss. Every visit compels me to engage with a version of the city that no longer aligns with my lived reality, making it difficult to process emotions in a conventional manner.
Reconciliation with a City That No Longer Feels Like Home
For now, my relationship with Lucknow remains fractured, burdened by the weight of memory and loss. However, engagement with grief literature suggests that this estrangement need not be permanent. Studies on continuing bonds theory propose that instead of detaching from the deceased, individuals can find healthier ways to integrate their presence into their evolving lives.
Healing is neither linear nor predictable. It is a process marked by contradictions, regressions, and unexpected moments of clarity. Perhaps in the future, I will return to Lucknow and experience it differently—not as a site of unrelenting grief, but as a space where my father’s memory exists alongside my own evolving identity.
Until then, I remain a stranger in the only city I ever called home. But if place attachment can be severed by loss, perhaps it can also be reconstituted through time, memory, and a shifting understanding of what it means to belong.
This essay was written by Disha, who is a Ph.D. Scholar at Dr. K. R. Narayanan Centre for Dalit and Minorities Studies at Jamia Millia Islamia, India. She completed her B.A. (Honours) in History from Miranda House, University of Delhi, and earned her Master's in History from Indira Gandhi National Open University.
Photographs by Devansh Dixit
Lucknow is my city too 💜