There are things a city loses without quite forgetting them.

A building disappears. A neighbourhood is renamed. A language slowly slips out of everyday conversation. A familiar landmark is demolished. A jhuggi vanishes overnight. And yet, somehow, all of them continue to exist in the stories people tell.

This is the idea at the heart of Shriti Tyagi’s notHERE: The Absent Presence, the latest and final book in her Mumbai-Delhi series.

At its recent gathering at Museo Camera in Gurugram, what could have been a conventional book launch became something quieter and more evocative. Readers, writers, photographers and old friends of the Beyond Bombay and Beyond Delhi communities gathered to talk about cities, but much of the conversation was really about what cities have lost.

A City Is More Than What We See

For almost two decades, Shriti Tyagi has been walking, researching and documenting the lesser-seen worlds of Indian cities through Beyond Bombay and Beyond Delhi.

A theatre aficionado, researcher, translator, TEDx speaker and chronicler of micro-cultures, Shriti has led walks through cemeteries, explored the history of plague in Bombay, followed literary trails, mapped food cultures and uncovered corners that most residents pass without noticing.

Her work has always carried a simple idea: a city is never just its skyline. It is memory, argument and residue.

With notHERE, that idea takes on a new meaning.

The book follows The Tell of Two Cities (2023) and KONA, Corners. Connect. (2024). Shriti describes the journey as one that began with places and now arrives at the idea of absent presence: not simply where things are, but how they remain after they are gone.

What Remains When Something Is Gone?

The book brings together fourteen contributors, each looking at a different form of disappearance.

Giraj writes about the Ghantaghar in Chandni Chowk that no longer stands, yet survives in the way people continue to identify an address.

Sumedha Chawla recalls a jhuggi that disappeared overnight, leaving behind memories that somehow made its former residents feel more present.

Kabir Pandit reflects on Urdu, a language still woven into everyday life yet increasingly difficult to locate in the spaces where it once belonged.

Kanchan Gandhi explores the emotional history hidden in renamed cities, from Bombay becoming Mumbai to Madras becoming Chennai, and the struggle of residents in Chandigarh’s Mani Majra to hold on to their name.

Shruti Sareen writes of another disappearing Delhi, where college haunts and familiar addresses increasingly exist only in memory or online.

Four photographers add another dimension to these stories, turning absence into something almost visible.

The City That Is Not Here

Shriti opened the discussion with a thought that perhaps explains the entire book. notHERE, she said, asks us to dwell on the traces, residues and remainders that persist in names, memory, growth and the echoes of places.

The book opens with two poems by Kashmiri writer Dr Owais Farooq, who calls Delhi the Phantom City.

From there, the premise becomes clear.

This is not a book about what Mumbai and Delhi are today.

It is about everything they were, and everything that continues to live within them.

Perhaps that is why the evening felt less like a book launch and more like a gathering of memories. Voice notes from contributors who could not attend filled the room. Pages were turned. Stories were recalled. And for a while, the absent seemed remarkably present.

Nothing Is Ever Quite Gone

There is something deeply human about wanting to hold on to what a city has forgotten.

In eighteen years, Shriti Tyagi has built an entire ecosystem around that impulse: walks, conversations, research, storytelling and books that encourage people to look again at places they thought they knew.

notHERE: The Absent Presence feels like the most complete expression of that journey.

As Shriti puts it: much of the city is not here, and yet, in another sense, everywhere.

Perhaps that is the strange beauty of cities.

They keep changing, and we keep losing pieces of them. And yet, somehow, they keep finding their way back to us.

Geetanjali Kaul

G Caffe Founder & CEO. She says, "I fall in love with all that I see and always believe in giving the benefit of doubt."