By AATISH TASEER

This piece is excerpted from the memoir A Return To Self by Aatish Taseer, a guest at Amherst College’s eleventh annual literary festival. Register and see the full list of for LitFest 2026 events here.                                                                                              

At 9:05 a.m. on the tenth of November, 2020, a hush fell over the leaden turbulence of the Bosporus. All activity on the strait ceased. Coast Guard ships, ferries, and caïques, like the younger members of a tribe of large marine mammals, drew close in a circle. Behind them, a Turkish destroyer kept vigil, the blue of its gunmetal merging with the strait’s frigid waters. A red-bottomed freighter marked with the words iraqi line hulked in the background. That cityscape of sea-blackened buildings, broad panes glazed silver in the daytime darkness, was no ordinary Left Bank, no mere farther shore. The silhouette of low domes and pencil-thin minarets piercing a nimbus of pale sky above was the continent of Asia. The wonder of looking at it, with my feet still planted on the shores of Europe, was not lost on me. I had been in Istanbul for less than seventy-two hours. The air grew heavy with anticipation, and then, low and deep and melancholy as whale song, came the first moan of a ship’s horn.