A family atlas · lights up as we go

Madhya Pradesh

The heart of India, drawn as one sheet — forts in the north, the Narmada across the middle, tigers in the east, temples everywhere. Every place this family actually stands in starts to glow. Six are lit: the August 2026 circuit out of Balaghat — where this family is from — to the Narmadā's source at Amarkantak, through a rained-out Jabalpur, up to Pachmarhi and home; and from an earlier trip, the two tiger forests, Kanha and Pench. The rest are the plan.

The ledger

Lit, and not yet lit

The yatras

Two walks the map is waiting for

Narmadā Parikramā · 0/1

The mind-bending one — walk the whole river, source to sea and back, never crossing her. Three thousand kilometres, months on foot, fed and sheltered by villages the entire way. A daily examination of grit and mental endurance. Traced on the map as two dotted lines, one along each bank.

Kāwad Yātrā · 0/1

The bhakti one — carry sacred water on foot and do not set it down until it is poured over Shiva. In Madhya Pradesh that means Narmadā jal from Omkareshwar up to Mahākāleshwar at Ujjain, jyotirlinga to jyotirlinga. Not a test of distance; a test of what you carry.

How this page works. The shape, rivers and places are drawn from the real geography, simplified the way the old pictorial atlases simplified it; the idea of the state as one illustrated sheet is borrowed with admiration from a printed album seen in Pachmarhi — the drawing here is our own. A gold, breathing marker means the family has stood there; the heavier ring at Balaghat is home, and the dashed gold line is the August 2026 circuit. Pachmarhi has its own page. Everything else is an intention. The list updates after every trip — that is the point of it. And the discovery itself has a source worth naming: Madhya Pradesh arrived in this family through marriage — the in-laws opened the door, and the state kept walking through it.