South Calcutta lanes and sonder.

Sonder:

n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

A beautiful definition provided by the forever brilliant Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: 

I recently came across this word because a friend and mentor shared a poem of the same name with me.

And it reminded me of how beautifully the word represented an evening of urgent writing on whatever paper pieces were at my disposal, trying to explain an almost inexplicable experience I had on the streets of beautiful South Calcutta (while the lovely gentleman opposite me at the table patiently let me finish and offered to be first proofreader).

14th November, 2016 @ La maison des délices, South Calcutta.

It was quite extraordinary, the ordinariness of that sight. 

Clad in a dull cotton saree that had been washed often and more, she held the black grill on the stairway window, looking out onto the street, at nothing in particular and yet holding something so potent and piercing in her gaze that the mere sight of her made me stop. 

It was an old two story building on a street corner in the heart of old South Calcutta. The walls mellowed in yellow paint and weathered down by the ravages of a forgetful, or perhaps helpless owner, who it seemed would have had a keen eye for bright colours in the youth of the building when it had last been painted. For the dull municipality yellow of the walls was contrasted by a bright earthy orange column of colour that surrounded the grilled full length windows on the stairway, offering a view of the beyond while keeping the house-secrets to its unyielding inner sanctums. It was as if time itself had stopped for the hands of a skilled painter to capture its essence into that moment. The lady, in all her commonplace wistful dignity, framed on a stairway window amidst the orange of overcast sunsets, looking out at the world and thinking, ruminating on a life that I will never know. A life she lived out within those weathered walls and fiercely laid claim to. A life that stood for all others that I will never know.

It was such an intensely private act of contemplation done with such disregard for its public accessibility that I stopped. And I took out a camera with the intention of capturing what would make for a beautiful frame and then left without clicking anything because I couldn’t come to terms with desecrating that time and moment.

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