In front of the post office, a mustached man started talking to me

In front of the post office, a man with an unkempt beard struck up a conversation with me. He peered curiously at the postcard in my hand, staring as if the Japanese characters printed on it were some kind of riddle. To his eyes, the script must have looked like an impenetrable array of symbols. Yet to me, the Bengali letters I encountered in Kolkata were far more puzzling—shapes of curves and dots that resembled geometric doodles more than anything else. For the locals, though, those same letters are part of daily life. In the end, it’s simply a matter of perspective: we each find the other’s writing system equally strange, so the balance is even.

The man had no real business with me. It seemed he was merely passing the time, indulging his curiosity by examining a foreigner with a postcard. Perhaps to him, the sight of a traveler relying on such an old-fashioned tool was comical. After all, for many modern Indians, a smartphone is more than enough; the ritual of stamps and envelopes must feel hopelessly outdated. Then again, in Japan too, the origins of the postal service go back to couriers and runners, proof that communication has followed similar paths across cultures. With that in mind, there was no reason to bristle at his laughter. I accepted it as nothing more than the sort of teasing that inevitably falls upon travelers.

That fleeting glance exchanged on a Kolkata street corner revealed how cultures overlap without words. The Japanese characters on a postcard and the Bengali script on shop signs are both, after all, nothing more than convenient symbols invented by human beings to record the world. Standing there with the bearded man, I realized that travel is less about grand revelations and more about these seemingly trivial moments—where a smile, a letter, or a glance becomes the story itself.