The man stayed motionless on the chair on the other side of the gate

Walking through the streets of Kolkata, I came across a door left half-open, abandoned as if in mid-gesture. Through the gap stretched a narrow passageway, looking less like a thoroughfare and more like the threshold to someone’s private life. Indian cities live in a strange tension: the noise of the main road and the quiet of the back alleys exist only a step apart, and to a passerby like me, the urge to step inside is almost irresistible. Yet it was, unmistakably, someone’s space, and I had no right to intrude.

Peering down the corridor, I saw a single plastic chair. On it sat a man, shoulders hunched, head bowed, his figure soaked into the damp Kolkata air. He might have been wrestling with a private burden, or perhaps merely surrendering to the torpor of a humid afternoon. In India, philosophy and melancholy alike seem to seep naturally into daily life, as unremarkably as the varying strength of tea.

Above him, an old air conditioner clung to the wall, its casing rusted with age. Layers of faded posters peeled away in fragments, while a tangle of wires sprawled outward like wild vines, turning the alley into a miniature of the city itself. What I witnessed was no more than a fragment of his life. The man who sat there brooding might, tomorrow, be elsewhere, laughing over tea. Or he might still be there, in the same chair, the same posture. Either way, it has nothing to do with me. It was simply one more cross-section of the city called Kolkata.