Peter Chachei
Looking at the world around us, we may but somehow manage not to see it until whatever it is that we’ve become accustomed to suddenly disappear. For instance, take the neatly attired woman I use to see- or look at- on my way to work every morning.
For the past few month or so, no matter what the weather is, she was always there waiting at a regular stop around 9:30 am. It was clear that she was a working woman. Of course, I remembered all this only after she vanished or disappeared. It was then I realized how much I counted on seeing her every morning. You may even take it in this way that I had started missing her.
Naturally, I had fantasies about her disappearance. Accident? Something worse? Now that she was gone, I felt I had really known her. I began to realize then that a significant part of our daily life consists of such encounters with familiar strangers: the paper-boy you see every morning delivering the papers to every door in your neighborhood. The scrap dealer passing your way with his ear-shattering invitation to the residents to sell iron and steel scraps to him. The neatly dressed traffic personnel at the traffic island maintaining the traffic’s everyday on your way to work. The woman in her late thirty’s walking back home after dropping her child to school.
Such people are important markers in the landscape of our lives. They add weight to our sense of belonging. Think about it. After all, if part of being a tourist is seeing nothing and no one familiar to you, then can we not say that seeing the familiar paperboy or perhaps the shopkeeper is a part of what makes us citizens of our community?
Perhaps a shopper at the supermarket sees me there every morning when riding to office, without really noting of my presence. Or may be someone at the tea stall where I and some of my colleagues’ drink tea everyday would notice if we stopped showing up.
Once in a while you might actually meet one of these familiar strangers, as I did a few days back. I was standing in-front of a shop when a woman said ‘Hello!!’. Excuse me “Do we know each other?” she asked. And I did. She was one of member working with an NGO in Dimapur of whom I have encountered her presence for quite a few times during my regular routine of reporting. We had an easy familiar chat- although we never got around to exchanging our particulars.
But here’s what I remember most about the importance of familiar strangers. Once, while returning from a night-long journey, I was feeling disoriented, out of place. Then I saw him- the man in his regular shorts and a t-shirt. I’d seen this man walking through my neighborhood for so to say a thousand times.
At last! I thought. Seeing the sight of that familiar stranger, I felt, “I’m home at last”.
