The infinite tapestry of untold stories

You can know a person for an entire lifetime, and even in the fourth decade of knowing them, they can still surprise you. Some aspect, some belief, some experience, some wound, some hidden chamber in them you had never truly seen before. And isn’t that something?

It’s kind of funny that we go through life thinking we know everything there is to know about the people closest to us. We think that through time and intimacy and familiarity, we’ve more or less grasped the full shape of who they are. But the fact that they can still surprise us, even after years and decades, is proof that we don’t. There’s a hint of unconsidered arrogance in that assumption. Not a conscious arrogance, not a malicious one, but still an arrogance.

This post was triggered by a strange experience I had recently.

I went to visit a family friend, someone I’d known since childhood. He was one of those people who used to pick us up from school, buy us things, and look after us when we were young. I had lost touch with him over the years.

He had met with an accident a couple of years ago, one that left him unable to walk. I asked him what had happened and he began trying to explain, but he was visibly struggling to talk about it. I don’t know whether it was emotional difficulty or whether he had developed some kind of speech impediment, but he was struggling. I felt bad, so I cut the conversation short. It’s okay, I said. Let it be.

And in that moment, out of nowhere, this phrase popped into my head: an infinite tapestry of untold stories.

What struck me was that in just those two years since his accident, this man must have lived through an entire lifetime’s worth of pain, grief, adjustment, humiliation, resignation, fear, rage, and endurance. He would have had to come to terms with the possibility that he might never walk properly again. Reckon with dependency, with having to rely on his wife and children just to get through an ordinary day. He would have had to watch countless hopes and assumptions about who he was and what his life would look like simply shatter.

And I’m only scratching the surface.

For someone with a fully functioning body, it’s nearly impossible to truly imagine what that means. You can delude yourself into thinking that you do, but you can never know what it truly feels like to lose the ability to use a body part. Beneath the visible fact of his not being able to walk lies an ocean of pain: private humiliations, altered intimacies, crushed aspirations, everyday indignities, and anxieties that cannot be spoken without reliving all the horrors.

In the weeks that followed, I had a steady stream of bad news about people around me, people I love and care about, people whose lives had suddenly or slowly become excruciating in ways I didn’t know. Each time I heard something difficult, that phrase came back.

Every time I heard bad news, I kept thinking about how profoundly unrelatable another person’s suffering really is. Not because we don’t care, but because we can never fully know. We can never know all the dimensions of another person’s pain, or fear, or endurance, or hope, or disappointment. Even with the people closest to us, even with the people we’ve known our whole lives, there are dimensions to them we’ll never know. We are hyper dimensional beings.

To give you a sense of what I mean, here are some lives I’ve encountered in the recent past.

A single mother, fresh out of a divorce, struggling not only with her own health issues but with the constant fear of securing a future for her child, all while battling her own inner storms.

A housemaid who works tirelessly day after day, only to return home to the beautiful face of her daughter and the monstrous reality of an alcoholic husband, trying somehow to hold those two opposite worlds together while making sure her daughter still has a chance at a decent life.

A woman who won a battle against cancer, only to find that even a defeated enemy can leave behind such devastation that she can no longer walk properly or live normally.

A young man in the prime of his life, with everything supposedly ahead of him, crushed by a debilitating struggle with his own mental demons, rendered passive and inert at the very age when life is supposed to be opening up.

A divorced man who’s been alone for years, now facing serious health issues with no one to depend on and no one to care about him.

Every single one of these lives, if their inner worlds were turned into a novel, would be nothing short of an epic. Greater than the epics written by the likes of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

Of course, none of this is a grand discovery and this is how life is. But there are moments when even the most obvious things knock you sideways, and this has been one of those moments for me.

As I was writing this, I kept finding more examples. A few days ago, a neighbor asked if he could speak to me. We’d been living next to each other for over a year, but because I’m an introvert with fairly severe social anxieties, I’d never had more than a hi and bye with him. We ended up talking for more than three hours. And boy, has this man lived.

He comes from a background where hard limits were placed on social mobility because of various identity markers — not my place to get into the specifics. But the distance between where he started and where he is today is almost unfathomable. He has a beautiful family. He’s taken risks that would have made most people destitute, been knocked down more times than he can count, watched his best laid plans fall apart again and again. And yet he never gave up. He’s still very much in motion, still relentlessly working, because he has things to do and places to go. Apart from my own father, I don’t think I’ve met many people who fit the definition of relentless quite so completely.

There was a poignant side to his story too — regrets about roads not taken, things he never got to do. But it was also full of joy and humor and the quiet satisfaction of a man who has earned every inch of ground beneath his feet. He contains multitudes, in the truest sense of Whitman’s phrase. And here he was, pouring all of it out to a relative stranger he’d barely spoken to before.

If his life were turned into a novel, I’m fairly certain it would be a bestseller. And unlike the other stories in this piece, his was not a depressing one. It was a beautiful story about a person who has been relentless in his desire to build a good life for himself and the people he loves.

Something else struck me while writing this. Appearances really can be deceiving. The way a person speaks, the way they walk, the way they look — none of it tells you much about the vast inner universes within that person. And thinking about various intimate conversations I’ve had over the years, it hit me that pretty much everybody, whether they realize it or not, goes through life looking for a therapy partner. A friend, a lover, or sometimes even a kind stranger who’ll lend a listening ear. There’s a profound beauty to this streak in us, this need to find someone to unburden ourselves to. And in those moments, some of the unknown stories become known.

A few weeks ago, I was in a temple for some ceremony. I’m not really religious, barring the last remnants of religiosity stuck to my liver and kidneys thanks to my upbringing. I’m a heretic, and I know I have a standing appointment after death in hell, where I’ll be roasted in boiling oil while being simultaneously forced to watch Dhinchak Pooja videos on loop. But sitting there, watching people walk in and out with such visible devotion on their faces, I found myself thinking about belief.

Yes, many people inherit religion passively, from parents, from institutions, from society. Religion is like a costume handed down, one that people force themselves to wear because of tradition and the fear of eternal damnation more than anything else. But there are also people whose beliefs are forged in the act of living. Their faith isn’t merely inherited; it’s created. It emerges from grief, gratitude, survival, awe, longing, loss, and encounters with reality that change the architecture of a person from the inside.

When you meet someone who is deeply religious, and hear their story of how they came to believe, you suddenly realize that their belief itself has a history, a drama, a hidden ocean behind it.

That’s when another obvious aspect of life hit me.

It’s not just that every person’s life is an epic but rather every single element of a person may itself be an epic. Their faith, their fears, their anger, their ways of loving, their ways of withdrawing, their strange habits may all been shaped by hidden worlds of experience we’ll never fully know.

And although this reflection began in a pretty dark place, it eventually turned into something beautiful.

What makes life worth living, maybe, is that we can always be known a little better by someone, and in the process know a little more about them. That even after years of love and familiarity, there are still stories waiting to be discovered. That the mystery and the suspense are never entirely gone.

Everybody is a pilgrim in life, and we are all stumbling and suffering through it, constantly being made and unmade in the process. So whenever someone rubs you the wrong way, whenever you feel contempt or coldness or distance, maybe the trick is to imagine the full spectrum of life that may lie behind their face. The humiliations they may have endured. The losses they may have suffered. The private hopes they’re still keeping alive. The silent battles they may have fought just to become this person standing in front of you now.

If you do that sincerely, even briefly, I think you begin to feel something like kinship. And strangers start to feel like intimate acquaintances in this shared pilgrimage.

This feels especially important right now, in a world that seems to be splitting apart at the seams. A world where othering has become a reflex, where everyday life has been turned into a game where your win must necessarily come at someone else’s loss.

Maybe the antidote is to stare into the eyes of the people you know, and the people you’ve only just met, and try to imagine the vast inner universe that lies behind that face.

If you can do that, strangers stop being strangers. And you start to feel like what the ancient Greeks meant when they coined the word cosmopolitan: not just a citizen of a country, but a citizen of the world.

And in those little moments of kinship, those sudden glimpses into another person’s hidden world, that is where I see my God.