Some strangers stay with you for
reasons you cannot explain

It was October 2019, just before the world shut down, though none of us knew that yet. I was on holiday in Kolkata with my family. My parents, my sister, and me. We had gone early that morning to the Dakshineswar Kali Temple, and the darshan had been good. More than good. I walked out feeling something I did not have a word for, a kind of relief, as though something heavy had been quietly set down without my noticing when it had been picked up.

We wandered the streets behind the temple afterwards. It was early enough that the streets were nearly empty, one or two people at most. My parents and my sister were walking ahead of me. I was lingering behind the way I always do, taking photographs of the architecture, the light, whatever caught my eye.

They turned a corner. And for a moment, I was alone on that street.

That is when I saw her.

An elderly woman, perhaps in her sixties, perhaps older, I could not tell, sitting on an open veranda in front of a house. She had completely white hair. She was wearing a white saree with something blue draped through it. I cannot remember her face exactly, and that has always troubled me, because I remember her so clearly. The way she was sitting. The stillness of her. Something about the way she looked out at the street, or at nothing, or at everything.

She called me over as I was passing.

I went to her. Something strange happened as I moved closer. When I first saw her, when she first called out, I felt a rush of everything at once. Emotions I could not separate or name, all arriving together. But with each step towards her, they quietened. By the time I was standing in front of her, I felt only calm. A deep, widening calm, the kind you read about but never quite believe, the feeling that there is no tension anywhere, that the world is a beautiful place and always has been.

She asked me for twenty rupees. I gave it to her, I do not remember deciding to, I just did. And then she placed her hand on my head and gave me her blessing. We spoke for a moment. I cannot recall a single word of what we said. But what I felt when her hand touched my head, I have spent seven years failing to describe it. I was blank. Completely empty. And at the same time, I had everything. I felt nothing and I felt the whole world. A fullness of energy, not restless energy, not nervous energy, but something beautiful, something that filled every corner of me and asked for nothing in return. Something divine. That is the only word I have ever found for it, and it is not enough.

Parallelly, on my action of giving, an overwhelming, quiet warmth. A sense that I had done exactly the right thing in exactly the right moment, without trying. A deep, wordless satisfaction that I had helped someone, and that they had, in return, given me something I had not known I needed.

I walked on. I caught up with my family around the corner. We continued our holiday. We went home. Then the pandemic came, and life rearranged itself the way it did for everyone.

But that woman never left.

She began appearing in my thoughts. Not constantly, but persistently. Randomly. I would be doing something entirely ordinary and she would surface: the white saree, the veranda, the hand on my head. Sometimes she appeared in my dreams. Not as a narrative, not as a scene, just her presence, arriving uninvited and without explanation.

For a long time, I ignored it. Years, in fact. I did not know what to make of it, so I made nothing of it. People pass through our lives. Some stay in our memory longer than others. I assumed it would fade.

It did not fade.

It was only last year in 2025, nearly six years after that morning, that I finally mentioned it to my mother. I told her about the woman, the blessing, and the fact that she still visited my thoughts with a regularity I could not explain.

My mother smiled. She told me that the woman may have been a messenger of Kali Mata. Perhaps she was sent to test my compassion. Perhaps she was the Goddess herself, appearing as an elderly woman on a quiet street in the early morning, waiting to see what I would do. My mother said I should feel good, that someone who blesses you with that kind of presence does not leave your thoughts by accident. That her constant return is not something to worry about, but something to recognise.

I do not know if my mother is right. I am not making a theological claim. But I will say this: in Hinduism, there is an ancient and deeply held belief that the divine can manifest in the everyday, in the poor, the elderly, the stranger who asks you for very little. The tradition teaches that these encounters are not coincidence. That sometimes grace arrives not in a temple, with incense and bells, but on an empty street, in the form of a woman you will never see again.

And I will say this too: that woman had something. Call it aura, call it presence, call it whatever you like. When she placed her hand on my head, I felt something I have not felt before or since. My mind was already open, I had just come from the temple, I was at peace, I was not guarding myself against anything. And in that unguarded moment, she reached me completely.

Whether she was a messenger of Kali Mata, or simply an elderly woman who needed twenty rupees and gave a kind blessing in return, I am not sure it matters. She served the same purpose either way. She became, for me, a messenger of grace. And she has never stopped delivering the message.

I think about why certain strangers stay with us. Not all of them do. You meet hundreds, thousands of people in a life, and most of them pass through without leaving a mark. But occasionally, very rarely, someone you spoke to for less than a minute becomes a permanent resident of your inner life. They move in and do not leave.

I do not think this is random. I think some encounters are weighted differently. The timing, the place, the state of your mind, the openness of your heart, all of it conspires to make a moment land harder than it should. And once it has landed, it becomes part of how you understand yourself.

When this woman visits my thoughts now, and she still does, in 2026, seven years later, she humbles me. She reminds me of Kali Mata. She reminds me of the temple that morning, and of the person I was in that unguarded moment on that empty street. She reminds me that I am capable of simple, unrehearsed kindness, and that the universe sometimes notices.

I do not know what kind of experience this is. I have never tried to name it. But I know that it changed something in me that has not changed back.

Some strangers stay with you for reasons you cannot explain. Perhaps the explanation is not the point. Perhaps the staying is.