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Two Strangers, One Thought
Six Eastern proverbs and the Western lines that, across centuries, say the same thing.
I was in a hotel room, reading Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself on a friend’s recommendation. When I finished, I opened YouTube looking for music — and in that unpredictable way these things arrive, Bulla Ki Jaana Main Kaun began to play.
Something went through me. The same stripping away of every label and fixed identity that Whitman had just performed on the page was singing back at me from a voice century and continents away.
I went back to the poem to check whether I was forcing it. I wasn’t. It was there, unmistakable. Two strangers, one thought.
That was the moment this collection began.
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A man in old Punjab writes that he does not know who he is.
A man in Brooklyn, two centuries later, writes that he is everyone.
They never met. They never could have. And they are saying the same thing.
I keep finding this — a proverb from here, a line from the Western canon there, the same truth struck twice by people who never heard of each other. Not borrowed. Not passed down. Just true in two places at once, as if certain things are simply lying around for anyone, anywhere, willing to look hard enough.
