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It was in the frenzy of wedding season that Kolkata decided to find me.

The countless rows of shops looked disorderly at first glance – sarees spilling from shelves, colours stacked in uneven towers, shopkeepers calling out to passing customers. Nothing arranged, nothing seemed deliberate. And yet, the moment I stepped inside one of these shops, I realised everything demanded attention.

For instance, colour.

I was just trying to find sarees for myself, and what I thought would be simple quickly became anything but that. An orange-ish red wouldn’t do. A peachy pink didn’t make the cut. Each shade had to be exact.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

“Basonti,” one shopkeeper said, holding up a soft mix of yellow and peach that felt warmer than the others.

“Kacha holud,” another suggested, raw turmeric, bright and alive, or “peyaaji,” onion pink, faint and tender.

Each colour arrived with care, a story and a vivid image. The shopkeepers didn’t simply display fabric; they described it until I could see it differently. They held a saree up to the light, tilted it slightly, and asked me to notice how the shade changed, how it softened, how it deepened.

Their language made me look closer.

What seemed similar from afar slowly separated into distinctions – this one warmer, that one gentler; this one muted like early morning light, that one bright, more like late afternoon. The differences were small, but once I saw them, they felt undeniable. I found myself lingering over each fold of cloth, slowing down and letting my eyes shift across the fabrics.

Wedding season is when Kolkata too shifts in ways we rarely notice: people hurrying through underground walkways, metro rails ferrying crowds to markets, streets pulsing with a rhythm all their own – broken yet connected. Watching each person navigate the vast world beneath one of the oldest metropolises and dive into a dizzying array of colours and textures, I found myself thinking about love in its small, vivid particulars.

How can something so simple be named and renamed endlessly, yet survive only in what we remember? It is the act of remembering and reminiscing that forms the hidden architecture of love, too, just like those subterranean tunnels that quietly move the city around. It holds on to distinct details – the warmth of a palm resting against yours, a crooked smile caught mid-laughter, the way a head finds that small room between neck and shoulder, as if they have always belonged there.

Things that feel exact, precise, and known.

Perhaps love, too, endures like Kolkata in the wedding season: bustling on the surface yet subsumed by countless strangers crossing underneath the city, only fully felt when we pause to notice.

Growing up, Kolkata never quite felt homely, not fully. Every year during Durga Pujo, we travelled to North Bengal, our bags stuffed with new clothes. I remember the rhythm of the train tracks and the sighs around delayed journeys more clearly than the city itself.

Kolkata was always only a stop in between, a platform where we stretched our legs, a night spent at a relative’s house before moving on again. A place I passed through on the way somewhere else.

When people who weren’t Bengali asked me where I was from, I learned to say “Kolkata”. It was simpler. The kind of answer that didn’t require explanation. I carried the name easily, even though my memories of it were perpetually scattered.

The city remained abstract that way. I hadn’t yet learned to distinguish its textures and turns properly until that afternoon in the shop. But standing there, watching shopkeepers treat each small difference as something meaningful, Kolkata suddenly felt intimate.

Gradually, it surfaced in the small, lived-in corners of the city – a narrow verandah where an old woman watered her tulsi plants at dusk; a corner tea stall where two people leaned close over a shared glass of cha, their conversation folding into the steam; a small pond caught between apartment blocks, green and still, holding the last light of evening while boys skipped stones across its surface. It emerged in spaces that didn’t announce themselves – you’d stumbled upon them by accident. They seemed to surface briefly through the crowds and slip away again if you hurried past.

By the time I stepped back onto the street, the memory of the city was no longer fragmented. So, I stood there a moment longer than I needed to.

I am still learning to love Kolkata, just as I am still learning to love love – settling into the discomfort, the discombobulations and the subtle distinctions that shape both.

Priyanjana Das is a PhD scholar researching on migration, memory, belonging and afterlives.

We’ve grown up hearing that “it’s the small things” that matter. That’s true, of course, but it’s also not – there are Big Things that we know matter, and that we shouldn’t take our eyes, minds or hearts off of. As journalists, we spend most of our time looking at those Big Things, trying to understand them, break them down, and bring them to you.

And now we’re looking to you to also think about the small things – the joy that comes from a strangers’ kindness, incidents that leave you feeling warm, an unexpected conversation that made you happy, finding spaces of solidarity. Write to us about your small things at thewiresmallthings@gmail.com in 800 words or less, and we will publish selected submissions. We look forward to reading about your experiences, because even small things can bring big joys.

Read the series here.

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