Editor's Note
The fabled explorer, oceanographer, filmmaker, and writer Jacques-Yves Cousteau once said—“The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.” The statement laid testament to a life lived in devotion to the earth’s wild waters and the mysteries of the ocean, one where exploration and conservation went hand-in-hand, all of which included his co-invention of the aqualung—a historic moment that would forever change how humans viewed the ocean, and their place within it.
Abinaya Kalyanasundaram’s net of wonder has turned out to be the humble, everyday window. An architectural feature taken for granted in the frantic clamour of urban life, the window becomes an act of meditation and a means of salvation for Kalyanasundaram, ensconces in her mountainous worlds or isolated in her chosen safe spaces. In modes of exile, through the window’s shifting gaze, she witnesses. Seasons change. Life withers. Stillness and belief. Another seasonal shift. The blossoming of life. The dance of humans. Fruit and faith. Kalyanasundaram sees it all, and breathes all of it in, with this framed existence helping her come to terms with an illness, and fight her way through it.
“Through the window, touch the world,” she proposes. And her vast array of windows backs up the statement—looking out on the snowy peaks of mountains, meadows in bloom, parched trees, errant bursts of cloud, clothes drying on the line, dawn bursting through in its first blush, the profusion of spring, the poetry in winter. And in each window, through each gaze, Kalyanasundaram is able to find an allied quote from a favourite writer or a cherished work of literature, turning this whole expedition into a modern-day fable.
The result is a moving piece that transports you to unknown topographies, a stilled state of mind, and striking passages from literature, thus answering truthfully to the Passengers theme within our Visual Narratives. Journey with this photographic essay. And at the end of it, open your own windows. Perhaps you’ll find the world gazing back at you.
— Siddharth Dasgupta
The Bombay Literary Magazine
THE WINDOW’S GAZE
“… And what is more generous than a window?” asks Pat Schneider in her gracefully simple poem, The Patience of Ordinary Things.
Indeed, I have greatly benefitted from the sublime generosity of windows for most of my life. They’ve been portals to experience the outside world from the safety of shelter. A reprieve from boredom while stuck in a lecture. A caress of melancholy when the skies open in rain, and an embrace of hope in sunshine.
Windows have become especially dear to me since I came down with an illness a few years ago. On “flare days”, that sometimes stretch into weeks, they offer a desperate escape from my bed, a way to keep in touch with the seasons of the world while mine stood still.
In these moments, I find a strange kinship with Johnsy, who I suspect was around the same age as I am today. In O’Henry’s The Last Leaf, the thirty-something artist, on her self-proclaimed death bed, perenially stares out her apartment window, waiting… In her pneumonia-driven delirium, she has formed a pact with the vine leaves growing on the next building. “When the last one falls, I must go too.” But, unbeknownst to her, a grumpy but kind neighbour paints a leaf on the vine to feed her hope, and seeing the “leaf” survive day after day gives her strength to heal.
When I think about it, windows are a discernible theme in several literary texts. When I first read L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, I’d imagined myself as the whimsical Anne who often finds herself by the window in her gable, dreaming up “all sorts of splendid things,” or sending morse code-like candle messages to her best friend Diana. In Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, I yearned along with young Esperanza and other women to look out the window every chance they got, to breathe a little, maybe escape their trapped lives in this troubled Chicago neighbourhood.
Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl; the fairytale Rapunzel, Ruskin Bond’s Words from my Window, and many more stories I’ve read and loved, feature windows quite often, used literally and symbolically to propel the narrative.
During my days in architecture school, I learned how to design windows—the ideal lintel height, how to design minimal French windows and luxurious bay ones, of Kashmiri ‘pinjra-kari’ and Japanese ‘shitaji-mado’. But it turns out, the most crucial element is not in these external fineries, but in the emptiness they frame—a way to touch the world, and for it to touch me.
“Anne peeped out from her frosted gable window with delighted eyes… The birches and wild cherry-trees were outlined in pearl; the ploughed fields were stretches of snowy dimples; and there was a crisp tang in the air that was glorious.”
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
“She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow… I have inherited her name, but I don’t want to inherit her place by the window.”
— Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street
“I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was the same. I began sitting under them, staring at the sky. It did not seem real. The windowpanes acted as frames, so the sky came to me slowly and the huge openness of its space did not touch me.”
— Anne Spollen, The Shape of Water
“It is lovely weather, and in spite of everything, we make the most we can of it by lying on a camp bed in the attic, where the sun shines through an open window.”
— Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl
“They never pulled the curtains till it was too dark to see, nor shut the windows till it was too cold. Why shut out the day before it was over? The flowers were still bright; the bird chirped. You could see more in the evening often, when nothing interrupted.”
— Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts
“I’m so glad my window looks east into the sun rising. It’s so splendid to see the morning coming up, glowing. It’s new every morning, and I feel as if I washed my very soul in that bath of earliest sunshine. Oh, Diana, I love this little room so dearly.”
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
Rapunzel was leaning out of the narrow window, singing a sad melody softly to herself. She had magnificent long hair, as fine as spun gold.
— Brothers Grimm, Rapunzel
“A room without a window is rather like a prison cell, and the soul is inclined to shrivel up in a confined space… Car horns, children calling to each other as they return from school, a boy selling candyfloss, several crows chasing a hawk! Never a dull moment. And the magic mountain looks on, absorbing everything.”
— Ruskin Bond, Words from my Window
“I sat at my bedroom window with one leg indoors and one leg out, as if straddling a great white-winged horse, admiring both the interior and exterior worlds at once.”
— Sandra Cisneros, A House of My Own
“But the window was more fun than anything else. It gave us the power of detachment: we were deeply interested in the life around us but were not involved in it.
It is like the cinema. The window is the screen, the world is the picture.”
— Ruskin Bond, The Window
“The sun was shining through the window and falling in golden rays on her bed—and as she opened her eyes everything in the loft seemed gleaming with gold. She looked around her in astonishment and could not imagine for a while where she was.”
— Johanna Spyri, Heidi
“She asked me to move her to that room because of the view. She said it raised her spirits. She lay in bed and spent her days looking out the window—at the foothills in the distance and the deep, rich gold they turned midday when sunlight shone full tilt on them.”
— Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
“I sat a long time by the window looking out over the silent grounds and silvered fields and waiting for I knew not what. It seemed to me that some event must follow the strange cry, struggle, and call…”
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
“The window glows. The slow sandy light of dawn permeates the room. Everything transient and aching; everything tentative.”
— Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
“Her face was only a mask, her body only a costume. Staring out of the window, she wondered, with great sadness, if she would ever be allowed to step off the stage and enter the real world—she wanted only its sincerity, its truth.”
— Anita Desai, Bye Bye Blackbird
“Francie, standing at the window overlooking the river […] So many things seemed like dreams to her. Or was it all real and true and was it that she, Francie, was the dreamer?”
— Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Mary was at the window in a moment, and in a moment more it was opened wide and freshness and softness and scents and birds’ songs were pouring through. “That’s fresh air. Lie on your back and draw in long breaths of it. That’s what Dickon does. He says he feels it in his veins and it makes him strong and he feels as if he could live forever and ever. Breathe it and breathe it.”
— Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
She ran first to one window and then another. She wanted to see the sky and country outside. She felt like a bird in a cage.”
— Johanna Spyri, Heidi
Acknowledgments
Cover Banner Photograph: Unsplash/ Banner Design & Photography + Narrative Editing: Siddharth Dasgupta
Author | ABINAYA KALYANASUNDARAM
ABINAYA KALYANASUNDARAM is a visual artist, writer, poet and editor based in Bengaluru. Growing up in Zambia, she nurtures an intimate connection with the Earth which is her guiding muse. Her works reflect a desire to deepen this connection through written narratives and photographs. Her ongoing project ‘Daughter of the Earth’ was projected at the 19th Angkor Photo Festival (2024) and exhibited at Photo Circle, Kathmandu in 2023. She has also worked as an editor with publications such as The New Indian Express, Sanctuary Asia, The Kodai Chronicle, Mongabay India and is currently with the Indian Institute of Science. She finds solace and inspiration in reading poetry, walking under trees and trying to live as slow as the world allows her to.
You may also like:
