The Calligrapher of College Street

We met Anup-da through a secondhand bookseller who'd known him for thirty years. He's transcribed Tagore by hand for most of his life, first for publishers, now mostly for himself.

"Every letter has to breathe like the line does," he told us, over tea that had gone cold twice while we talked. "If you rush the pen, the reader rushes the poem, and the poem was never meant to be rushed."

It took him four attempts to get a single line small enough for a caseback while keeping every stroke legible under a loupe. We didn't ask for a fifth.