The silent observer

I first saw her sitting on the pavement outside my apartment block 10 days ago. Wrapped in her sari, she stared into space…her gaze focused on some distant memory, or so I like to think. She was no beggar, at least she never asked me for alms. Her position was constant, her posture fixed. Even the pack of strays that rule our street never took time out of their canine schedule to pay her any attention.
The human horde swept around her; there were no sly glances cast in her direction, and no words spoken. Over the days she began to seem more like one of the gargoyles that play sentinel to Mumbai's architectural heritage. Her purpose was unmapped, her reasons unknown, but sit she did, same place, all the time.
As the temperature plummeted, the sari was covered by a flimsy sheet, a knitted woolen cap held her face in a warm embrace. At night she was a mass of cloth, nothing to give away clues that a human being lay buried under there. My girlfriend and I often pondered her origins, her past, and her story, but city slickers that we aspire to be…talk was all we did. No help was ever mentioned, lest it destroy our urban reverie.
Yesterday, she was gone: Not a trace on the pavement of her existence. A hundred feet trod over where, just hours ago, sat the unnamed observer of Mumbai's life. Maybe she found what she was looking for, maybe a Samaritan took her to a place that was warmer, maybe she just died and someone dumped her unclaimed body in that place where few people go.
I like to think she found what she was looking for; hopefully it was that little bit of humanity, so rare in this sea of concrete frivolity in which we live.