Near-misses and parallel lives: how unexpected connections shape fate across continents

In her latest novel Eighteen Inches Apart (Fingerprint! Publishing, 2026), author Sonia Bahl weaves a story across two continents through shifting timelines, while examining issues of class, privilege, love, grief and ambition.

Interestingly, the idea of fragmented bonds shaping human destiny also runs across her previous two novels, The Spectacular Miss (2016) and A Year of Wednesdays (2019). These themes are no doubt drawn from Kolkata-born author’s own varied life and creative career as an advertising professional and screenwriter. Having lived and worked in Mumbai, Delhi, Jakarta, Miami, Brussels and Johannesburg, she is now based in Singapore.

In this interview with eShe, Bahl delves into the inspirations behind her visually alive characters, the delicate balance of memory, and the unseen threads that remind us there are no coincidences.

eShe: Your latest novel Eighteen Inches Apart follows four main characters whose lives intersect across different cities. What inspired you to write a story centered on the invisible threads that link strangers together? What was the starting point of this narrative?

Sonia Bahl: Do strangers carry pieces of our story we never get to read? In real life, those threads stay invisible. You are fleetingly touched by something or someone and you never learn what it meant, or what you meant to them. If only we could pull those threads into the light and let them show. Those were the thoughts hovering in my head from the start.

It crystallized around a photograph I never took. My brother, an accidental but gifted street photographer, sent me an image of a man on a crowded Calcutta street, standing utterly still, dressed in rags he wore like couture, gone before you could look twice.

I was mesmerized by the photograph. He became the figure Leela can’t photograph and can’t forget, and the other lives assembled themselves around him, in Calcutta and London, each quietly shaping the others without ever quite knowing it.

You have lived in many global cities yourself. How did your own experiences of moving around the world influence how you write about migration and the feeling of home?

Where are you from becomes a trick question when you’ve lived in nine cities across four continents. But when you move often, there’s also a wonderful distillation of connecting to and carrying with you only what truly matters.

I adore the itinerant Pico Iyer who puts it best: “Home is not the place where you live, home is what lives inside you”. I think you belong everywhere and sometimes nowhere, which brings a unique gift – being an insider and an outsider at the same time, no matter where you go.

Invariably this spills into how one views the world, the real one and the fictional ones we create. Which is probably why most of my characters aren’t homesick for a place as they are for a version of themselves. That’s the home they’re looking for.

In your previous novel, A Year of Wednesdays, two strangers connect during a flight. Eighteen Inches Apart also focuses on fleeting encounters that alter the course of a life. What draws you to this recurring theme of unexpected human connections?

We’re conditioned to believe the relationships that count are the ones that last, the ones with some sort of title and a history. But often the encounters that rearrange us can be the briefest. A person you knew in a city you once lived in. A stranger on a flight. A single conversation that runs a beat too long and never quite leaves you.

In A Year of Wednesdays it was 16 hours on a plane. Here it’s a man glimpsed for a second on a street and somewhere else it’s a little busker boy playing a harmonica. The fleeting, transformative power of connection outlasts time. Something can last a week or even an afternoon and reorder your entire life. I find that more romantic (even when it’s platonic), and more terrifying, than a grand love story.

Your debut book, The Spectacular Miss, was a coming-of-age story, while Eighteen Inches Apart takes a closer look at the inner shifts in people’s lives rather than big plot twists. How do you feel your writing style has changed since your first novel?

The Spectacular Miss was all velocity. A girl in the grip of something she can’t compute – love? friendship? – hurtling forward, 20 years of wanting. It needed momentum.

Eighteen Inches Apart asked for the opposite: the shifts that happen when nothing appears to be happening. My two protagonists never meet. And when your leads never meet, you can’t reach for the usual scenes, the confrontation, the confession, the big declaration. The intimacy has to happen sideways, in near-misses and parallel lives. So the restraint in style was baked into the premise.

There’s a common thread in the three novels, only here the near-miss isn’t a single beat in the plot, it’s the entire texture. If there’s a quietness in the writing, it isn’t a new register I discovered. It’s more to do with what this particular story asked for.

What are your thoughts on how social identities linked to class, caste, race or religion affect human relationships and love?

I am wary of characters becoming spokespersons for anything. So I try to let class or faith or where someone comes from sit in a character the way it sits in real people. Unevenly, mostly unspoken, surfacing at an unexpected moment that gives everything away.

Of course, these markers decide who we’re allowed to want, who our families would choose for us, who has access and who doesn’t. Leela loves across a line her world would rather she didn’t cross. But for me it wasn’t about the sociology of it. It’s about the small human moment where privilege becomes visible to the person who has it, usually because they care deeply for someone who doesn’t.

Readers are so smart, all they need is that flicker of dawning awareness. It tells them more than any statement could.

You have mentioned that you like giving cities “main character energy”. How do Calcutta and London serve as more than just settings, and how do they mirror the emotional journeys of your characters?

Cities aren’t just backdrops, they’re accomplices. A setting becomes a character the moment it changes the fate of the people inside it. Calcutta is the geography of Leela’s temperament. Proud, disheveled, loving, entirely unbothered by anyone’s opinion of it, magnificent precisely because it refuses to tidy itself up. It won’t let you be indifferent, and neither will she.

London is the opposite kind of mirror for Neel. It lets him vanish, stay anonymous, stay reserved, forget who he’s supposed to be. And because it’s a melting pot, it hands him something he couldn’t have engineered: a smorgasbord of people from everywhere who slowly become the family he chooses.

Leela is a photographer who prefers capturing ordinary, everyday moments over famous landmarks. Does Leela’s way of seeing the world reflect your own approach to storytelling?

She frames the ordinary in the hope of capturing the extraordinary embedded in it: the face nobody else noticed, the thing that tells you what a moment actually felt like rather than what it looked like.

The celebrated photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson might have been speaking of Leela when he said, “Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing.”

I’d love to believe I write in that same space, finding the untold story, capturing the ephemeral.

The book handles romantic, familial and platonic love with equal care. Why was it important for you to show that friendship and brief encounters can shape a person just as deeply as romantic partnerships?

We’re sold the idea that the romantic partnership is the main event and everything else is replaceable supporting cast. But ask people who shaped them most, and you’ll hear about a single parent, a substitute teacher, a cousin, a friend’s parent, a near-stranger. And sometimes the person who changed your life the most is someone you never even got to keep.

In this book, at her worst moment, Leela finds her best friend in Sid. Neel is remade by a child who isn’t his and by a couple who treat him like their own. I wanted every kind of love on the same footing, because imagine how bereft we’d be without the profound richness of it.