The Ghosts We Carry
On a cool January evening in Pune, the city exhaled a gentle hush. The air carried the scent of roasted peanuts and eucalyptus, and the sky above Model Colony was a soft indigo, stitched with the first stars. An old bungalow, once belonging to a freedom fighter, now hosted a literary soiree — poets, professors, musicians, and wanderers gathered under fairy lights and faded portraits to celebrate the written word. Arjun Deshmukh, 38, stood near a bookshelf lined with dusty Marathi anthologies and translated Russian novels. His lean frame was wrapped in a navy Nehru jacket, and his eyes — brown, thoughtful, slightly sunken — moved across the room like a man searching for a sentence he’d once read but couldn’t recall. A literature professor at Ferguson College, Arjun was known for his lectures on Eliot and Ambedkar, but tonight he felt like a footnote in someone else’s poem. His wife, Abha, 35, moved through the crowd with quiet grace. Her silver saree shimmered like ...