The Word That Never Came
Pune, September 2025. The city had grown louder—flyovers slicing through old neighbourhoods, cafés blooming like wildflowers, and the hum of scooters and conversations filling every crevice. But in a quiet lane off Prabhat Road, in a second-floor apartment with peeling blue shutters, lived Kshama Datar, a 62-year-old retired literature professor who had once taught at Fergusson College. She was a spinster. Her home smelled of sandalwood and old paper. Books lined every wall, their spines faded, their pages annotated with thoughts she never shared. A brass lamp flickered in the corner, and a framed black-and-white photograph of a man with kind eyes sat on her writing desk. His name was Raajan Joshi. He had died twenty years ago. But Kshama still spoke to him—sometimes aloud, sometimes in her mind. What she never did was write about him. She had spent her life teaching poetry, dissecting metaphors, and guiding students through the maze of language. But when it came to Raajan, wor...