By Shriraj More

Pune, June 2025 — Early Morning

Vedika heard the rain before she saw it. A shy, uncertain sound at first—like fingertips tapping lightly against a glass jar. It came from behind the neem tree that shadowed her balcony, the same tree whose leaves she had swept into tidy piles just the day before. Now the world was reassembling itself, slowly and softly, in water.

She sat at her desk near the open window, the fan turned off to let the monsoon air drift in—sour, sweet, and slightly metallic. The cursor on her laptop blinked like an impatient metronome. The sentence before her read:

“Yeh tishnagi jo lagi mohe,

mori khuddari liye jaye.

Dekhi usey jo jaate meine

Mano parchhai chuti aaj mere hatonse…”

“The thirst that rose—unbidden—

drained the last of self-respect from me.

And in the moment, I watched it go—

it felt as if a shadow slept through my hands…”

She tried a few versions. An unending thirst. An insatiable longing. Each one felt inadequate, either too clinical or too indulgent. She reached for her cup of tea, now cold, and set it back down untouched. A suitable word rose in her mind, but she avoided, thinking that it would sound too intimate, too much like a name.

She leaned back. The chair creaked beneath her. Across the street, someone had opened a blue umbrella and was running for the bus. A schoolboy in a raincoat trudged behind a woman holding a stack of steel tiffin boxes. The world seemed like, it had prepared itself for the rain in ways she never had.

Eight years ago, in Berlin, the first rain of spring had arrived suddenly—without the dignity of thunder or warning. It had soaked the windowpanes of the Altbau apartment she had shared with Anagha. They had stood in silence, watching it from opposite ends of the kitchen, each holding a chipped mug from a mismatched set. Anagha had suggested something then—something that Vedika couldn’t remember exactly, only the tone: subtle, but firm enough.

She didn’t keep photographs of Anagha in plain sight anymore. Not from any shame—there had never been room for declarations between them—but because memory had already claimed its space, unframed and immovable. She had brought back one photo, though. A candid one, taken in a tram, where they sat shoulder to shoulder. Neither was smiling.

Vedika closed the translation window and opened a new document. The rain thickened, falling with steadier intent now, beading against the balcony railing. She watched the droplets form rivulets, then slide away without resistance.

A thirst that never quenches.

She typed: Longing is a language spoken silently.

She saved the file and reached for the third drawer, where the photo still lay. The drawer stuck slightly—it always did. A small rebellion. She didn’t open it. She only sat there, listening to the rain as if it were saying something she could almost, but not quite, understand.

Berlin, 2016–2022

They met at a language workshop in Kreuzberg. Vedika was translating fragments of medieval Hindi poetry, and Anagha—half-German, half-Malayalam—was giving a lecture on untranslatable Malayalam idioms. She wore a deep red scarf, even though it was spring and warmer than Berlin typically allowed. After the seminar, they spoke briefly about Manipravalam poetry, and how it navigated through two languages – Sanskrit and Malayalam.

Their second conversation happened outside the workshop building, next to a döner stand where Anagha bought a sandwich and offered Vedika a bite without hesitation, as if they already knew each other. They didn’t discuss politics or their parents, only words. They spoke about how German gave shape to logic and Hindi to memory. English, they agreed, lived somewhere in between.

When Vedika moved into the apartment in Wedding a few weeks later, it wasn’t planned. Anagha had a flatmate who moved out suddenly, and Vedika needed a place that didn’t ask too many questions. The landlord was an old woman with three cats and bad hearing. There were two rooms, both small, and a kitchen with pale yellow tiles that retained the smell of turmeric no matter how often they scrubbed it.

It began simply—cups of tea brewed too strong, an extra blanket left out in winter, a borrowed woollen sock that never made its way back. They shared groceries. They shopped for plants. They folded each other’s laundry without comment. There was no conversation, no ceremony, just an ongoing act of quiet belonging.

But they never used words like “us.” Not even in German, which Vedika barely spoke. There was no discussion of boundaries or futures. Sometimes, when friends came over—usually colleagues from the institute or Berliners who wore their politics like tattoos—Anagha would introduce Vedika as her “flatmate,” her “co-translator,” once even as her “friend from India.” Vedika never corrected her. She told herself she preferred the ambiguity. It gave her privacy. It gave her an exit.

In truth, there were things they never said because language, even in three tongues, felt insufficient. Once, in the dim light of an old café on Schönhauser Allee, Anagha had taken her hand under the table and held it for a full minute. The gesture was not romantic, not even deliberate. It was something else—a quiet assurance that even silence could be shared.

Yet for all the closeness, there were distances too. Anagha’s mother lived in Hamburg and called every Sunday. They spoke in rapid German, which Vedika only half-followed. Sometimes she caught the word Heirat, and sometimes kinder, and she would look away politely, as if overhearing something sacred.

Once, Vedika asked, half-joking, what Anagha would say if her mother ever met her.

“She’d think you’re lovely,” Anagha replied. “But she wouldn’t understand.”

“And would you try to make her understand?”

Anagha smiled the way people do when they’re about to leave but haven’t yet told you. “No. I’m not brave like that.”

They didn’t fight, not really. But over time, the silences changed shape. They grew sharper, narrower. Vedika spent more time in libraries, translated more. She stopped asking if Anagha would be home for dinner.

Then one afternoon in late October—just as the trees had turned brittle gold—Anagha mentioned, casually, that she had been seeing someone else. A man. A colleague. Vedika remembers the way she stirred her coffee three times, clockwise, before saying it. As if a ritual could soften a truth.

“It doesn’t change how I feel about you,” Anagha said, looking down.

Vedika nodded. She wanted to say, “That’s exactly what it changes.” But she said nothing.

After Anagha moved out, the apartment felt disjointed, like a sentence with its verb removed. Vedika stayed for another year. She finished her grant. She translated Kabir. She attended a queer film festival alone and left halfway through the screening. She started sleeping with the bedroom light on—not out of fear, but because darkness no longer felt like a choice.

There were no letters. Only one email, months later, with a photograph of Anagha in a wedding sari—orange with green borders—smiling beside a man Vedika had never seen. The message read simply: You were always more home than home ever was. I hope you are well.

Vedika had stared at that line for hours. Not because it was cruel, but because it wasn’t.

By the time she returned to India, Berlin had emptied itself of her. The bookstores, the subway routes, the apartment corners—they had reverted to their neutral states, unburdened by her presence.

Sometimes, even now, in Pune, when the street smells of wet pavement and roasted corn, when a woman on the radio speaks in a mix of Hindi and English, Vedika thinks of Berlin—not as a place she lived, but as a name she once answered to.

Pune, Late June 2025

The call came in the middle of Vedika’s afternoon tea. Her phone buzzed three times before she answered, recognizing the Delhi landline. Her mother preferred the old phone, its keypad stiff and numbers half-erased from decades of use.

“I found someone,” her mother said without preamble, as if Vedika had been waiting for this very sentence, for this very person.

Vedika stirred the sugar in her tea, then stopped. “Found who?”

“A boy. From Bhopal. His father was in Railways. He works in Singapore. MBA from Nanyang. Very modern, very progressive.”

“Progressive how?”

“He doesn’t mind if the girl works. Or lives alone. He said you can continue your writing or translating or whatever it is. He even asked if you liked Chinese food!”

Vedika smiled, despite herself. “That’s the criteria now?”

Her mother didn’t answer the question. “He’s flying to Mumbai next week. His parents want to meet you. At least say yes to tea.”

Vedika said nothing. She watched the rain as it collected in a shallow patch on the building terrace below. Two pigeons pecked near the puddle, hopping from ledge to ledge like clumsy diplomats.

“You’ll be thirty-five this year,” her mother added, her voice lowering. “You say no to everything. Every time. People ask me things I can’t answer anymore.”

Vedika pressed the phone closer. She knew her mother wasn’t cruel, only tired. Tired of dodging questions in temple queues, at wedding receptions, at the annual get-together of her late husband’s office circle.

“I’m not saying no,” Vedika replied. “Just… not now.”

A pause. Then, a sharp breath. “You never say no. You just vanish.”

When the call ended, Vedika sat with the phone still in her hand. The screen went black. She let her tea go cold.

An hour later, someone knocked at the door.

It was Rutuja—the landlord’s daughter. She stood in the corridor holding a plate of steaming poha, her round face damp from the rain. Her hair was tied into a hasty braid, and the hem of her kurta stuck slightly to her calf.

“Aai said to give this to you. You haven’t eaten all day.”

Vedika stepped aside to let her in. Rutuja placed the plate on the dining table with the casual confidence of someone who had visited many times before.

“Smells like you added mustard seeds this time,” Vedika said, trying to anchor herself in the moment.

Rutuja smiled, dabbing at her forehead with the end of her dupatta. “And grated ginger. My addition. Keeps the monsoon cold away.”

They sat for a few minutes in silence. Vedika picked at the poha with her fork, though she wasn’t hungry. The fan whirred gently above them. Rutuja looked around the flat, eyes lingering on the stack of translated folios by the window, the unfinished canvas leaning against the wall, the covered third room still unopened.

“You still haven’t used that room?” Rutuja asked.

Vedika shook her head. “It doesn’t know what it wants to be yet.”

Rutuja laughed softly. “Maybe it’s waiting for you to figure yourself out first.”

It was the kind of thing that might have sounded pointed from someone else. But from Rutuja, it felt oddly tender. Like a small plant held out in an open palm—fragile, but real.

Vedika set down her fork. “What if it never figures anything out?”

Rutuja tilted her head. “Then you could still paint it blue. I have leftover paint at home.”

They looked at each other, and then away. The silence that followed was not uncomfortable. It was, Vedika realized, the kind that holds something—something unnamed, unexamined, still too early to voice.

When Rutuja left, Vedika walked to the balcony and stood watching the evening blur into violet. Somewhere behind her, the third room waited, its door half-ajar. The air smelled of ginger, rain, and old memory.

She didn’t know what she wanted. But for the first time in a long while, she didn’t mind not knowing.

Ujjain, Early July 2025

The house in Ujjain had not changed. Above the entrance, the brass bell still hung from a unravelling brown thread. The walls remained the same pale beige, their corners darkened by the slow insistence of time. In the backyard, the banyan tree had grown wider, casting longer shadows on the earth her father once swept every morning in silent devotion.

Vedika had arrived just before dawn, her train delayed by landslides in the Western Ghats. Her mother met her at the gate with a wet dupatta around her head and sandalwood paste on her wrists. They didn’t say much. They rarely did during this visit—her father’s barsi had a kind of solemn choreography that didn’t permit digressions. A priest came. Offerings were made. Rice was pressed into small leaf bowls. Incense coiled its way up into the wooden beams of the veranda.

After the rituals, her mother went to lie down, her eyes red from lack of sleep. Vedika wandered the house, absently opening cupboards and drawers, pulled by something she couldn’t name. In her old room—still stacked with schoolbooks and rusting trophies—she found the diary.

It was cloth-bound, a dusky maroon, its edges worn smooth. Her name was written inside the cover in a looping, adolescent hand: Vedika Tiwari, Class 9A. She sat cross-legged on the floor, spine curved in the familiar shape of return, and turned the pages.

The handwriting grew neater after the first few entries—then messier, more urgent. Notes about classes, movies she’d liked, a friend’s betrayal in lunch break. Then she noticed it: a tear.

Several pages had been removed—cleanly, precisely, as if done with a blade. The stitching had loosened where they once lived. The next entry jumped two weeks ahead, skipping something she now vaguely remembered writing.

She shut the diary and pressed her palm against its cover, as if willing memory into coherence.

She had been fourteen. It was summer. The power cuts came every evening like clockwork, and her father would fan her mother while she read aloud from Gita Press. That was the year she had become friends with Shreya Mishra. Shreya who wore two plaits tied with purple ribbons. Shreya who smelled of lifebuoy and roasted peanuts. Shreya who, one evening, had touched Vedika’s shoulder in the corridor while laughing—and the touch had lingered like light filtered through a window, unexpected and warm.

Vedika had written about her. Just once, in careful, coded words. A few sentences of wonder and fear. She remembered writing: When I think of her, I feel something that doesn’t have a name.

And then, days later, the pages were gone.

She hadn’t asked her mother. She hadn’t needed to. The silence in the house had thickened. Her diary was returned to its shelf, untouched, but altered. From then on, she wrote differently. She censored herself before anyone else could. The entries became about school events, prayer lists, aspirations to become a writer “someday.”

In Berlin, years later, when Anagha had asked her when she’d first realized, Vedika had said: “I don’t remember.” But that hadn’t been true. She remembered everything. The diary. The touch. The fear.

Now, decades later, she held the red book again in her hands like a confession she had tried to forget.

Downstairs, her mother called out—tea was ready.

Vedika didn’t move.

She thought of Anagha, of how even that relationship had been lived between omissions. How queerness had always, in her life, existed around things—around glances, silences, photographs hidden in drawers. And now, even grief felt like it had no safe container. It leaked sideways, into memories of other wounds, older absences.

She looked around her childhood room. The shelves still held dolls she had stopped playing with at twelve. The bedspread still bore a floral print faded by sunlight. But the girl who once slept here had known something she was not allowed to name, and in tearing those pages, that knowing had been delayed—not erased.

Outside, the sky had darkened. Rain again. The house smelled of wet clothes and tulsi leaves crushed underfoot.

Vedika placed the diary in her handbag. She would not leave it behind this time. She stood slowly, her limbs resisting the weight of so many returns.

She walked down to the kitchen, where her mother poured tea into steel tumblers.

“You found your old things?” her mother asked, without turning.

“Yes.”

“Throw away anything you don’t need,” her mother said. “No use carrying old junk.”

Vedika took the tumbler, its rim warm against her fingers.

“You know,” she said gently, “some things have finally started making sense.”

Her mother didn’t ask what she meant. And for once, Vedika didn’t fill the silence.

Pune, Mid-July 2025

The monsoon had settled fully now. Every morning, the city woke to softened skies and leaves slick with water. In Vedika’s apartment, the ceiling dripped faintly in one corner, forming a small, predictable pool she now placed an old brass bowl beneath.

She had returned from Ujjain two days ago. The diary sat on her desk, unopened, but no longer hidden. She didn’t feel the urgency to reread it. What needed remembering had already returned.

The third room persisted as it always had: door open, window shuttered, the scent of disuse faint but insistent. It had been intended, originally, as a guest room. Then a study. Then nothing. In the months since she moved back to Pune, she had entered it only a handful of times. Once to store a canvas. Once to hide a sweater that still smelled faintly of Anagha’s perfume. Once just to stand inside it, uncertain of what she hoped to find.

Now, she opened the door fully.

Dust swirled briefly as light spilled in. She coughed once, then stepped inside, barefoot. The room was plain—pale walls, a single shelf, a window that overlooked a patch of bougainvillea growing from the neighbour’s garden.

She began cleaning slowly. First the shelf, then the corners. She moved the canvas into the hall and pulled a cotton rug from the cupboard. She wiped the window with an old T-shirt. The work was quiet, almost meditative. When she finished, she sat cross-legged in the center of the room and closed her eyes.

There was no plan. No intent to turn it into anything. Only a willingness to stop waiting.

A soft knock on the front door broke the stillness.

Rutuja stood outside, holding a paper bag of modaks and a book wrapped in newspaper.

“My Aai insisted on the sweets,” she said, stepping inside. “The book is mine. I finished it last night and thought you’d like it.”

Vedika took it wordlessly. Rutuja’s fingers softly but briefly touched hers, and neither of them moved away.

“Tea?” Vedika asked.

Rutuja nodded, following her to the kitchen.

They stood together as the water boiled, their movements unhurried. Outside, the rain had returned, not with force, but in a gentle, steady rhythm. The third room’s door remained open now, visible from where they stood. The apartment felt altered, not in shape, but in tone—less like a place of waiting, more like one becoming.

“I cleared that room,” Vedika said quietly, without turning. “Not sure what it is yet.”

Rutuja leaned against the wall, watching her. “Maybe it doesn’t need to be anything right away.”

Vedika turned. “Maybe.”

They carried their tea into the living room. The diary sat on the side table. Rutuja noticed it but didn’t ask. Instead, she pulled a blanket over her knees and curled into the armchair like she belonged there.

It occurred to Vedika that no one had done that in years—arriving just like that, without any reason, without any agenda. Perhaps presence itself could be a sort of answer.

Later, as the rain softened to mist and the city lit up faintly in the distance, Vedika walked to the third room one more time. She placed the diary on the shelf, not hidden, not displayed.

She would not fill it with new entries. Nor tear out any more pages.

The room remained spare. Empty, but not void. It smelled faintly of dust, rain, and ginger.

That night, Vedika slept with the door open. To the third room. To the rain. To what might come.

***

Shriraj More is an educator by profession and holds an M.Sc. in Physics from Mumbai University along with a B.Ed. in Science and Environmental Education. He has over a decade of experience teaching physics and environmental science. In 2025, his novel Gleam from the Abyss was published, which blends scientific curiosity with speculative fiction. His writing often draws from the intersections of education, ecology, memory, and emotional interiority.