Sudipta Sen
The Pause Between Verses
The morning fog had lifted just enough to let the sun trace the old Mughal arches of Lodhi Gardens. It was January in Delhi, the kind of cold that didn’t bite but lingered, like a half-finished conversation. Rituporna wrapped her shawl tighter around her and sipped from the paper cup of lukewarm coffee she’d picked up from the small kiosk outside Gate No. 3.
She wasn’t here for solitude, not really. She came to watch. Watch the joggers who ran like they were escaping something. Watch the couples who thought ruins made their love eternal. Watch the city in slow motion.
But this morning, she wasn’t alone in her rhythm.
He was there again — the man from the IIC seminar last weekend. She remembered his voice from the Q&A session, measured and soft, not aggressive like most others. He had stood at the back of the room, asking something about the politics of forgetting Partition literature, quoting Saadat Hasan Manto and Amrita Pritam in the same breath.
She had turned slightly to look at him then — just a glance. His words had stayed. Now, here he was again, sitting on the stone bench near the tomb with the carved jharokha windows, reading Poetry of the Last Bengali Decades.
Coincidence? Delhi was big, but academics orbited in smaller circles.
She hesitated before walking over. She didn’t plan it, but maybe that was the nature of these things.
“You seem to haunt my favorite places,” she said with a small smile.
He looked up slowly, a flicker of surprise in his eyes, then recognition. “You’re the one who questioned the definition of ‘melancholia’ in postcolonial narratives.”
“Guilty,” she said, sitting beside him.
“I’m Arijit,” he offered, as though this were the start of something small, not significant.
“Rituporna.”
The silence after the names wasn’t awkward. It had shape. It was a pause that knew it was necessary.
They talked.
About why Delhi had so many tombs and so few poets left. About how love in literature always seemed more honest than love in life. He said he found Delhi’s winters poetic; she said she found them forgiving. They both smiled at that.
She noticed he didn’t wear a ring. But his left wrist bore a faint tan line where one must’ve rested once.
He asked about her work — feminist readings of Tagore, postmodern narrative structures. She asked about his — political thought, memory theory, Kolkata’s academic circles he no longer missed. He had been divorced for three years, he said casually, as though he was used to neutralizing the weight of it.
She didn’t mention her husband. Not out of shame — just irrelevance. In that moment, it didn’t matter. She wasn’t a wife. She was a woman in a warm shawl, talking to a man in a crumpled jacket about poetry, sitting on cold stone.
When the sun rose higher, he closed the book.
“Shall we walk?” he asked.
She nodded.
They moved through the garden’s red gravel paths. She noticed he didn’t walk too fast. He wasn’t the kind who filled silence unnecessarily. She liked that. It had been a long time since someone walked with her, instead of just beside her.
Near the butterfly garden, he paused and said, “You always seem to know where to sit in silence.”
“You always seem to know when not to interrupt it.”
She looked at her watch, suddenly aware of the time, of life waiting outside this quiet pocket of Delhi. Her son’s online class, the pile of essays to mark, Sandeep’s calls about groceries — life was tidy, structured.
This moment was not.
“Same place next Saturday?” he asked, not presumptuous.
She nodded, then hesitated. “Yes. But not at nine. Come at ten. The fog’s kinder then.”
He smiled. It wasn’t wide or showy. But it reached his eyes.
She walked away first, not because she had somewhere to be, but because it felt like the right thing to do. To leave a moment intact before it becomes too aware of itself.
As she stepped out of the garden gate, the cold didn’t feel the same anymore. Delhi still carried its grey, but her breath felt warmer somehow.
And in her pocket, she realized, she still held the empty paper cup — fingers curled around it like a memory not ready to be thrown away.
The Coffee Always Cools Too Fast
The café was tucked inside one of those narrow lanes in Shahpur Jat — the kind that didn’t want to be found, but knew the right people would. Its wooden signboard hung a little lopsided. Inside, there were books instead of menus on the walls, and faded blue chairs that looked like they’d heard too many confessions.
Rituporna was already there, sitting at a corner table near the window. A faint stream of sunlight crept in, warming her left hand as it rested on a paperback of Kamala Das. She had ordered a cappuccino but hadn’t touched it. The foam had flattened.
Arijit entered quietly. No dramatic glance around. No wave. Just the subtle acknowledgement of eyes meeting — like two people who weren’t strangers anymore, but still figuring out the rules of this new space between them.
“Hope I’m not too late,” he said, pulling out the chair opposite her.
“You’re right on time,” she replied, her voice soft, not rehearsed. “Though the coffee’s lost its courage.”
He smiled. “Coffee always does. Especially when it’s waiting for something to happen.”
They didn’t dive into conversation immediately. The silence between them had shape — like an unwritten poem they were both scared to ruin. Around them, the café hummed softly: spoons against cups, a girl whispering on the phone, someone laughing too loudly two tables away.
Arijit finally said, “I googled your paper on gendered loss in post-Partition literature.”
“Oh?” she raised an eyebrow.
“I didn’t agree with all of it,” he added, and then leaned back. “But it made me think. That’s rare these days.”
She smiled. It was an academic compliment, but one layered with curiosity. “I’d be worried if you agreed with everything. That would make you boring.”
He chuckled. “And you don’t like boring?”
“I live with boring,” she said, then immediately regretted how easily it had slipped out.
He didn’t flinch. Just nodded gently. “We all do. In different forms.”
The second coffee arrived, warmer than the first. They talked about growing up in cities that change faster than you do. About how Delhi had a way of turning memory into architecture — tombs, gates, markets named after things no longer there. How silence in Delhi felt different than silence in Kolkata — heavier, but lonelier.
“I used to walk around Connaught Place with my college friends,” Rituporna said, stirring her coffee out of habit. “We thought we were invincible. Now I only go when there’s parking.”
“That’s the price of growing up,” he replied. “You trade magic for practicality. And then spend the rest of your life trying to buy it back.”
They laughed — not the kind that draws attention, but the kind you remember later.
There was something about the way Arijit listened. He didn’t interrupt. He didn’t nod out of politeness. He followed threads — even the loose, frayed ones.
“Do you think it’s wrong,” she asked suddenly, “to want conversations that go nowhere? That don’t need to lead to anything… definitive?”
“No,” he said after a pause. “Sometimes, that’s the only honest kind.”
She didn’t respond. But her fingers stopped stirring the coffee.
As they walked out into the early afternoon sun, the lane felt narrower than before. They didn’t touch. They didn’t say anything dramatic. But the space between them had changed.
“Do you usually let people in this easily?” he asked, not with accusation, but wonder.
“No,” she said. “But I don’t think you knocked either.”
They reached the end of the lane. The city roared back around them — cars, vendors, noise. Delhi never waited for anything.
“I should get a cab,” she said.
“Or we could walk for five more minutes,” he offered. “Let the coffee settle.”
She nodded.
And just like that, they turned left instead of goodbye.
In a city full of detours, sometimes the smallest ones are the hardest to forget.
Rain on Old Stone
It had started with a message that said:
“There’s a ruin I want you to meet.”
No emojis. No explanation. Just Arijit, four words, and a location pin near Mehrauli Archaeological Park.
Rituporna had hesitated for an hour before replying:
“Only if it doesn’t talk back.”
She arrived late. Not on purpose, but perhaps with the subconscious belief that if something was meant to shift the axis of her quiet life, it could wait.
The sky had already begun its slow descent into greyness. A late February rain had crept over the city — not a storm, just a fine drizzle, the kind that didn’t chase people indoors but softened the world’s edges.
She found Arijit near the Jamali Kamali mosque, under an old neem tree, hands in his pockets, a folded umbrella untouched beside him. He turned when he heard her footsteps on the gravel, and smiled.
“You came,” he said, as if it were a question.
“I was curious about this ruin you’re on speaking terms with,” she said, pulling her dupatta over her head to shield from the soft rain.
They walked in silence for a while, the drizzle wrapping around them like a fragile veil. The red sandstone glistened. Moss clung to the edges of arches like memories no one wanted to clean.
“Do you come here often?” she asked.
“Only when I want the city to forget I exist,” he replied.
She nodded. “I understand that.”
They wandered deeper, past broken tombs and forgotten stairways. The air smelled of wet earth and fading time. Arijit paused near a low dome with flaking blue tiles and gestured for her to sit on a stone ledge.
“You know,” he began, “in all the places I’ve lived — Kolkata, Ahmedabad, even London briefly — I never found a silence quite like Delhi’s. It doesn’t hush you. It listens.”
She watched him as he spoke, his profile soft in the grey light. “Do you ever miss your marriage?” she asked quietly, surprising both of them.
He exhaled. Not sighing. Releasing. “I miss the idea of it more than the reality. The comfort of familiarity. But also, the trap of it.”
She didn’t speak. Her own marriage was a threadbare shawl — it still warmed her, but the holes were growing too wide to ignore.
A crow cried from the far edge of the park. Rainwater trickled down a carved niche in the wall beside them.
“I feel like I’m always two people,” she said finally. “The one who teaches Tagore and Auden, speaks about love like it’s a concept. And the one who wakes up at 3 a.m. and stares at the ceiling, wondering when her voice stopped sounding like her own.”
Arijit turned to her. His eyes didn’t pity. They understood.
He reached out — not impulsively, not with expectation. Just gently. His fingers brushed hers, resting on the wet stone between them. It was barely a touch. But it echoed louder than a thousand words.
She didn’t pull away.
They sat like that — not holding hands, not lovers yet, but two people who had accidentally stumbled into the quietest truth they’d ever known.
A gust of wind swept through the trees, bringing with it the faint scent of eucalyptus and something older, something unnamed.
“We should go,” she said softly, though neither of them moved.
“Do we have to?” he asked, and the question lingered like the rain — not heavy, not demanding, just there.
Eventually, they stood. Not like a goodbye. More like an agreement — this moment had happened. It would stay with them, with or without continuation.
As they walked back to the entrance, their shoulders brushed once, and neither apologized.
The ruin said nothing.
And yet, it had witnessed everything.
The House on the Third Floor
It was a flat she had all but forgotten.
Tucked behind an iron gate at the edge of Jangpura Extension, third floor, no lift — a relic of a time when friendships were made over shared cups of chai and whispered secrets during power cuts. Her college roommate Mira had left for Canada years ago, but the apartment remained — empty, yet intact. The keys still hung in Rituporna’s drawer, under old receipts and unused incense sticks.
When she called Mira out of the blue and asked if she could use it for “a few quiet afternoons,” Mira hadn’t asked questions. Old friends don’t.
The house smelled like dust and dried neem leaves. Pale blue walls, a cane chair with a torn cushion, a half-used bottle of perfume from 2011. The curtains still carried the scent of last winter’s Delhi fog.
She opened the windows. The hum of the city spilled in. Distant horns. Children playing. A pressure cooker whistle from a neighbour’s kitchen.
She texted him:
“Jangpura. Flat 3C. Third floor. Don’t ring the bell. Just knock.”
He replied with a single word.
“Okay.”
She changed her kurta, not because she wanted to look different, but because the one she wore smelled too much like home. She brushed her hair, left it loose. No kajal. No earrings. Just her.
The knock came at 4:07 p.m.
He stepped in quietly, carrying nothing but a soft smile and an unspoken question.
“You really trust me?” he asked, looking around the modest living room, as if trying to memorize the details.
“I don’t know if it’s trust,” she said, locking the door. “Maybe it’s just… wanting something that doesn’t come with a label.”
He didn’t ask what the place meant to her. He just walked to the window, glanced at the rusted grill, and said, “It’s quiet. Like someone paused time here.”
She poured two glasses of water. It felt strange not offering tea or coffee, as if this place refused the rituals of normal hospitality. This wasn’t a visit. It was a pause — just like the flat.
They sat on the floor, cushions under them, a low table between. No fan. Just the slow breeze of a late Delhi afternoon filtering through.
“I didn’t call you here for anything… dramatic,” she said.
“I didn’t come expecting anything,” he replied.
But there it was — the space between expectation and truth. A fragile line, already crossed in silent agreement.
He pulled out a book from his bag. Amrita Pritam. Raseedi Ticket. He began reading softly, in Hindi, his voice low but warm. She leaned back, eyes closed, letting the words ripple through the still air.
At some point, his hand rested near hers on the floor. She didn’t move. Neither did he.
The poem ended.
“I used to think love was something you fell into,” he said. “Now I think it’s something you lean towards. Slowly. Carefully. Without knowing when exactly you crossed the line.”
Rituporna looked at him then. Not like a woman seeking validation. But like someone who had finally found a mirror that didn’t distort her.
“I don’t want to destroy anything,” she said.
“Neither do I.”
She leaned forward, and their foreheads touched. Not a kiss. Not yet. Just the contact of two people who had run out of reasons to pretend.
The moment held.
And then they both pulled back, as if the air had grown too loud.
He stood first. “Should I leave?”
“Not yet,” she said.
So he stayed. They didn’t talk much after that. Just sat near the window, watching the streetlight flicker on in the evening haze. The silence was not tense. It was full.
She walked him down at 6:30. No hug. No promises.
As he reached the gate, he looked up at her one last time.
She didn’t wave. But she didn’t look away either.
Inside the flat, the Amrita Pritam book still lay open. The wind fluttered its pages — as if the room had memorized the verse and was reading it back to itself.
Yellow Light, Blue Walls
The light changed before anything else.
Rituporna noticed it first — how the golden glow of afternoon entering through the half-drawn curtains made the blue walls of the room look gentler, warmer. Almost like a watercolor that someone had spilled chai on, but didn’t regret. It softened everything — the cracks in the paint, the dust on the windowsill, even the space between them.
Arijit arrived just after four again, holding two small packets of samosas from a corner stall. No grand gestures. Just two people who had started filling time instead of watching it pass.
They sat cross-legged on the cane mat, the samosas between them, two glasses of water again — still no tea, as if the flat had silently banned anything too ceremonial.
“I used to come here when I had nowhere else to go,” Rituporna said. “During fights with my parents. Or when I needed to feel like I was someone more than what everyone expected me to be.”
“And now?” he asked, gently.
She looked up. “Now I come here to feel… honest. Not right. Not wrong. Just real.”
He didn’t answer. But his eyes didn’t leave hers.
The silence began to hum again — not empty, but thick with things that had not yet been said.
After they ate, she got up and walked to the small bedroom. She didn’t ask him to follow. She didn’t need to.
He came in a minute later, slowly, pausing at the doorframe. It was a simple room. A thin mattress on the floor. A faded curtain. A lone bookshelf with a cracked spine of Neruda’s collected works.
She stood by the window, arms crossed — not nervous, not seductive. Just waiting for him to arrive fully into the moment.
He didn’t touch her at first. He stood beside her, close enough to feel her breath shift.
“You don’t have to,” he said.
“I already have,” she whispered.
His hand brushed her wrist. She turned, and he kissed her — not urgently, but like someone who had rehearsed this in his mind a hundred times and was now afraid to ruin it.
They moved like they were rediscovering themselves — not young, not reckless, but human. Each touch was slow, each breath deep, as if they both knew they were not trying to escape their lives, but to feel them more clearly.
After, they lay side by side on the thin mattress. No sheets. No plans.
“You’ll ask me later if I regret this,” she said.
“No,” he replied. “I won’t. Because I already know you don’t.”
She turned to him, her cheek resting on her arm. “How?”
“Because your voice sounded like it belonged to you again.”
Outside, the streetlight had turned on, painting the walls yellow. Their shadows flickered on the ceiling — two outlines overlapping gently, not perfectly.
They didn’t talk about what came next.
They didn’t need to.
Because for that evening — just that one — they had stepped outside the timeline of their lives. And in a borrowed room with blue walls, they had remembered what it meant to feel something without apology.
Things We Don’t Say at Dinner
The dinner table had always been rectangular — four chairs, one for each member of the Sen household.
Rituporna sat at her usual spot, diagonally across from Sandeep, while their son, Neil, scrolled through his phone with one hand and absentmindedly poked at the rajma with the other.
Outside the windows, Nizamuddin East was quiet — too posh for noise, too old-money to scream.
“Did you hear about the new Humanities Dean?” Sandeep asked between bites. “Apparently, he’s ex-FTII. Bit of a radical.”
Rituporna nodded, chewing slowly. “Saw the email.”
“Bet you two will get along,” he said with a small chuckle. “You’re good with the intellectual types.”
She managed a smile, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes.
Everything was familiar — the blue pottery bowl for the salad, the light stain on the tablecloth from last week’s dal, the fan that made a soft rattle no one bothered fixing anymore.
It should’ve been comforting.
It wasn’t.
It felt like she had stepped into a memory — one that repeated itself night after night, with minor edits.
Neil looked up briefly. “Ma, I need the college consent form signed. I’ll leave it on your desk.”
“Okay,” she said, clearing her throat. “You’ve applied for the April internship?”
“Yeah. Hoping for the one in Bangalore.”
Sandeep looked pleased. “Good. Engineering exposure will do him good. This writing nonsense—” he turned to her, half-smiling, “—thank God he didn’t inherit that from you.”
She laughed lightly. It was the sound of someone playing an old recording of herself.
After dinner, she rinsed her plate and left it to dry without wiping. Her movements were precise, habitual. Efficient. The kind that doesn’t draw attention.
Later, when the house went quiet and the lights dimmed to that soft glow they always used after 10, she stood by the window in their bedroom, staring out at the colony park below.
Sandeep lay in bed, reading news on his tablet, occasionally sighing at the headlines but not speaking.
Rituporna watched a woman walk her dog along the footpath. The same woman, same time, every night — collared Labrador, tired gait, husband following behind, speaking on the phone.
Routine, wrapped in velvet.
She wondered if they were happy. Or just in sync.
“You’ve been quiet lately,” Sandeep said without looking up.
“Just work,” she replied. “The semester’s been heavier than usual.”
He nodded. “You should take that writing retreat in Mussoorie. Mira keeps asking, right?”
“Maybe,” she said. “I might.”
He returned to his screen. “You deserve a break. Just don’t come back with a dozen notebooks and no time for dinner.”
She smiled faintly, not because it was funny, but because it would end the conversation.
When he turned off the light and rolled away to sleep, she stayed at the window, her reflection barely visible in the glass.
For a second, she imagined telling him everything.
The afternoons in Jangpura. The taste of samosas still on her tongue. Arijit’s hand on her back as she fell asleep beside him on that thin mattress. The way her own name had sounded when he said it — slow, deliberate, like it mattered.
But the words didn’t come. They never did.
Instead, she whispered to the glass:
“I wasn’t unhappy. I just wasn’t whole.”
And the city — her city — blinked back at her in a thousand scattered lights, not judging, not forgiving, just watching.
Like it always did.
A Winter Without Promises
Spring was supposed to be a short sigh between Delhi’s punishing extremes — but this year, it clung longer. The bougainvillaea spilled over terrace walls like secrets that refused to stay contained, and the evenings lingered in a pale lavender light.
For Rituporna and Arijit, time had started to fold inward — not linear anymore. Their meetings weren’t planned as much as felt. Some happened with a message; others didn’t need one. She would find herself walking into the third-floor flat in Jangpura with the same ease she walked into her college lecture halls.
He had left a spare key under the blue flowerpot.
One afternoon, she arrived early and found a note on the table:
Back in 20 minutes. There’s leftover biryani in the fridge — unless you’d rather wait for me.
– A
She sat down, folded the note, and placed it beside her glasses. Then she stood at the window and let her eyes rest on the city — hazy rooftops, laundry lines, distant horns. Delhi breathed its hot-cold rhythm, uncaring but never absent.
When he returned, he smelled like sunshine and ink.
“I was at Daryaganj,” he said, putting down a cloth bag full of old books. “Got lost in that smell of dusty paper and secondhand ambition.”
She smiled. “Sounds like your version of therapy.”
He kissed her forehead — a gesture so tender it disarmed her. “You’re my version of therapy.”
That evening, she cooked. Just khichuri and fried begun. Simple. Comforting.
They sat on the floor, legs crossed, sharing the food from one plate. There was something childlike about eating like that. No formality. No performance.
“What happens when you go back?” she asked suddenly.
He paused, his spoon mid-air. “Go back where?”
“Kolkata. Or… somewhere that’s not here.”
Arijit sighed. “The university wants me to return in June. They’ve offered a full-time position. Head of the department.”
She stared at him. “You didn’t mention this.”
“I wasn’t sure if it mattered.”
“It does.”
He put the spoon down. “To you?”
She didn’t answer right away. The question wasn’t simple. It carried all the weight of what they hadn’t named.
“I don’t want to be your reason to stay,” she said finally. “But I’m not ready to be something you leave behind, either.”
“I’m not trying to leave you behind.”
“But you will.”
The silence that followed was not comfortable. It wasn’t cruel either. It was just… real. And that made it hurt.
He reached for her hand. “Rituporna, I didn’t come into your life looking for something. But I found something I didn’t know I was missing.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s yours to keep,” she whispered.
“I know.”
They sat like that, two grown people who had run out of places to put their tenderness. The food turned cold. The moment didn’t.
Later, as they lay on the mattress with the fan spinning above them like a lazy eye, she traced the lines on his palm.
“Have you ever believed in fate?” she asked.
“No. But I believe in timing. And how often it’s wrong.”
She closed her eyes.
That night, they didn’t make love. They just held each other, not like lovers, but like people standing on the edge of something too beautiful to name.
The room smelled of turmeric, paperbacks, and skin. And outside, Delhi’s spring held its breath — as if it, too, feared what would come next.
Love Letters That Don’t End in Forever
There are things we write but never send.
Letters that stay folded in drawers, at the bottom of bags, in the margins of half-used notebooks. Rituporna began one such letter on a Tuesday morning, long before dawn, while the city still slept under its summer blanket of dust.
She sat at the dining table, the light above dimmed, a cup of tea gone cold beside her. The pen moved without hesitation. There was no drama in her hand, just release.
Dear Arijit,
If I were a braver woman, I’d give you this in person.
But then again, I’ve learned that some truths are better when they remain private — like prayers whispered at a shrine with no god.
I don’t regret anything.
Not the first walk, not the ruined tombs, not the books, not your breath against my collarbone in a stranger’s flat.
But I do regret not knowing how to end this.
We were a sentence with too many commas and no full stop.
You once said love is something you lean into, not fall into.
I leaned. But I also looked back.
And the world behind me hadn’t disappeared.
My husband.
My son.
My life.
Not perfect, but present.
You made me feel like myself again — not someone’s wife or someone’s mother. Just Rituporna. That’s not a small thing. That’s everything.
But maybe what we had isn’t meant for this world. Maybe it belongs to another lifetime, one where people are freer, or younger, or less careful.
Please forgive me if I walk away without fanfare.
I think we’ve said everything we were meant to — in silences, in touches, in the way your eyes softened every time I turned toward you.
Thank you for that.
Always,
R.
She never gave it to him.
The next time they met, it was a Sunday afternoon. They met at the India Habitat Centre, on the grass patch outside the Stein auditorium, pretending it was for coffee, pretending it was casual.
Arijit wore white linen and carried a book he never opened. She came in a kurta he had once said made her look “like poetry sitting by a window.”
They talked about a new film, a mutual colleague’s retirement, the weather turning too quickly.
Then he said, quietly, “I’m leaving next Friday.”
“I know,” she said.
They didn’t say what happens now, because both knew the answer.
He looked at her — not pleading, not hopeful — just seeing her. All of her. And then he reached into his bag and handed her a small, unwrapped paperback. Inside the cover, just one line in his handwriting:
“You reminded me how it feels to be read without being revised.”
She closed the book, placed her hand over it. “You’ll be okay,” she said.
“So will you.”
Neither stood. Neither walked away first. They just sat, holding space for something that was ending, not in ruin, but in recognition.
When she finally rose, he did too. They didn’t hug.
Instead, their fingers touched for the last time — like bookmarks marking a page neither of them would reread, but would never forget.
And then, they walked in opposite directions, not hurried, not broken.
Just human.
THE END
