I finished Tumhari Aarshi late in the evening, phone face down on the bed, the room lit by a single tube light that had begun to hum faintly. I remember my shoulders were slightly raised, as if I had been bracing myself without knowing why. When I closed the book, I didn’t move at once. Not because something had struck me dramatically—but because something had quietly refused to leave.   There was a pause. The kind that doesn’t ask for attention.   This book did not arrive lo

I noticed my breathing before I noticed the quiet.   Not the dramatic kind of silence that announces itself, but the softer one — the kind that slips in when the mind stops reaching for the next thing. I was sitting by the window. Late afternoon light. The book closed without ceremony. And for a few seconds, I didn’t feel the need to move.   That is how Fragrances Unseen stayed with me — not as a volume of poems, but as a lingering presence. Like something you smell after som