Encouraged by the tiny but meaningful spark that had returned to her writing, Padmavathi began to search for something more. She wanted to test her voice outside the confines of her notebook, to see if her words had the strength to stand in the open air. One late afternoon, she spotted a tattered flyer pinned to a corkboard near the college library:
"Mysore Writers' Circle — Weekly Meetings | Saturdays at 5pm | Everyone Welcome."
It sounded informal. Maybe even a little amateurish. But it also sounded like something she needed.
That Saturday, under a sky bruised with dusk and birds wheeling overhead, Padmavathi made her way to a small independent bookstore tucked behind the Devaraja Market. The back room, where the writing circle met, smelled of old paper and cardamom tea. A mix of people had already gathered: students, retirees, a schoolteacher, a software engineer who wrote speculative fiction in his spare time. The atmosphere was oddly comforting — not polished, but sincere.
When it came time for readings, Padmavathi nearly stayed silent. Her story was printed in trembling ink on two crumpled pages — a piece she'd written the night after the umbrella walk with Neha, raw and hesitant. Her hands shook slightly as she raised them.
"I… I wrote something," she said.
The room grew quiet.
As she read aloud, her voice wavered, catching on certain phrases. The story was intimate — a first-person piece about feeling unseen in a world that never stopped moving. It was woven with metaphors — clouds as silence, doorways as choices not taken, a yellow umbrella as unexpected kindness. When she finished, there was a pause. Her heartbeat thundered in the silence.
Then came the feedback.
A middle-aged woman with bright eyes spoke first: "That was beautiful. There's something very soft, very aching in your prose. I could feel it."
Someone else added, "Your imagery is strong — lyrical, even. I liked how you made the city into a kind of living character."
But then a man in his thirties, wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a shirt with ink stains on the cuff, leaned forward and said, "But I feel like… you're hiding behind your metaphors. You keep wrapping your pain in symbols. Why not just show us the truth? Say what you mean. Don't dress it up."
Padmavathi's cheeks flushed. For a moment, she wanted to disappear — to melt into the bookshelf behind her and never be seen again. She nodded mutely, unsure how to respond. The comment stung, not because it was cruel, but because it might have been right.
That night, back in her room, she didn't write immediately. She paced. She reread her story — first with defensiveness, then with curiosity, then with something resembling honesty.
Maybe she was hiding. Maybe the metaphors had become a shield.
So she tried again.
This time, she wrote plainly. She wrote about being lonely in a city of people, about sitting through lectures and feeling like an imposter, about hearing laughter in the hostel hallway and not knowing if it was meant for or about her. She didn't reach for poetry — just truth. And strangely, it came more easily than she expected.
Her hand moved steadily across the page, and when she finally stopped, the city outside had quieted into midnight.
She exhaled.
It wasn't perfect. It wasn't even pretty. But it was real. And that, for now, was enough.