Her childhood moved with her father’s government postings—Ahmednagar, Ahmedabad, Nagpur, Mumbai. “My childhood was very cheerful,” she says. “That kind of pure happiness I never really got later in life.” Poetry entered early—Marathi first, English hesitantly. By sixteen, she could speak English, but without confidence. “I wasn’t fluent. But I was never scared of learning.” Her curiosity for languages deepened when she began studying German at Max Mueller Bhavan, Pune. It was there that she met the man who would later become her husband. The decision to learn German was practical at first, but it quietly altered the course of...