As a child, I always felt the letter ‘ऋ’ (ri) in the Hindi alphabet was the loneliest because we were taught it stood for just the sagacious word, Rishi , always depicted as an old man with a white beard sitting beneath a tree, eyes closed, and I assumed that this was where the world of ‘ ri ’ ended.

Then, in our matriculation syllabus , came the poem ‘ Kanyadaan ,’ a mother advising her daughter, “Be a girl, but never look like one.” Rituraj was its poet , and in those hot afternoons in Bharatpur, ‘ri’ came to stand for him. On Monday, that name returned as news. Rituraj is no more.

He was born in Bharatpur on Vasant Panchami, the festival that heralds spring, and was fittingly named Rituraj, after the king of seasons. Ironically, the man named after spring spent his life writing in defense of autumn, the falling leaves that drop unnoticed and nobody counts.

A stubborn presence for decades, he died on October 26, aged 86, and his silence has settled over the courtyard of Hindi poetry.…