Sometime in 2016, taking inspiration from the typographical month on twitter, Korak started writing a series of anaphorics called Characters of grief. He went as far as the letter B when I jumped in, an uninvited but not unwelcome collaborator. I took on the mantle to finish the series as Korak left Mumbai for New York, Columbia’s Chemistry PhD program being a project much more worthy of his talents. I slowly populated the series, experimenting with the meter, rhyme, and atmosphere of the poems before three years whisked by and I found myself facing The PhD Project at Santa Barbara. I gladly passed the baton to Kireeti who, with his natural calligrapher’s hand and lyrical photographer’s vocabulary, not only took it up but ran with it. The series was not meant to be completed for the sake of completion, a clear unuttered understanding between us three. We write these poems to contain our grief in lines of 5-4-5-5, ABXB, so that they can find a form and become finite.