India, Feb. 6 -- Growing up the only child of a single parent in Udaipur, Priyanka Sarkar remembers playing games she made up herself. As a young adult, she says, a "quiet ache" of isolation hovered at the margins of her life.

Then the pandemic hit. She spent two years in Gurugram, "a city of loneliness", caring for an ailing uncle. "Loneliness, at this point, became an intense, inescapable feeling," says Sarkar, 42.

Once the world opened up, she began working as an editorial consultant and translator with Sahitya Akademi in Delhi. But the echoes of this other, emptier world stayed with her.

Finally, in 2023, she approached the editor and translator Semeen Ali, then an editorial assistant at the Akademi, to ask if she would like to put...