The Crossword War

Every morning, the coffee house on Elgin Road put out one newspaper, and the newspaper had one crossword, and for three years the crossword had belonged to Professor Ila Sen, retired, sharp as vinegar, who solved it in pen at the corner table between 7:10 and 7:40.

Then the new doctor started coming in at 6:55.

The first morning she found the crossword finished, Ila assumed it was an accident. The second morning, she assumed it was a crime. The third morning she arrived at 6:50, met a man in his sixties with a doctor's terrible handwriting reaching for her newspaper, and said, "Sir, in this establishment, we have an order of things."

"I retired last month," said Dr. Bose. "I have no order of anything."

War, then.

They tried arriving earlier and earlier until the owner, a peaceful man, found them both outside his shutters at 6:15 and made a ruling worthy of a high court: one crossword, two pens, alternate clues, any dispute settled by the dictionary he kept under the till. He thought this would end it. It institutionalised it.

For two years, seven days a week, they solved it together and called it against each other. They kept score in a notebook that began as evidence and slowly became a diary — 14 across, she got 'ephemeral' before I finished my sentence. Unbearable woman. Same time tomorrow. They learned each other the way you learn a co-solver: that she went quiet when her son didn't call, that his wife had died the same year he retired and Tuesdays were the hard days, that "one more clue" meant stay.

The morning Ila was in the hospital for her knee, Dr. Bose sat at the corner table and did not touch the crossword. He had the newspaper delivered to her ward instead, untouched, with two pens and a note: "Against the rules to start without you. Hurry up. The dictionary misses the arguments."

She was back in eleven days. He'd saved every crossword. They did all eleven in one long morning, and somewhere around the eighth puzzle, her hand stopped moving and she said, without looking up, "You could have solved these alone."

"I tried," he said. "Couldn't think of a single word."

Nobody at the coffee house can tell you exactly when the war ended, or whether it counts as ending if both sides won. But the corner table seats two now, permanently, and on the notebook's last filled page there is only one line, in her pen, in his defence: 7 down, six letters: what this is. She got it first. She always does.

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