# Silent Storm: 1 The telegram arrived on a Tuesday morning when the city was still wrapped in the grey remnants of night. Rahul held it in his hands—that thin slip of paper that would later seem to him like the hinge on which his entire life swung open. His mother was in the kitchen. He could hear her humming, that old tune she'd carried with her from her own mother's house, the way some women carry a silver bangle or a recipe. The sound was incongruous now, set against the silence the telegram demanded. He didn't go to her immediately. Instead, he sat by the window of the front room and watched the city wake. The milkman's bicycle passed. A woman in a green sari hurried past with a child. An old man swept the pavement with a broom that seemed older than he was. Everything moved as it always did, as if the world didn't know that his had stopped. When he finally went to the kitchen, his mother was making tea. The kettle was just beginning to whisper. "There's a telegram," he said. She turned to him, and he saw the exact moment her mind changed what his words meant. Her hands, which had been reaching for the sugar, fell. The spoon she'd been holding clattered against the rim of a cup. "From who?" Her voice had become smaller, like something that had been left out in the rain. "Delhi," he said. "From Father's office." He handed her the slip of paper, and watched her read it—once, then again, as if the words might rearrange themselves into something more bearable the second time through. Her lips moved slightly as she read. That was what broke him: not her tears, which came later, but the way her lips moved silently, pronouncing words that would never be taken back. "When?" she whispered. "Three days ago," Rahul said. He didn't know how he knew. Perhaps it was written somewhere in that telegram. Perhaps it was simply that grief always arrives late, always finds you unprepared, always makes you feel as though you've been left behind. The kettle began to scream. Neither of them moved to turn off the gas.

Midnight has come and gone. It must be around one, maybe half past. The ceiling fan turns—that same monotonous, weary sound, as if it too wanted to sleep but no one has switched it off. From the next room, someone's snoring drifts in, muffled; outside somewhere, a dog barks in fits and starts—that kind of night-barking that deepens solitude. The pillow is damp with sweat. A mosquito lands on the skin, flees, lands again.

And in all of this, phone light falls across a face—bluish-white, harsh light. Like a wound opened in darkness. In that light, someone is writing.

What is being written? A letter? No. A confession? Not quite that either. A prayer? Perhaps. There are words that don't fit into any such frame—just as there are tears that never fall from the eyes, but collect instead into a lake inside the chest, pooling there for years on end, until someone throws a stone into those waters.

They are writing to someone to whom they could never fully explain how deep they have gone under. Maybe complete explanation isn't even possible. Jibanananda Das understood this—which is why in his poems meaning never quite reveals itself fully, only touches and passes on, and the reader sits with that touch lingering; knowing something happened, but when you try to say what, language stumbles.

Wittgenstein said, whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Beautiful words. But Wittgenstein was a philosopher, not a lover. A lover cannot stay silent. If they could, they wouldn't be a lover—they'd be a monk, or a stone.

Reality is a strange animal. It comes like someone throwing cold water on a sleeping face. The moment your eyes open, you see—the world is far less kind than your dream.

Standing within that reality, you understand: some people don't come into your life, they hold life itself. Camus wrote at the beginning of "The Myth of Sisyphus" that suicide is philosophy's one truly vital question—whether life is worth living, that's what matters. But Camus perhaps didn't know—or knew but wouldn't admit—that sometimes the answer to this question doesn't lie in any philosophy. It lies in the presence of a person. In a voice that simply says, I am here. That's all. And that single word becomes a door in the wall of darkness, through which a little light comes—not much, just a little. But a little is enough when you're in complete darkness.

Someone exists. One should give thanks for that—every day, with every breath. But gratitude falls into that category of words that, when you speak them, make you feel inadequate. As though someone were trying to fit an ocean into a teacup. The cup breaks. Water spills. The person stands there with wet hands—foolish.

If in this world you must be indebted to anyone—there is only one name. Every other name pales beside it. This is not an insult to them; it is simply the truth. Some truths sound like insults because we're used to equality. But love doesn't care for equality. It is tyrannical—the world's most beautiful tyranny.

They speak of studies. Repeatedly.

Some might think it's pressure. But pressure and rescue are different things. What pulls the hand of a drowning person—that's not pressure, it's saving a life. A lighthouse doesn't command a ship; it only shows—this way to shore. The rest is up to the ship.

What is it like to study in someone else's room—only those who endure it know. No roof of your own. No walls of your own. Not even a quiet corner where you could sit and cry a little, fold yourself up a bit. When you sit to study at night, you're afraid even to switch on the desk lamp—what if someone wakes, what if someone says, "What are you studying at this hour?" The deepest need of any human being is not food, not shelter—it is a place where they feel safe.

# Where Someone Will Hold You When You Fall

Where someone will hold you when you fall. What we call in plain speech—”shelter.” Not just a roof overhead, but a little warmth inside the chest. For those without it, the world itself is a battlefield. Every morning is a war. Every night merely a temporary ceasefire—and you close your eyes knowing you’ll have to fight again tomorrow.

Sitting in that battlefield with a book open—that’s not studying. That’s rebellion. I think of Dostoevsky’s man from underground, the one who says, I am a sick man…I am a spiteful man—insulted, cornered. And yet he won’t surrender his consciousness, he’ll cling to his suffering, because that is the proof of his existence, that is his rebellion. Opening a book while sitting in someone else’s house is much the same—silent, teeth clenched, one stubborn resolve: I will not be erased.

Ahead lie a thousand difficult moments. Poisonous words. Unbearable circumstances. They’ll come like floods—whether you want them or not. Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor, used to write in his diary: the obstacle becomes the way. Beautiful words. But Marcus was an emperor—an empire lay beneath his feet. For one with nothing beneath their feet, the obstacle isn’t a path; the obstacle *is* the entire map. And yet they walk. Why? Because someone told them, read, don’t stop, you can do it. That’s all. One sentence. And they believe it—they believe in that person more than they believe in themselves.

Gratitude. Such a small word. But what lies inside it?

If that person weren’t there? Just asking this question makes the chest constrict—the way your feet tingle standing at the edge of a cliff. What’s below? Darkness. That darkness from which people don’t return. Where identity gets erased—like ink in water: first there were letters, then a stain, then it fades, the paper is clean, and no one can tell what was written. People disappear this way too—not dead, but erased.

I think of Kafka’s story—Gregor Samsa wakes one day to find he’s become an insect. But the real suffering isn’t becoming an insect—the real suffering is that even after becoming one, he still loves his family, while they slowly begin to think of him as a burden. The sister who once brought him food—she’s the one who eventually says, it has to go. Not forgotten, exactly—deliberately removed. What could be crueler in this world? You’re loving, but the world has made you so insignificant that your love itself means nothing.

Only one thing saves you from becoming that insect—someone who still sees you as a human being. Someone who looks at you as if you are *something*—not worthless, not invisible, not an insect.

Outside, the dog is barking again. The phone’s battery is fading red. Time is passing. But the writing won’t stop.

What is she to them—even they don’t know exactly. How much they love her—there’s no capacity to write it. Rumi spent his whole life trying—to capture in language what burned in his chest for Shams. Thousands of ghazals, thousands of lines, drunk and spinning, breaking his pen over and over—and yet every poem ends with a hunger. As if to say: no, this isn’t all of it. I couldn’t capture all of it. Maybe no one ever will. Seven hundred years have passed, and no one has yet. That itself is proof—some feelings are larger than language, and language doesn’t feel shame at losing to them; rather, that is its finest defeat.

The mosquito came again. Landed on the neck. A slap. Dead. A little blood on the hand. Wiped it on the corner of the pillow. It’s through these small annoyances that great feelings flow—the world doesn’t set aside special time to write epics.

Among all this, that urge to come first in the exam—it wasn’t for themselves.

People will probably laugh reading this.

You think, midnight emotions, romantic self-deception, come morning you’ll realize how badly you’ve written. But the one writing knows—this is no exaggeration. Some truths sound like exaggeration, because we inhabit a world where suspicion of selflessness is the default; where if someone says “for you…”, the eyes and mind speak only—”spare me, what’s in it for you”.

Whether I came first or didn’t—that never crossed my mind. One image alone circled there. If I can’t do this—then what face will I have to show in front of them?

Psychologists might say it’s anxious attachment—the fear of loss so acute that a person will erode themselves just to hold on. They’d say it happens when childhood never offers safety. Perhaps they’re right. Perhaps the analysis is flawless. But dissect a flower and you see every cell—and the beauty? Beauty dies on the dissection table. Some things aren’t meant for analysis—they’re meant for feeling.

No, I misspoke. Analysis isn’t wrong—analysis is incomplete. A thing can be both—born from a wound of the mind, and beautiful. A broken bone, once set, grows stronger than before—is it worth less because it was broken?

To surrender to myself is for them to lose—this has burrowed so deep inside that it’s no longer a thought, it’s an instinct. Like breathing. Viktor Frankl used to say that everything can be taken from a person except one thing: the last freedom to choose one’s attitude toward any circumstance. Quoting Nietzsche, he’d say that whoever has a “why” for living can bear almost any “how”. That “why” here isn’t philosophy, isn’t ideology—it’s a face. A human being.