The Words I Kept

There is a version of me that spoke.

In that version, I sat beside my father in the last ordinary week before the world collapsed into the clinical, the irreversible and I said the thing I had been rehearsing since I was twelve. That I was proud of him. That I understood, now, why he was always tired. That I had been watching him my entire life, cataloguing his silences, and I had finally decoded them: he loved us in the only language exhaustion had left him.

I did not speak.

I was seventeen and I believed there was time. I believed the future was a room I could always walk back into, rearrange the furniture, find a better angle for the light. I did not know that some rooms lock from the outside.

My brother Akash was there at the end. I was not.

I have never fully forgiven myself for that sentence.

He was twelve young enough that grief arrived as confusion, old enough that it calcified quickly into something harder: a permanent record of who was present and who was not. I have tried, in the years since, to explain what absence means when you are seventeen and terrified and running in the wrong direction. He has never quite believed me. Maybe he shouldn't. Explanation is not the same as presence, and presence was the only currency that mattered that night.

What I regret is not the absence itself I cannot go back and insert myself into that room. What I regret is the decade of held tongues that followed. Every time he looked at me with that specific distance, I chose silence. I told myself I was giving him space. I was giving myself protection.

There is a woman who once sat across from me at a kitchen table in Delhi, tea going cold between us, and said: "You don't have to keep earning the right to grieve your own parents."

Her name is Kritika. She has been watching me hold my tongue for years in rooms with my brother, in rooms with myself, in the long internal corridors where I rehearse conversations I will never have.

She is the reason I write.

Not because she asked me to. But because watching someone refuse to let you disappear into your own silence makes the silence harder to justify. She did not fix me. She made the holding-on visible, which is a different, more demanding kind of love.

I write about Raghav because I cannot always write about Abhishek.

Raghav gets to sit in the College Street coffee house and say the thing. He gets to call across a room to Ananya and admit that the city feels wrong without his parents in it, that he is translating himself in every new place, that he is tired of being fluent in loss and inarticulate in everything else.

I gave him my words because I did not know what to do with them myself.

That is, I think, what writers do when they have held their tongues too long. They build a room. They put someone else inside it. They make that person say, out loud, the thing that got stuck somewhere between the throat and the air seventeen years old, standing in the wrong city, believing there was still time.

There wasn't.

There rarely is.

-Abhishek Banerjee