Life

There is an old Hindi saying my grandmother often repeated in our Delhi home: “Rishtey shor nahin karte jab tootte hain” — relationships don’t make noise when they break.

I didn’t understand it as a boy. I assumed endings were loud — slammed doors, raised voices, dramatic exits. But after more than three decades of living between two worlds, the East I was born into and the West I have called home, I’ve come to realise she was right. The most important shifts in human connection happen in silence. They arrive not as earthquakes but as slow erosions — small absences, postponed phone calls, a glance that doesn’t linger as long as it once did.