A story of Leela- By Kasturi Sinha
Leela sat by the window, her eyes tracing the raindrops as they slid down the glass, but she didn’t see them.Her fingers tracing invisible patterns on the pillow on her lap. Her husband, Niraj, sat across the room, scrolling through his phone. The silence between them stretched on, as it had for months, thick and suffocating.
The world outside had become a distant blur, much like the woman she once was. Silence had become her refuge, her only defense.Her husband, Niraj, moved about the house with the kind of ease that came from years of practice. He was a man who demanded control, in every conversation, in every moment. At first, his words had come like a drizzle—small criticisms that she brushed off. But slowly, the drizzle had turned into a storm. His words became sharp, and then, his silences became even sharper.Leela hadn’t always been like this. There was a time when their house echoed with laughter, conversations, and dreams shared late into the night. But ever since that day, when her world shattered into pieces, something inside her had changed.Leela remembered the night she stopped speaking. It was after another argument—if it could even be called that. Arguments required two people, but with Niraj, there was only ever his voice. He had spoken with the precision of a knife, cutting into her with accusations that made her doubt her every thought, her every feeling.
“You never get it right,” he had said, his voice cold. “I can’t believe I ever thought you’d be enough.”
Something inside her broke that night. She had wanted to defend herself, to scream that she was enough, that she had given everything she could. But no words came. Instead, she withdrew into herself, her silence becoming her shield. Niraj tried to reach her, his guilt obvious in his every move, but nothing he did seemed to touch the void she had sunk into.The trauma had stolen more than her trust—it had taken away her ability to engage, to argue, to forgive. She was present, yet absent, her silence a heavy presence that spoke of her pain more than any words could.Niraj, once so confident in his charm, now sat in helplessness. Every evening, they would share the same room, bound by a marriage that felt like a ghost of what it once was. He longed for her to say something, anything, even if it was filled with anger or resentment. But her silence remained.It was as if the part of her that still believed in her own voice had finally withered away.From that day, the silence between them became a chasm. Niraj didn’t notice at first. He enjoyed his monologues, enjoyed the sound of his own voice filling the space. But as days turned into weeks, he began to sense something was different. Leela no longer flinched at his words; she simply existed, like a shadow in the corner of his life.The silence was unbearable for him, but for Leela, it was peace—a shield that kept his cruelty at bay. She had nothing left to say, and in her quiet, she found a strange kind of power. Words no longer bound her to him. She was invisible to him now, but in her invisibility, she found freedom.Her silence was the loudest statement she could make. And for the first time in years, it was hers alone.
Leela’s silence wasn’t just a refusal to speak. It was a prison, built from betrayal and grief, where the echoes of her trauma kept her locked inside. And though Niraj had unlocked the door with his betrayal, neither of them knew how to find the key that would bring her back.And so, the silence continued, louder than any argument, more painful than any confession, until it became the language of their broken love.
