THE UNSPOKEN
Advait pressed his forehead against the cool glass of the window. The train slowed down and pulled into Nashik station, He was standing on this platform after fifteen years. On the hot summer night of 10th May with one bag and a rage he had left his city completely justified at that time. Now he had come back with a suitcase, a head of greying hair at forty-one, and a heavy feeling in his chest that he could not name. His sister Aditi had called four days ago and told him that their mother was not going to last the week. Her voice had been flat, the way voices get when someone has been strong for too long.
"I will be there," Advait said. There was a pause on the line. A silence of fifteen years in it.
"Okay," Aditi said. Just that. Okay.
On way home in the auto-rickshaw the thoughts of yesterday arrived in succession. He watched the town pass by, some things remained and some had changed. A big mall stood where the old cinema hall used to be. A flyover cut across the road on which he had ridden his bicycle as a boy. The lane to their house was unchanged, narrow, with bougainvillea spilling over the compound wall of the Deshmukh house next door. The red flowers looked too bright for a day like this. He paused at his own gate for a moment before going in. This time the house appeared smaller than he remembered. The paint had gone pale and the garden his mother had attended every morning was still there, but it was not that tidy now. He knocked, even though it was his home. It was instinctively he did that. It just felt wrong to walk in although he had spent his childhood there, but those fifteen years. Aditi opened the door. She had cut her hair short and there were lines around her eyes that had not been there the last time he had seen her face on a video call three Diwalis ago. In person, she looked tired and worn out.
"You came," she said. "Of course I had to, " Advait was a bit flustered.
She stepped aside to let him in. The house still smelled the same. Fifteen years and the smell had not changed, old wood and incense and something that could only was his mother's cooking, all folded into a single scent and that hit him deep.
"She's sleeping," Aditi said. "The doctor had come in the afternoon. He says maybe two, three days now." Advait just nodded.
Putting his bag down he followed Aditi to the kitchen. She heated up some dal and rice without even asking him if he was hungry and put the plate in front of him and sat across the table with a glass of water, watching him eat the way their mother used to, making sure that they actually finished. The hesitation of fifteen years clearly was showing. They talked but nothing important. The weather, the auto fare from the station and if the salt was ok in the dal. Small words trying to fill a large space.
After dinner, Aditi took him to his old room. She had put fresh sheets on the bed. His old cricket posters were gone from the walls and the room was clean and bare, like a guest room in a house. It looked like a place that was not sure whether to remember the occupant or not.
"Get some rest," she said from the doorway.
"Aditi," Advait said, looking at her.
"We can talk tomorrow," she said. Not with anger, but with a firm expression. He heard her door close. As he lay on the bed the ceiling was the same one he had stared at as a teenager, lying awake with his headphones, planning the life he was going to escape to. He had done it and gone to Pune for college, then Mumbai for work, then further, a career in urban planning which took him across the country. He had built things. Roads, parks, housing projects that thousands of people lived in now and had made a good life for himself, but his own house was fractured.
He had also made a lot of phone calls that were too short and a lot of birthday messages that arrived a day late and a lot of reasons not to come home.
At two in the morning, finally he gave up on sleep and walked out into the hallway. He stopped at his mother's door. It was ajar, he pushed it gently and went in. She was lying on her back, very still, her chest rising and falling slowly. The room was dark except for a small lamp in the corner. She looked thin. Smaller than he had seen her last. Her hair had turned completely white and her face showing with age.
He sat in the chair next to her bed, he did not touch her. He just sat there, watching her breathe, something he had not done in fifteen years. After a while, he got up and went back to the hallway.
That was when he noticed the cupboard which was his father's old wooden one that had always been there. His father had died three years ago. A second heart attack. Advait had come for the funeral, stayed four days, and left. He and Aditi had barely spoken even then.
The bottom drawer of the cupboard was slightly open. Inside was an old tin, it’s lid dented on one side. He remembered that his father used to keep important papers in it. Reaching out he opened the tin. Inside were letters. Not one or two, but a thick stack of them. It was his father's handwriting, that particular slanting script, always in blue ink. They were all addressed to Advait and none of them had been posted. Some of them did not even have envelopes. They were just folded papers, carefully dated, stacked by year.
His hands were shaking as he unfolded the first one. It was from 2011. The year after he had left home.
Advait,
I heard from Suresh uncle that you got the job at the firm in Mumbai. I am not going to pretend that I was not waiting to hear from you. Your mother thinks I am still angry with you, but I am not. I don't know what I am anymore. Maybe I was wrong about the engineering. Maybe I was right. How does it matter now. I just want to know if you are ok. That is all. Your mother doesn't sleep well.
Love Baba.
Advait sat down on the hallway floor, right there, back against the wall and kept reading letter after letter. His father had made a list of him. Read about a housing project in a magazine, a development in Navi Mumbai. A journalist had mentioned the name of the young planner who had designed the community park inside it. His father had torn the page out and kept it. It was folded inside the letter.
I showed this to your mother and she cried, but she told me not to tell you that she cried.
His father had a minor health scare. He didn't call Advait. He wrote a letter instead, and then did not send it.
I thought about calling you, but decided against it. I did not want you to leave your work and come. Also, I was afraid and what if you wouldn't come. That would have been worse, That’s the reason I did not even call you.
His father had found Advait's Instagram, someone must have shown him how. He wrote about a photo Advait had posted at a friend's wedding, in a blue kurta, laughing at something outside the frame.
You looked happy. That is the right word. Happy. I thought you would call sometime. I thought I would call sometime. Neither of us ever did. I don't know whose fault that is. Probably mine.
The last letter was from March 2020 exactly Two years before he died.
Advait,
I am getting older and I spend more time thinking about things I did not say. I was never good at talking, even when you were small. My father did not talk either, maybe that’s an excuse or it’s simply true. Whatever it is but believe me I am proud of you. I should have said it to you. I am saying it now. I am proud of you. The work you do matters. You matter. Come home sometimes. Your mother misses you. I miss you too, though I don't know how to say that out loud. I miss you.
Advait put the letter down on his lap. He pressed the back of his hand against his mouth and sat very still, the way you do when something is trying to break open inside you and at two in the morning and you don't want to wake anyone. He sat like that for a long time and did not hear Aditi come out of her room until she was standing right next to him. She looked at the tin on the floor and the letters in his hand. She had known about them long ago.
"You knew," he said. She sat down on the floor beside him, back against the wall, the way they used to sit as children, watching cricket on the small TV in this same hallway when their parents thought they were asleep.
"I found them when I was going through his things," she said quietly. "After the funeral. I read all of them."
"Why didn't you tell me?" Advait had a lump in his throat.
She was quiet for a moment. "I was not sure would it be ok to tell you. Or maybe," She stopped. "Maybe I was angry."
"At me." Advait said.
"At you. At him. At all of it." She pulled her knees to her chest. "He wrote letters to you for ten years and never sent a single one. The things he could not say out loud. And you were the one who had left. And yet you were the one he was writing to."
Advait did not say anything because he could feel the unfairness of it, just as she had felt it. The silence sat between them.
"I'm sorry," he said resting his head on Aditi’s shoulder.
"You don't have to be sorry for what you chose." She looked at the wall ahead. "I am not angry anymore. I was, for a long time but now I am just tired."
They sat in the quiet hallway. The house breathed around them.
"You never told me," he said slowly, "what happened here after I left."
Aditi looked at him. "It got harder. Baba's blood pressure. Then Aai started having her knee trouble. The house needed fixing constantly. I was working and managing everything at the same time. It was fine and we were managing."
"You gave up your plan," Advait said. "The Delhi one." There was a deep silence and it was heavy.
"Where did you hear that?" Her voice was careful.
"I did not hear it from anyone. I just remembered, you had finished your project and were waiting for a letter that summer. I left before it came but after that I never asked what happened."
Aditi was very still for a moment.
"I had received a reply for the Social Sciences program," she said.
“It was a good college."
"You didn't go."
"No."
The “NO” sat between them, small and heavy as stone.
"Aditi,"
"Don't." Her voice was soft but clear. "Don't say sorry again. There's nothing to apologise for. I had made a choice and I could have gone, but I chose not to." She looked at him in the eye for the first time since they had sat down. "Aai and Baba were not helpless. They would have managed but I just, did not go when I looked at that letter and thought that if I also leave, then who holds this place? Who stays?" She gave a small smile.
"Foolish, maybe."
"Not foolish," Advait said.
"No. Not foolish. Just, what I was." She paused. "What I decided to be."
Advait was now shaking from inside and was feeling bad about her. In spite of so much she had endured and sacrificed she was not bitter and she never complained. But now he could feel her pain. He thought about his own years, the freedom and the choice of making his life. All this time he thought that leaving the house is a kind of courage but he was wrong. Staying without freedom was a bigger courage. Both of them were living their choices.
"I should have called more," he said.
"Yes."
"I should have come back more often."
"Yes."
"I think," he started, then stopped. He tried again. "I think I was afraid of this house, afraid of the feeling I had inside me. Afraid that staying in a small town would dwarf me and my potential. I thought if I stayed away long enough, the thoughts would stop following me."
"Did it?"
"No," he said. "I just carried it somewhere else and labelled it freedom."
A small sound came from their mother's room. A shift in the bed. Both of them went very still and listened. Nothing followed. She was still sleeping.
"She talked about you all the time," Aditi said quietly. "Even when she was pretending not to. She had see something on the news, some new road or overpass, and she would say, that's the kind of thing your brother does."
Advait closed his eyes.
Aditi said. "She missed you terribly and she was proud of you. Both feelings, at the same time. That was very much her."
"And Baba? What did he say? What were his words?"
Aditi thought about it. "Nothing directly. But sometimes in the evenings, when there was nothing on TV, he would step into your room and look at your photo and just say your name - Advait. Just the name. And then nothing after it. As if saying it out loud was enough."
That was the thing that finally broke the dam, not the unsent words on paper, but this. His name, said into a quiet room, as a complete sentence in itself. His father in his old chair, saying his son's name the way you say the name of something precious that you are not sure how to hold.
Advait leaned his head back against the wall. The tears came and trickled down his cheeks. Aditi did not react or put her hand on his shoulder. She simply stayed there beside him and allowed the fifteen years to flow.
When Advait was done, she got up without a word and came back from the kitchen with two cups of chai and sat down on the floor beside him. The sips were the only sound at that time. The chai was too sweet, Aditi had always liked more sugar than anyone else in this family. Advait did not say anything about it, it tasted exactly right.
"I will come back more," he said. "After everything. I will actually come back."
Aditi looked at her cup. "You can stay for a while now, if you want. There's no hurry to leave."
It was an offering which he took.
"Okay," he said.
Advait was on one side of the bed, Aditi on the other. Her breathing had been slow all night, growing softer. And then, somewhere in that golden early hour, it simply stopped. There was no struggle. She looked peaceful and they were holding their mother's hand while she was leaving for her final journey. She had a light smile on her face as if she knew something they did not.
The room was very quiet. Aditi pressed her mother's hand to her cheek and held it there. Advait stayed where he was. Neither of them spoke for a long time.
Later, when the phone calls had been made and the neighbours had come and the house had filled with noise and the movements, Advait stepped out into the garden alone.
He stood there and looked at it. The bougainvillea from the Deshmukh house had spread further over the wall. And along the fence, in a corner a bunch of small white flowers, his mother's jasmine was in full bloom. He had not noticed it last night. It must have just opened.
He stood still and thought about all the things that don't get said between people. Not because the feeling isn't there, but because feeling something and saying it out loud are two completely different abilities, and some families never manage to build both. His father had written it all down and kept it in a tin. His mother had expressed it through quiet pride. Aditi had expressed it by simply not leaving. And he had expressed nothing at all, just gone, and kept going, and told himself that was a life.
All of them loving each other in their own language which they knew which wasn't enough. And all of them knowing it wasn't enough. And none of them knowing how to learn another.
He heard the door open behind him. Aditi came and stood next to him. They looked at the jasmine together.
"She planted that along the fence the year I was born," Aditi said. "She told me once, years ago. I don't think she ever told you."
"No," Advait said. "There's a lot we didn't know about each other."
"Yes," she said.
They stood there in the morning, close enough that their shoulders were almost touching. Two people who had grown up under the same roof, breathing the same air, eating at the same table, and had somehow, across the years, through silence and distance and all the things that went unsaid, become strangers to each other. Not through cruelty but just through the slow, quiet drifting that happens when no one ever says wait, stop, I need to tell you something.
But now, in the light of this morning, with their mother just gone and their father's letters still on the hallway floor where Advait had left them the night before, they were finding their way back.
Not with big speeches nor with explanations or apologies and not trying to cover the fifteen years in one go.
Just standing in the garden. Beside each other. Finally, after all this time, not looking away.
The jasmine moved very slightly in the morning air as if acknowledging the new found connection.
