Chapter 1: The Silence in the Garden
The morning sun hung low over the quiet suburbs, casting long, golden shadows across the neatly manicured lawn of the Sharma residence. It was a house that looked perfect from the outside—an upper-middle-class sanctuary with white-pillared porches and blooming jasmine. But inside, the air was heavy with a silence that had lasted for over a year.
Sharma, a man whose hair had turned silver during his thirty years as a Headmaster, sat on the stone steps of the veranda. In his hands was the morning newspaper, but his eyes hadn’t moved past the headline for twenty minutes. His mind was a chalkboard filled with regrets he couldn’t erase.
A few yards away, his daughter, Komali, was kneeling in the dirt. She was tending to the rosebushes. Before her marriage, she used to hum songs while she worked. Now, she worked in a robotic, focused silence. She looked thinner, her eyes carrying a weight that no twenty-six-year-old should bear.
“What sin did I commit in a past life?” Sharma thought, his heart tightening. “I taught thousands of children how to build their futures, yet I couldn’t secure the happiness of my own child. We raised her like a princess, only for her dreams to shatter like glass.”
The sound of a tray clinking broke his trance. Meenakshi, his wife, stepped out with two stainless steel tumblers of steaming coffee. She didn’t say a word; she didn’t have to. The look she exchanged with her husband was one of shared grief. She walked over to Komali, who wiped her mud-stained hands on her apron and stood up.
They sat together on the steps—a family of three, yet feeling like a family of shadows.
