Chapter 1
They said it like a joke, the kind people throw into the air without ever thinking where it lands.
“কুড়িতেই বুড়ি।”
A girl turns old at twenty.
It never sounded cruel when they said it. It came wrapped in laughter, in casual conversations, in rooms full of people who would never have to carry the weight of those words. But I carried them. I felt them settle inside me, slowly, quietly, like something being buried before it has even stopped breathing.
Because I am twenty.
And somehow that already makes me something less than what I was supposed to be.
Then there is the other proverb, the one they say with a kind of pride that almost feels sacred.
“সোনার আংটি বাঁকা হলেও সোনা।”
Even if a golden ring bends, it is still gold.
That one is never meant for girls. It belongs elsewhere. To a different kind of permission. A different kind of existence. I learned that early. Not through lessons, but through the way people spoke and the things they chose not to say.
—
My name is Amiya.
If you ask anyone, they will tell you I came to India for studies. That is the version that survives in daylight, the version that sounds neat and acceptable.
The truth does not sound like that.
The truth waits for silence.
It returns in the spaces between things.
I did not come here.
I ran.
And still, sometimes it feels like I never really left.
—
There is something wrong with the way I feel things.
Everything reaches too far inside me. A sentence does not stay a sentence. A sound does not remain a sound. They linger, echo, and settle somewhere they should not.
Even silence is not empty.
Silence listens.
Silence presses back.
And the more I try to ignore it, the louder it becomes.
I do not belong anywhere.
Not here.
Not where I came from.
Not even inside the version of myself I remember being.
People talk about home as if it were something solid, something that protects you. I used to believe that. I used to think there were places in the world where nothing could reach me.
Now I understand something else.
A place can feel safe long before it proves that it is not.
—
My family is large in a way that feels almost unreal when I try to explain it. Too many names. Too many faces. Too many expectations attached to people who may never really know me.
I remember them laughing once about weddings, about numbers, about how even a small gathering would still mean inviting a thousand people each.
I smiled when they said it.
But even then, something in me resisted.
Being seen by that many people felt less like celebration and more like being observed.
Measured.
Consumed.
There were people I trusted.
That is the part that unsettles me the most now. Trust does not arrive loudly. It builds itself quietly, through repetition, through familiarity, through the absence of doubt.
It becomes something you stop checking.
Something you leave unguarded.
Like a door you no longer lock.
I had a door like that.
And I believed it would never open the wrong way.
—
It happened in the afternoon.
Not at night.
Not in darkness.
Not in a place that felt unfamiliar.
Everything was exactly as it should have been.
That is what makes it harder to understand.
Nothing warned me.
Nothing shifted.
Nothing told me that something had already begun to change.
—
I was tired.
So I slept.
There is something about sleep that feels like trust.
You close your eyes without thinking.
You let go without asking who is watching.
You assume the world will remain as it was when you wake.
I remember waking slowly.
Not all at once.
Not clearly.
Just enough to feel that something was wrong before I understood why.
A presence that did not belong.
A closeness that felt misplaced.
—
At first, my mind tried to soften it. To turn it into something harmless. Something accidental. Something I had misunderstood.
But the body does not misunderstand.
The body recognises what the mind refuses.
And then I understood.
Not suddenly.
Not violently.
But completely.
—
I did not scream.
There was too much silence for that.
It filled everything.
It sat between breaths.
It made sound feel impossible.
Because the face was familiar.
Because the place was familiar.
Because nothing looked wrong—
And yet everything was.
—
The house did not change.
The walls stayed where they were.
The air remained still.
The world continued exactly as it had before.
Except something had shifted.
Something I could not name then.
Something I still do not fully understand now.
After that, things did not return to how they were.
Not visibly.
Not in ways anyone else would notice.
But something inside me no longer settled the same way.
Silence became heavier.
Sleep became uncertain.
And that door—
I am not sure it ever closed again.
—
Now, when everything is quiet enough,
When the world slows down just before sleep,
I sometimes feel it again.
That same stillness.
That same sense that something is waiting on the other side of something I cannot see.
Not moving.
Not leaving.
Just there.
And sometimes,
in that moment before I fall asleep,
It feels less like a memory—
