Chapter 1: The Window That Stayed

There is a small window in the room. Not large enough to feel generous, not small enough to disappear into the wall. It exists quietly, like something that has learned not to demand attention, and yet refuses to be ignored.

Tonight, the light enters through it carefully, almost as if it understands that this room does not welcome brightness. It doesn’t flood the space or insist on being seen. It simply arrives, gently resting on the edges of things without disturbing them.

The room itself feels paused. The curtains are half-drawn, the air is still, and everything carries that strange weight of waiting, the kind that belongs to recovery, to healing, to time stretching without moving.

My mother lies on the bed.

The darkness is for her. The doctors said light would hurt her eyes, and so the room has adjusted itself around that instruction. Light has been reduced, silence has been accepted, and even movement feels careful here.

But the window doesn’t fully agree.

Through it, I can see a small portion of the world that refuses to slow down. A slice of sky that looks untouched by what is happening inside this room. A bird crosses it once in a while, casually, as if checking in. Buildings stand in the distance, steady and sunlit, carrying on with a confidence that feels almost unfair.

I sit beside the bed, in a chair that has held too many versions of me over the years.

Because this isn’t new.

At four, I remember sitting on hospital benches with my legs swinging in the air, too short to reach the floor, not fully understanding why I was there but knowing enough to stay quiet. At ten, I understood a little more, enough to feel worry, not enough to name it. At sixteen, the questions had arrived, but they stayed inside, carefully arranged behind a smile I had already learned to maintain.

And now, I am here again.

Older, perhaps wiser, but still sitting by the same kind of bed, in the same kind of room, watching the same kind of window.

Only this time, something feels different.

It is not the window that gives meaning to this moment. It is me. It is my mind that chooses what to hold on to, the sky, the birds, the distant buildings, or the darkness that fills everything else.

Hope, I realise, is not a place you arrive at. It is something you decide to keep.

“Can you close the curtains?” my mother asks softly.

Her voice is gentle, never demanding. It never has been.

For a brief second, I hesitate. Not long enough for anyone to notice, but long enough for me to feel it. That small window, that quiet frame of light, is the only thing that makes this room feel less heavy. It is my escape, my reminder that the world continues somewhere beyond this pause.

But I don’t say any of that.

I get up, walk to the window, and draw the curtains.

The room responds immediately. Darkness settles in as if it had been waiting just outside.

And strangely, I don’t feel like I’ve lost anything.

Because the window is still there.

Just because I cannot see it does not mean it has disappeared.

And maybe that is what growing up teaches in the quietest way, that hope does not always need to be visible to exist.

I was not raised in one place. I was stretched between worlds. Mumbai taught me speed, how to move quickly, think faster, and keep up with a life that never paused. Kerala taught me stillness, how to sit, observe, and understand things that don’t need to be said out loud.

My thoughts grew somewhere in between. Half movement, half silence.

My grandparents believed in structure, in traditions that had already been decided long before,I arrived. My parents believed in movement, in making space for change and possibility. And somewhere between these two worlds, there was me, raised partly by routine, partly by freedom, and largely by something I could never quite explain.

Because even as a child, I believed in something unseen. Not in a dramatic way, not in something loud or overwhelming, but in a quiet certainty that somewhere beyond what we can prove, there exists a version of the world that is kinder than this one. A place where things make sense, where people are softer, where endings don’t feel like endings.

I don’t know where that belief came from.

But I have carried it everywhere.

Like a window.

Tonight is long, and I am awake, and my mind moves through memories and thoughts as if they are rooms I have already lived in.

And I begin to wonder, what if life is not just what happens to us, but also the stories we quietly collect from it? Not just our own, but the ones we witness, feel, and carry without realising.

Because this is not just my story.

This is something I have seen around me, something I have felt in spaces that don’t belong only to me.

And maybe, if I tell it right, someone sitting in their own quiet room might recognise it too.

“Light is not what enters a room. It is what the mind decides to keep.”

And maybe tomorrow, when the curtains open again, what waits beyond that window will not just be light.

It will be something living.

Something that looks like love.

Something that feels like safety.

Something that stays, even when the door is open.

But If hope can exist without being seen, can love exist without becoming a cage?