Chapter 1: The Window That Stayed

There is a small window in the room.

Not large enough to be called generous, not small enough to be ignored. It sits there like a quiet negotiator between two worlds, the one inside and the one that refuses to stop existing outside.

Tonight, the light enters through it carefully, almost respectfully, as if aware that this room does not welcome brightness. The walls are dim, the curtains half-drawn, the air carrying that unmistakable stillness of recovery, of bodies healing and minds waiting.

My mother lies on the bed.

The room is kept dark for her eyes. Light, they say, would hurt. And so darkness becomes medicine, and silence becomes routine.

But the window does not agree.

Through it, I can see a slice of sky, unbothered, uninjured, and wildly alive. A bird crosses it once in a while, as if signing attendance. Buildings stand in the distance, sunlit and confident, like they’ve never known what it means to pause.

And I sit here, on a chair that has held more versions of me than I can count.

Because this is not new.

I have been here before.

At four, I sat on hospital benches with legs too short to touch the ground, swinging between confusion and quiet obedience. I didn’t ask questions, not because I didn’t have them, but because I didn’t yet know how to hold them.

At ten, I knew a little more. Enough to worry, not enough to understand.

At sixteen, I had questions. Many. But they stayed inside, stacked neatly behind a practiced smile.

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, I notice something different.

It is not the window that gives meaning to the moment.

It is me.

It is my mind that chooses, to see the sky, the birds, the beautiful buildings or to stay with the darkness that fills the rest of the room.

Hope, it turns out, is not a place.

It is a decision.

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

Her voice does not demand. It never has.

For a brief second, just a second, I hesitate.

Because that window, that stubborn little frame of light, is the only thing that makes this night feel less heavy. It is my quiet escape, my reminder that the world is still functioning somewhere beyond this pause.

It is, in a way, my proof that things continue.

But I say nothing.

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

The room obeys instantly. Darkness returns like it was waiting just outside the fabric.

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 quietly teaches you,
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 walk fast, think faster, and never miss a local train even when life felt like one.

Kerala taught me stillness, how to sit, observe, and let silence speak in ways noise never could.

My thoughts grew bilingual.

Half city. Half soil.

My grandparents believed in structure, rituals, and a way of living that had already been decided long before I arrived.

My parents believed in movement, progress, and making space for what could be.

And somewhere in between, there was me, raised partly by a Maharashtrian nanny, partly by inherited values, and largely by something I could never quite explain.

Because even as a child, I believed in something unseen.

Not in a dramatic, thunder-and-lightning kind of way.
But in a quiet, everyday certainty, that somewhere, beyond what we can prove, there exists a 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 I am thinking,
what if life is not just what happens to us, but also the stories we quietly collect from it?

Not just mine.

But the ones I’ve seen, felt, borrowed, and imagined from the spaces between people.

Because this,
this is not just my story.

This is a story I have seen around me.

Felt around me.

And maybe, if I write it right,
someone, somewhere, sitting in their own dimly lit room,
might find their window too.

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