The house was never quiet, yet Ira learned how to be.

She had lived her whole life in the old bungalow with her mother and her maternal grandparents. From the outside, the house seemed almost proud of itself, standing with its wide verandas and bougainvillea spilling across the gates, its windows watching the street with a kind of weary dignity.

But inside, the air was heavy, thick with unspoken words and unresolved tempers. The ceilings were laced with cracks like veins, and sometimes Ira wondered if the house itself was trying to speak, carrying the weigh…

Her grandmother moved through the rooms like a storm, her words sharp, her moods unpredictable. Her mother, a criminal lawyer, rose before the sun and returned long after the night had settled, leaving little of herself behind except the faint smell of ink and courtroom files. And her father, he was not a man but an echo.

He had left before she was even born, and his presence lingered only in bitter fragments of stories told by those who resented him. Ira grew up in that absence, learning far too early…

When Ira was just four months old, her mother had gone back to work. The task of raising her fell to her grandparents. It should have been a foundation, solid and certain, but it was not. Her grandmother’s depression colored every room with chaos, and her mother’s absence deepened it. Ira learned to measure her worth in sighs and scoldings, in taunts disguised as love, in affection rationed like a scarce commodity.

Her aunts visited often, their laughter sharp, their voices heavy with judgment. They mocked her body, the roundness of her cheeks, the awkward rhythm of her words. Her cousins joined in, circling her like restless birds, chanting fatty cousin until the words etched themselves into her bones. Even within the walls of her own house, there was no place that felt entirely safe.

School was no different; there too, her body, her voice, her very presence became targets. Teachers turned away, complicit in their silence. More and more, Ira faked sickness just to avoid walking back into classrooms where she was treated as less than human.

And yet, she was not entirely alone. Her grandfather, whom she called Papa, was her shelter. He was a man of quiet strength, a steady flame in a house where fires burned too wildly. He slipped an extra roti onto her plate when she thought no one noticed, placed his weathered hand on her shoulder as if to anchor her. And then there was Dolly, her dog, who greeted her each day as though Ira were the most important soul in the world. Between Papa and Dolly, Ira found fragments of tenderness to cling to.

The garden behind the bungalow became her refuge. Weeds split through broken stone, butterflies flitted like secrets through the air, and stray dogs slipped in through rusted gates as though drawn to her by something unseen. Pregnant mothers found her, trembling and lost, and Ira took them in.

She spread rags for their beds, poured water into chipped bowls, and crouched beside them through long nights when their bodies shook with labor. When the puppies came, blind and fragile, it felt as though the universe…

In those moments, she wasn’t the unwanted child or the cousin mocked into silence; she wasn’t the daughter of an absent father or the granddaughter forever falling short of expectations. She was a protector, a healer, the keeper of fragile lives.

But peace never lingered long. By the time Ira reached seventh standard, she had grown adept at wearing masks. At school, she forced herself into invisibility, pretending the taunts didn’t pierce her.

At home, she smiled through her grandmother’s barbed words and her cousins’ relentless teasing. Even her aunts sharpened their tongues against her, mistaking her wounded voice for insolence.No one saw that her silence was not defiance but survival.

And then came the night her mother’s exhaustion boiled into cruelty. Ira had spoken clumsily, perhaps too loudly, perhaps not at all. Her mother’s face hardened, her voice a blade. “You are bad blood,” she said, “your father’s blood. That’s why you’ll never change.”

Her father. The man she had never seen, never heard, never touched. All she knew of him were the stories, half-truths and accusations whispered with venom by her aunts, her grandmother, her mother. He had left before she was born, and yet somehow, she carried the punishment for his absence.

The words lodged inside her, sharp and unyielding. Bad blood. If that was who she was, perhaps the pain she carried was inevitable; perhaps she did not deserve anything else.

That was the year Ira turned her pain inward. Quietly, secretly, she began to carve her hurt onto her own skin. Thin lines hidden where no one would notice. She was barely thirteen, but the world had already taught her to punish herself before anyone else could.

No one asked; no one reached for her hand.

Only Papa seemed to sense the shadows gathering. He never pried, never asked why her laughter had become so rare, why she lingered longer in the garden than anywhere else. Instead, he sat beside her on the veranda, pointing at the night sky. “The stars,” he would say, “shine brightest in the darkest nights.”

She never told him how dark her nights had become. But she held on to his words like a thread, thin yet unbroken, pulling her forward through the silence.

Still, a truth pressed against her ribs: she had never known what it meant to be carefree. Even joy carried the weight of survival, even laughter came with the fear of being heard too loudly.

And somewhere deep inside, though she could not name it yet, she carried a vow, fragile but certain: One day, I will leave this silence behind.