If You Stay Silent, Someone Else Will Decide What Happens in Your Life

Lessons I learned from my grandmother’s silence over the conflicts in a dysfunctional Indian joint family.

Not my grandmother, but if she were alive, this is how I’d love her to look. (Photo by BBH Singapore on Unsplash)

When I was seven, I loved writing poems.

I turned every new experience into my childish poetry.

As a seven-year-old, almost everything that happens to you is a brand new experience.

My first train ride, the first time I rode a bicycle, quarreling with a friend I thought would stay forever, wanting someone to be a friend but being met with disdain in return — I turned all of them into poems.

My parents loved reading these, even though they didn’t always know the context behind the poems. They showed their appreciation by sharing it with local newspapers. I loved the validation being published gave. The awe in my classmates’ faces when my name was published in the newspapers their parents read every morning motivated me to keep writing.

Of course, I loved sharing my poetry with everyone I met, including my favorite person in the world: my grandmother. Aita, as I called her in Assamese.

She would sit on her comfortable chair, cushions propped up against her back, wearing her white mekhela chador (like…