Chapter 1:The Sound of Silence

Chapter 1: The Sound of Silence

The world was quiet when Aarya Khan was born—too quiet. No lullaby welcomed her, no proud whispers danced in the air. Only her mother’s labored breaths filled the dimly lit room, and a midwife who frowned at the frail, pale child in her arms.

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“She won’t survive,” the woman had muttered.

But Aarya did.

She lived....

And that was the beginning of her punishment....

The house she was born into was not a home. It was four walls that groaned under the weight of secrets, where the air smelled of damp wood and unspoken grief. The cracked plaster of the ceilings peeled away like the skin of old wounds, and silence crawled through the corridors like an uninvited guest.

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Her mother had been a gentle woman, soft-spoken and delicate, like a candle burning in a storm. She had carried Aarya with trembling hands and sleepless nights, often praying for her daughter’s safety in whispers too fragile to reach the heavens. But Aarya’s birth took more than her strength—it took her life.

Her father, once a man of poetry, lost himself that night. Where verses once filled his notebooks, liquor now filled his veins. He never blamed Aarya aloud for her mother’s death, but his eyes—bloodshot and bitter—spoke all the words he never said. To him, she was the child who had stolen his beloved away.

Aarya grew up beneath that gaze, her earliest memory not of warmth but of absence. No hand ever stroked her hair when she cried, no kiss brushed her forehead when fever burned her small body. The cradle where she slept was not rocked with love but with indifference.

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The neighbors would sometimes hear her tiny wails in the night, piercing through the thin walls. They’d shake their heads, mutter that she was a weak child, cursed perhaps. No one offered comfort. No one came knocking.

Her stepmother entered her life when Aarya was only three—a woman draped in silk and bitterness, whose smile was as sharp as broken glass. She looked at Aarya not as a daughter but as a burden, a reminder of the woman she could never replace.

The stepmother’s hands were always busy—adorning herself with gold, preparing lavish meals for her own relatives—but never once busy with Aarya. When she did use them, it was often to push Aarya aside or strike her for being “too slow, too clumsy, too much.”

The child learned early that silence was safer than sound. That asking for food meant a slap, that crying meant a harsher punishment. She became a shadow in her own house, drifting through rooms unnoticed, holding her breath when footsteps came too close.

The world outside did not offer rescue. The street she lived on was filled with noise—vendors shouting, children running, women gossiping—but none of it belonged to her. Aarya was like glass behind a wall; she could see life unfolding, but never touch it.

Yet, even in those early years, she clung to survival. When her stepmother tossed her scraps, she ate quietly, never wasting a grain of rice. When her father slammed doors and shouted, she pressed her small palms over her ears and imagined faraway lands where people smiled. At night, when the shadows frightened her, she whispered to herself that she would live—because living was the only thing she knew how to do.

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The midwife’s words followed her like a curse, echoing in her mind even though she was too young to understand their weight: She won’t survive.

But Aarya did.

She lived.

And as she grew, she would come to realize that surviving and living were not the same thing. For now, though, the world had already decided what she was—fragile, unwanted, and silent.

Her life had begun not with joy, but with the sound of silence

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