Edited by: Prisha Visveswaran
Two people pass each other in the hallway. For a brief, fleeting second that seems to fill up all of eternity, their eyes meet, and their lines of vision hold onto each other like two golden threads. Time stops, and wind echoes in the hollow of their ears. Shadows and light play on their faces. Not a sound escapes their mouths, yet, in that moment, lost in the depths of each other’s eyes, something magical happens. Feelings that live in the realm beyond words, fill the emptiness around them. The silence becomes a melody in itself, breaking onto the shores of their ears like soft waves. The warmth of shared feeling settles deep in their hearts.
A girl stands near the car, her eyes searching for her younger sister who has just landed at the New Delhi airport. The last time she saw her sister was three years ago, when her sister was just two, a cute little baby who would fit in her bony arms and snuggle her soft face against hers. Now she’s almost six, a mischievous little kid who wouldn’t stop running from place to place. Everyone takes turns to kiss her on the cheek, remarking about how cute and energetic she is. Then, all of a sudden, it’s her turn. Silence clouds them. A thousand emotions flood her heart. She look into her sister’s round, soft brown eyes, eyes that are still thirsty for the world, eyes that glow in the late afternoon sunlight. Her sister looks back at her for a moment, confused, and she realizes that she too has changed a lot in these past few years. They stand there, two sisters made strangers by time and place. And then, suddenly, a smile of recognition lights up her face, and the golden past comes crashing into the present. They jump into each other’s arms, and hold on tight, never ready to let go.
He escapes from the hubbub of his classroom during recess and goes to the nearby garden. Ducks float in the pond. Leaves rustle on the bare branches of trees. Silence, stretching vast as the blue sky, surrounds him. His friends find this silence stifling, suffocating, even, but he found it enlivening. It was through this silence, away from the cacophony of the world that nature spoke to him, told him stories and tales, and helped him find magical worlds of thought and feeling within himself.
She is going back to university after a month of winter break. She gets into the car, stuffing her suitcase in. Her parents stand at the gate, bittersweet smiles on their faces. They don’t say anything, but she knows that they still see her as the little girl she was ten years ago. She knows that they are hoping that she’ll get off the car and delay her departure. As she drives away, she hears their unspoken words echoing in the silence: Stay. Don’t go. The force of those unexpressed feelings rents her heart.
Silence is not the absence of sound; rather, it is a kind of sound itself, a sound beyond the rigid structures of language, a sound that one needs a deep connection of hearts to hear. In these moments of silence, you can understand what the other person wants to say without them actually saying it. These moments and spaces of emptiness are actually filled with beauty and meaning and silence has a kind of music, a kind of poetic intensity that words can’t quite capture. Silence is a space where hearts unite at a much deeper level.