Silence: The Stories We Don’t Tell Out Loud

The instruction was simple.

When I started walking home from school alone, my mother told me to look straight ahead. Don’t look left. Don’t look right. Focus on where you’re going and get home. She didn’t explain what was on either side. She didn’t need to. The instruction had its own weight, and I understood, the way twelve-year-olds understand things they are not supposed to ask about.

I still walk that way sometimes. The body holds instructions the mind has stopped questioning. The narrowing of attention. The practiced not-noticing. The instinct to move through without engaging.

It didn’t feel like silence when I learned it. It felt like safety.

We don’t learn silence as a philosophy. We learn it as a series of small adjustments. A moment where something happens and the conversation that follows is not about the thing itself, but about whether the thing needs to be said. A word that gets softened. A sentence that doesn’t finish. A look that means: this is as far as we go.

In the first semester of college, our computer lab logins were hacked. Another class, we later found out. They’d gotten into our CS projects and written comments. Some harmless. Some suggestive. By early 2000s standards, it was scandalous enough to be escalated. They found the boys. There was irritation, but also something else. A kind of grudging acknowledgement. They’d managed to bypass the college security system and get our login credentials. That seemed to matter, in the way that a certain kind of cleverness tends to matter, even when it is applied stupidly. I complained, not even formally in writing. Just in the lab. Called the incharge and showed all that was to see. Later, the managing director called me in. One-on-one. He explained, calmly, that this was not a big deal. Someone had made a pass at me.

A pass.

It’s a precise piece of language. It doesn’t change any of the facts, but it rearranges them. Makes the whole thing lighter. Almost flattering, if you need it to be. The phrase carries a quiet suggestion that the appropriate response is mild amusement, not what I did. That the appropriate person here is not the one sitting across the desk. I didn’t react. The boys were barred from an internal exam. Twenty-five marks across eight papers. A consequence, technically measurable.

Mine arrived differently. In tone. In how I was referred to in certain conversations. In the word that begins to follow you when you insist on not letting something go.

Difficult.

Not said loudly. Not written anywhere. Just present, in the way certain reputations are. Looking back, it is hilarious that the person making the ‘pass’ did not have the nerve to do it in person. I bet he is an armchair activist or a Twitter troll now. Bold opinions, carefully anonymous.

My well-wishers had advice: don’t tell people what was written. No need to repeat it. Why make it bigger than it already is? Here is what I want to say about that.

If this were a Bollywood film, or a woke web series, there would be a scene here. The girl who didn’t back down. Claps from the peer group. Maybe one older woman in the background nodding quietly. The right background score. A caption: she spoke up. At least that’s how it would be framed now, in retrospect, with the correct lens applied.

What actually happened: the management quietened me. The peer group either ignored it or asked me to withdraw. My well-wishers, the ones who actually liked me, asked me not to say what had been written. Not to repeat it. Not to make it a thing.

The woke web series version requires everyone around you to be a villain, or a convert. The actual version requires you to understand that most people are neither. They are just people who have also learned what happens when you speak up. And they are trying to help you, in the only way they know how. Which is to teach you the same thing they were taught.

Don’t make it bigger. In fact, shrink it. Ignore it till it fades away.

We like to think silence is about fear. That people don’t speak because they are afraid. That if they were braver, they would. What it actually is, is a calculation. Not a dramatic one. Not even a conscious one. The calculation isn’t about whether something happened. It’s about what happens when you say it did.

The conversation moves. It stops being about the thing and becomes about you. Your reaction. Your judgement. Whether this is worth making an issue of. The thing becomes secondary. And once you understand that, the decision changes.

We grow up with Gandhiji ke teen bandar. We are taught it as a moral principle. Somewhere along the way, we learn it is also a survival instruction. Don’t look. Don’t listen. Don’t speak. What looks like restraint is sometimes just the outcome of watching what happens to people who don’t observe it.

When we say we are not political, that these things don’t concern us, it sounds like neutrality. Not like we have understood the cost. My mother’s instruction made sense when I was twelve. I understood it as protection, the way a child understands things that are framed as care.

Don’t look. Get home.

I’m still not entirely sure what she was asking me not to see. Or how much of it I still don’t. Or whether the things I’ve learned to walk past are things I chose to leave behind, or things I was taught to leave there.

I walk with my eyes straight ahead. It is such a practiced thing by now that I cannot always tell the difference between choosing to focus and choosing not to look.

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This post is a part of Blogchatter A2Z Challenge 2026 .

This is a series about storytelling beyond a craft. As something we live inside. In memory, in conversation, and in the way we understand what happens to us. Read all posts here.

I’ve done A2ZChallenge in 2017, where I collected 26 quotes by people whose names started with the letter of the day. In 2015, the theme was professional life.