I Am the Quiet I Keep

By Sreyash Sarkar

In Kolkata, heat arrived as silence,

 thick, smothering.

 The days clung to us,

 draped like wet cloth,

 the evenings stitched with the hum of cicadas,

 their voices dense, layered,

 as if holding the weight of something breaking.

In the kitchen, Ma washed rice

 with a reverence I didn’t yet understand.

 Her hands moved through the grains,

 the water clouding,

 then clearing,

 as if grief could be rinsed clean.

 Each grain carried its story,

 its memory of earth and sun,

 its slow alchemy of becoming.

 She taught me to wait—

 to feel the steam rise,

 to watch the grains split open,

 each one surrendering itself

 to the hunger it would fill.

This was her gift:

 to make absence edible.

Years later,

 I stood in the doorway of a lover’s leaving.

 The sound of their suitcase zipper—

 a wound sealing itself shut.

I thought of Ma’s rice then,

 how each grain held

 its own emptiness,

 how we learned to eat

 and still be hollow.

In Paris, my walls carry ghosts.

 I press my hand to the plaster,

 listening for the faint breath

 of those who came before me:

 a chair dragged across the floor,

 a name spoken too softly

 to survive the years.

In my childhood home,

 walls were paper-thin—

 a fragile skin stretched taut

 over the ache of voices.

At night, I lay awake,

 listening for the silence

 that followed an argument,

 its weight thicker than words.

Touch the wall now,

 and it will tell you

 of stone becoming ruin,

 ruin becoming home.

I think of Ma’s hands

 moving through rice,

 her voice calling me to the table.

I think of water—

 how it remembers every vessel

 it has touched.

 How it carries absence

 the way the body

 carries the echo of touch,

 even long after it has gone.

I sit here, not waiting,

 but learning—

 to hold myself

 in the architecture of my own skin,

 to gather the fragments of light

 and let them be enough.

 To sit with absence

 and call it by another name.

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Sreyash Sarkar is a Pushcart Prize–nominated multidisciplinary artist and applied physicist from Calcutta who lives between Paris and Prague. His poetry, music, and visual art have appeared in literary journals and international exhibitions, exploring questions of identity, justice, displacement, and human resilience. His current projects include collaborative musical works with refugees and exhibitions that examine the intertwined realities of hatred, memory, and survival.