The River Within Me

By Dr.Sagarika Devburman

I was born into a house alive with movement yet guarded in speech. My childhood mornings began with the clatter of steel utensils being scrubbed, the hiss of oil meeting a hot pan, and the faint sound of a conch shell blown at the altar before dawn. But beneath the surface of these rhythms lived another music: the music of silence.

Conversations in my home were often elliptical. A question might be answered with a shrug. A disagreement might dissolve into a heavy pause. I watched words hover in the air like trapped birds, wings flapping but never quite free.

I remember sitting at the wooden window frame, watching the Gulmohar trees outside bloom in reckless red. Their fiery blossoms seemed like a language of their own; loud, unapologetic, impossible to ignore. And yet inside our walls, words felt rationed, as though they had to be earned with caution.

It was in this house of unspoken stories that I first learned how silence shapes a child.

Silence was not absence; it was an invisible presence pressing on the skin. It taught me to listen in unusual ways.

When my grandmother cracked betel nuts with her teeth after lunch, I heard the quiet satisfaction in her ritual, though she never said she craved it. When my father’s footsteps grew slower in the evenings, I sensed the day’s disappointments, though his lips never spoke them. When a festival came such as Durga Puja with its cymbals and chants, or Diwali with its sparklers lighting up our balcony, I felt the unspoken joy as much as I saw the lamps.

I realized that silence carried the pulse of truth. It revealed more than words dared to.

Yet, silence also bruised me.

As a young girl in school, I watched classmates raise their hands with answers brimming on their tongues. I knew the answers too, sometimes better. But my hand froze by my side, heavy as stone. My throat burned with the pressure of unsaid words. At home, when relatives asked questions, I smiled politely, hiding behind nods. I became fluent in invisibility.

At night, I scribbled into diaries under the dim glow of a lamp. Whole conversations spilled out—conversations I never dared to speak aloud. Those pages knew me better than any person did. But even as my handwriting filled them, I knew: words trapped on paper do not set you free.

The deepest wound was not fear. It was the sense of being unseen.

My first true breakthrough came during a school debate. I had been pushed into it by a teacher who saw something in me I could not yet see.

Standing on that stage, my knees knocked under my uniform skirt, my palms slick with sweat. The microphone loomed like an enemy. My first words came out halting, cracked at the edges. But I pushed on. Each sentence that left my lips made the next one lighter. And then, a strange thing happened: people listened. Heads tilted toward me. Eyes locked. For the first time, my voice made ripples in the world outside my body.

I stumbled off that stage shaking, but exhilarated. Something irreversible had shifted. I had tasted the power of my own sound.

From that moment, I have carried an argument within me: communication is not performance, it is existence.

We treat communication as ornamentation; grammar polished, tone perfected, slides adorned with graphics. But this is decoration. True communication is elemental. It is the cry of a newborn, the prayer whispered at dawn, the unsent letter aching in a drawer.

I argue that disconnection and not poverty, not scarcity; is the most dangerous human wound. A family falls apart not because love vanishes, but because words stop flowing. A team fractures not because they disagree, but because they cannot say what they truly mean. Even within ourselves, we collapse when our inner voice goes unheard.

The world unravels, not from noise, but from muteness.

When I think of voice, I think of rivers.

I remember childhood summers by the banks of the Brahmaputra, watching its restless currents. A river does not seek permission to move. It pushes past rocks, carves valleys, floods fields if it must. Its language is persistence. It teaches that flow is not optional; it is life itself.

That is what a voice is: a river. Sometimes gushing, sometimes meandering, sometimes still enough to reflect the sky. But always in motion, always seeking expression. To damn it is to suffocate. To release it is to live.

I have come to understand myself as such a river: shaped by silence, yet destined to break it.

Everywhere I have traveled, in every life I have touched, I see the same hunger: the hunger to be heard.

I saw it in the eyes of a young boy in Delhi who wanted to tell his father he loved dance more than engineering. I saw it in a weary mother in Kolkata whose sacrifices were swallowed by routine. I saw it in colleagues bursting with ideas no one gave them room to share.

We ache not for perfection, but for recognition. To have our words land, to be mirrored in another’s heart, to know that our stories matter.

That hunger is universal. When unmet, it does not just silence a person; it diminishes their soul.

My work, though it has taken many forms, is rooted in this: healing the fracture between silence and voice.

I have guided people to strip away performance and speak from their marrow. I have seen the relief on their faces when their words finally ring true. I have seen boardrooms soften when one person dared to be authentic. I have seen families reconcile when someone spoke the sentence they feared most.

This work is not corporate, not technical, not ornamental. It is human. It is the reclamation of the river that belongs to us all.

And yet, silence never fully leaves me. It walks beside me, reminding me of its weight. It appears in moments when I doubt my worth, when grief chokes me, when a hard truth feels unbearable.

But now I see silence not as my captor, but as my companion. It tells me what still waits to be spoken. It reminds me that even rivers must pause in still pools before they flow again.

Silence, I have learned, is not the enemy. The enemy is surrendering to silence forever.

When people ask what I do, I could say I coach communication. I could say I teach presence, influence, clarity. But none of those words are whole enough.

The truth is simpler: I refuse to let silence have the last word.

Because worlds do not collapse from too much speech.They collapse when words dry up.

And I—I was born to be a river.To flow where silence once ruled.To carve a path through stone if I must.

Because the river within me has only one command:Speak.

By Dr.Sagarika Devburman