When Silence Screams

By Roshan Tara

When Aayat was born, her mother whispered the azan into her ear, soft as a lullaby. Her father, eyes glistening, named her “Aayat”—a verse—because she was his poem from heaven.

By six, Aayat knew the azan’s cadence better than her classmates’ names. By ten, she read the Quran fluently in Arabic, though its meaning often eluded her. At twelve, she chose a hijab—not from pressure, but for its elegance, a quiet strength framing her face.

Her mother said, “Hijab is your choice, beti. It doesn’t shrink you. It makes you soar.”

Aayat believed her with a child’s unshakable faith. Until the world chipped away at it.

It started small. The meat-shop uncle’s chuckle: “Why hide a child’s head?” A friend’s whisper: “You’d be prettier without that cloth.” Classmates’ smirks at tuition, as if her hijab made her foreign in her own city.

Aayat stayed silent, smiling through the sting. Silence, she thought, was her shield, like her hijab.

No one told her silence could cage you.

At sixteen, on a humid July evening, the power was out, the air thick. Aayat left her coaching center late. The auto didn’t come. She didn’t call her father—he’d worked all day. The walk home was just fifteen minutes. She felt safe in her black kurta, blue jeans, and hijab.

She was wrong.

Near the railway line, shadows moved. Three boys—maybe four. Her world blurred. Her voice dissolved, unheard. She didn’t scream at first, frozen in disbelief.

I’m covered, she thought. I’m not “those” girls. I did everything right.

No one taught her that “right” doesn’t matter.

The police asked too many questions. Her father, shoulders hunched, burned with shame, not rage. Her mother’s sobs carried centuries of unspoken grief. Neighbors whispered: “Why was she out so late?” “Was it really rape?” “She wears a hijab—how could this happen?”

No one asked why men do this.

Aayat’s room, once alive with rose water and ink, became a tomb of fear. She avoided mirrors, flinched at her brother’s footsteps, ate little. Her body felt like a stranger’s.

No one told her trauma grows in silence, gnawing at the edges of your soul.

Her mother tried to help, brewing chai and sitting close, but her words faltered. “It wasn’t your fault,” she’d say, then look away, as if guilt clung to them both. Her father stopped meeting her eyes, his dreams of her as a doctor fading into silence.

Aayat watched news of girls like her—Dalit teens in fields, children in toilets, women in riots. Each face mirrored hers. Each silence louder.

No one taught her the world punishes girls for existing.

Months passed. Aayat found a notebook, a gift from her late grandmother, its pages blank but heavy with possibility. She wrote one night, words spilling like tears: “I am not my shame.” Anonymous blogs became her refuge, each post a brick in a new foundation.

One evening, her mother found her writing. “Beti, what are you doing?” she asked, voice trembling.

“Speaking,” Aayat whispered. “I’m done being quiet.”

Her mother’s eyes welled, but she nodded. “Then speak loud.”

Aayat’s blogs turned into articles, then speeches. She wore her hijab again—not from fear, but defiance. At a college rally, she gripped the mic: “You think hijab shields us from evil? It only shields you from your own excuses. You blame our clothes, our timing, our names—but what about the babies, the grandmothers, the girls in uniforms?”

Men in the crowd shifted uncomfortably. Women clapped, some tearfully.

Her father came to one talk, standing at the back, eyes red. Afterward, he hugged her, the first time since that night. “I failed you,” he said. “But you’re stronger than me.”

Aayat didn’t feel strong. Healing wasn’t a straight path. It was panic attacks in crowded markets, nightmares of railway tracks, days she couldn’t leave her bed. But it was also choosing to write, to walk, to live.

No one teaches survivors that healing is a thousand tiny rebellions.

At a university panel, an older woman in a cotton saree approached. “I read about you years ago,” she said. “My daughter went through the same. We never spoke. I wish I had your courage.”

Aayat squeezed her hand. “You’re speaking now. That’s enough.”

In India, where goddesses are worshipped during Navratri, girls are blamed for their own assaults. Where mothers light diyas for Durga, daughters are told: “Don’t sit like that.” “Cover yourself.” “Don’t laugh so loud.”

But Aayat kept fighting. She visited schools, teaching girls to speak and boys to listen. She told mothers to believe their daughters, fathers to question their sons, teachers to stop policing girls’ clothes.

Her viral article read: “Dear India, we were never your shame. You were ours.”

No one taught her she could be a verse that shakes the world.

Epilogue

In a small Uttar Pradesh town, a 13-year-old girl reads Aayat’s story under her blanket, flashlight trembling. Her name doesn’t matter. What matters is the spark in her chest, the whisper in her mind: “Maybe I can write, too.”

Revolutions begin not with riots, but with the stories of the unheard.

By Roshan Tara