Finding My Voice in the Silence

I began writing at sixty, after retirement, after becoming what the world calls a “senior citizen.” But the stories had been forming long before that, on solitary drives across India’s highways, in the quiet stretches between cities, alone with my thoughts. There’s always been a voice inside me: watchful, reflective, slightly cynical but never cruel. The observer. And then there’s the other me, the dreamer, the one who feels too much, who laughs easily and broods just as easily. Two selves that should contradict but instead converge on the page.

Each book carries a piece of me. Each story is me.

The journey has not made me rich, but it has made me whole. I have learned to see without judging, to accept what I once would have resisted. My perspectives keep shifting, opening doors I did not know existed. I have picked up new skills. I have also weathered unsolicited advice, strange abuse, trolling from strangers, and people who tried to exploit my simple desire to be read. I have had my poems corrected by those who’ve never written one, my thoughts policed by those who don’t understand that thoughts are meant to be chaotic and jumbled.

In the beginning, there was anger. Urgency. A hunger to be known.

And yet, I never quite believed I was a writer. I’d finish something and feel surprised, did I really write that?

Then, these last few months, something shifted. I wrote about silence. About acceptance. And in doing so, I finally understood: I am a writer. I stopped fighting it. I embraced the silence within me, that deep, reflective quiet, and it gave me a new way of seeing the world. From that understanding comes my new book

“The Lonely House of Polymol”