An open letter from your sister, living with a fractured sky
It has been ten years, Kailash.
Ten years since the world folded inwards, since time began to stutter in my veins. Ten years since laughter learned to echo instead of bloom.
They say time heals.
But what they don’t tell you is this: time doesn’t heal, it simply hushes the pain into quieter corners of your soul, where it waits—poised, patient, and sharp. Sometimes it murmurs through photographs, other times it roars through anniversaries like today. And today, I am listening to the silence that has your shape.
Your absence is not a void. No, it’s a presence. It is the loudest thing in every room. It trails behind me like a shadow that does not want to be left behind. People ask less now. The calls stopped long ago. Even grief, I suppose, must follow a social expiry. But I have not moved on—I have moved with. With you. With your memory stitched into every heartbeat.
You are still my first thought in the morning and my last quiet whisper before sleep.
You are still the unspoken name in every family prayer, the echo in every dream I refuse to wake from.
And what of them—Amma and Appa? They are quieter now. Not just older, but emptier. Your name lives in their silence, your face flickers behind their weariness. I try to be their strength. I try to carry the three of us forward as if my own heart weren’t shattering piece by piece with every passing year. I have learned to mask devastation with poise, sorrow with grace. But some nights—some cruel, collapsing nights—I unravel into the ache of a sister who lost her axis.
I wonder sometimes—had you lived, would you still chase the stars or heal the world from its invisible wounds? You were made for more, stupid. I just . So much more than this. You were the question that had answers for everyone else. The voice that soothed, the eyes that understood. You were my compass, my calm, my contradiction. You were—and you are—irreplaceable.
What they call 'grief' is far too sterile a word. What I carry is an ache coded into my DNA. A grief that’s fluent in silence, an elegy I hum to myself as I go about the business of being strong. Everyone expects me to be strong. And I am. But not because I am healed. Because I have learned the art of standing on fractured ground.
There are days I still see you. In the crimson blush of the sky at dusk. In the scent of sandalwood and old books. In a song that slips past the radio without warning. You are everywhere and nowhere. You are the warmth I still search for in cold winds.
I miss you, stupid—not just who you were, but all that you would have become.
A son. A healer. A brother. A legacy unfulfilled.
I have tried, in my own quiet way, to keep your spirit alive—not with monuments or rituals, but with stories, with service, with silent strength. Your memory is my rebellion against forgetting. You are the reason I speak gently to the hurting, listen deeply to the broken. I try, in fragments, to be the goodness you embodied.
Ten years - A whole decade.
And yet, somehow, today feels like day one. The ache is still raw, still real. I’m still trying to make peace with a world where you no longer exist. Still trying to become someone you’d be proud of.
They say grief is love with no place to go.
So I send mine skyward, where I hope it finds you—whole, luminous, eternal.
Wherever you are, know this: you are loved fiercely. You are remembered endlessly.
And you are missed beyond measure.
Forever your sister,
Who still walks the earth with a piece of her heart missing.
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