My Father’s Silence

My Father’s Silence

By Hasnain Shah

My father never raised his voice. He didn’t have to.

Silence did the work for him.

When I was little, I used to think his quietness was a kind of magic. He could fill a room with it. At the dinner table, my mother would ask him questions — How was work? Did you eat lunch today? — and he would respond with a nod or a half-smile. If she pressed, his jaw would tighten, and the words would stay lodged somewhere between his chest and throat, like stones he refused to spit out.

I learned early that silence could mean a lot of things. It could mean I’m fine when you weren’t. It could mean I’m angry, but I won’t say why. It could mean I love you, but I don’t know how to say it out loud. In our house, it meant all of those things at once.

My father worked as a mechanic, the kind of man whose hands always smelled faintly of oil no matter how often he washed them. He’d leave the house before sunrise and come home long after the sky turned dark. I remember hearing the sound of his boots hitting the floor at night — a steady rhythm, like punctuation marks in a sentence that never got finished.

When I tried to talk to him, he listened, but he rarely answered. I’d tell him about the kid who pushed me in the playground, or the A I got in math, or the time I broke my mother’s vase and blamed it on the cat. He would just nod, sometimes resting his hand briefly on my shoulder — heavy, warm, wordless. That touch was his language.

For a long time, I thought that was normal — that love was supposed to be quiet.

It wasn’t until I was in high school that I started to notice how other fathers talked. My friend David’s dad told loud jokes, made promises, argued and apologized in the same breath. Another friend’s father sang in the car, off-key and proud. Mine just drove in silence, eyes fixed on the road, radio off. I used to watch his face in the reflection of the windshield, trying to read him like a book that had all the pages glued shut.

When my mother died, his silence became something else — heavier, darker.

At the funeral, people hugged us and whispered things like She’s in a better place and She was such a light. My father stood at the front, his hands folded, eyes dry. I cried for both of us. That night, I heard him moving around in the kitchen long after everyone had gone home. Cups clinking, a drawer opening, the faint creak of the back door. When I went to check, he was sitting on the porch steps, staring into the dark yard. I wanted to sit beside him, to say It’s okay to cry, but the words stuck in my throat, just like his always did.

We didn’t talk about her again.

Years passed, and life moved the way it always does — relentlessly forward. I moved to a new city, got a job, filled my apartment with noise: music, friends, conversations that spilled late into the night. But even in that chatter, I could feel it — the echo of his silence inside me. When I got overwhelmed, when people argued, when someone needed me to explain how I felt, I shut down. Just like him. I didn’t mean to, but his habits lived in me like inherited shadows.

Then, one day, he called. Out of nowhere.

His voice, when I picked up, was shaky. “They found something,” he said. “In my lungs.”

I went home. The house looked the same — same faded wallpaper, same quiet corners. He was sitting in his chair, thinner now, eyes softer. I sat across from him and waited for him to fill the silence, but he didn’t. So I did.

“I used to think you didn’t care,” I said finally. “That maybe you just didn’t want to talk to me.”

He looked at me then — really looked — and sighed. “I didn’t know how,” he said. His voice cracked a little on the last word, as if it had been waiting all these years to escape. “My father never talked either. We just… worked. And hoped you’d understand without words.”

We sat there for a long time. The old kind of silence lingered between us, but this time it wasn’t sharp or heavy. It felt like something new — a pause before a beginning.

“I do understand,” I said quietly. “But I don’t want to keep doing it that way.”

He nodded, tears forming in his eyes. “Then don’t.”

So I didn’t.

When I left his house that night, I hugged him — really hugged him — and said, “I love you.” It felt awkward at first, unfamiliar, but he said it back. Clumsy, halting, but real.

That’s the thing about silence. You can inherit it, live inside it, and still find a way to break it.

And when you do, it doesn’t sound like noise.

It sounds like coming home.