The Day I Finally Heard My Own Story Again

The bad kind of noise, for a writer at least, isn’t the sound of traffic outside your window or the upstairs neighbor’s footsteps. It’s a roaring, oppressive silence of the blank page. That was the only thing I had to keep me company in six months of silence. I would sit at my desk, my fingers hovering over the keys, and nothing. The words had well and truly dried up, replaced by a din of deadlines and alerts - oh, and self doubt.

I was burned out. My inner world was now a desolate wasteland once populated with the characters and scenes that danced across its broken topography. In a fit of silence despair, whilst scrolling through images of things other than screaming concrete jungles, I decided. I wasn’t going to shoehorn the story down. No, I was going to hole up somewhere so quiet that I could once more hear myself think. Or even better: at least a place I could go to not think at all.

The destination was an authentic boutique heritage stay in Rajasthan’s countryside, a place that had potential to offer not just room but refuge. A place to breathe.

I came were a soft exhale. The air was strange—dense with the smell of rain on hot stone and the sweet, heavy jasmine perfume. There was no busy lobby, only a kind welcome followed by the taste of sunshine in a glass of hibiscus tea. My room did not come with a television, but it offered me a bookshelf and large window that opened to an expansive organic garden.

The first day, I did nothing. I strolled through vegetable plots, where gardeners worked in rows of spinach and tomatoes. While I was sitting on the verandah, all around me it began to turn colours as the sun set. I ate a meal so fresh and vibrant that it tasted like I was eating real food for the first time — the crunch of a cucumber, the sweetness of a carrot pulled from the dirt this morning.

I was filling the digital noise with the hushed, earthbound rhythm of the natural world. The rushing speed of my city existence gave way to the slow orbiting of day and night. I wasn't trying to write. I was just soaking in the silence.

Then, on the third morning, something changed. Seated with my cup of masala chai, I watched as a peacock strutted across the lawn, its magnificent tail sparkling in the morning light. And there in the serene space underneath a bougainvillea-covered verandah at Savista Retreat, which felt less like a hotel and more like a beautiful library, it finally happened.

A sentence came to me.

It wasn't a well-formed sentence. It wasn't a big plot twist. But it was mine. It was clear and true. I grabbed my journal, my hand nearly shaking, and wrote it down. Then came another. And then another.

It wasn't a flood, just a stream, but to a woman who had been wandering a desert, it felt like the ocean. The story was not dead. It had just simply been waiting for silence to pass. It had been waiting for a place quiet enough for me to finally hear it again.