The Sister Who Understood Without Words

Breaking the Silence, Part 6

This is for my Mother, and for Surinder Masi Ji.

This is for my Nani Ji, who I barely knew, and for the hardness she had to grow in order to survive.

This is for my Dadhi Ji too — who carried a grief and a haunting that were never fully hers to carry, and who was called crazy instead of believed.

This is for my Bhua Ji's and Masi Ji's — my Aunties, the ones still here and the ones who have gone — for every sister who called another sister every day, sometimes to say nothing at all, because the call itself was the medicine.

This is for the women before me who did not have the freedom to choose — who could not say what was happening in their homes, who were taught that silence was the price of belonging.

And this is for my nieces, and for the daughters not yet born, so that what was carried in silence does not have to be carried the same way again.

Yesterday I sat in Sehaj Path bhog for my Masi Ji's one-year passing. Kirtan moved through the room the way it always does — not asking anything of you, just steady, like water finding the low places it already knows. And somewhere inside that steadiness, I found myself back beside my Mother and her Sister. Not as memory, exactly. More like presence. As though they were both still in the room, still on the phone with each other, still saying nothing and everything at once.

The Sound of the Phone Ringing

They called each other almost every day. Some days there was something to say — a recipe, an aching knee, news of a cousin's wedding. Most days there was nothing at all. Just the sound of a voice. The rhythm of Punjabi passing back and forth like a small current between two shores. A kind of company that never needed content to be real.

I didn't understand it for a long time. What could there possibly be to talk about, every day, for that long? Now I understand it was never really about what was said. It was about being known by someone who required no explanation — someone who already knew what it cost you to survive your own life, because she had lived beside it, breath by breath.

Of the six sisters, my Mother was closest to Surinder Masi Ji. I used to wonder why — whether it was something about their temperaments, or something they'd lived through together that the others hadn't. But I think it may be simpler than that. They shared the same recorded birthday, two years apart — though nobody knows whether those were their actual birth dates, from a time when records were not always kept accurately. Still, it was the birthday they knew and shared. Close enough to have grown up inside the very same version of the house, to have witnessed the same silences at the same tender ages, to have needed each other at exactly the same moments. My Mother's two oldest sisters — fourteen and eleven years ahead of her — were more like mothers than siblings, the way it happens when the gaps between children stretch wide enough to become their own kind of distance. But Surinder Masi Ji grew up beside my Mother, not above her. And maybe that is what a true sister is — someone who stood in the same weather as you, at the same time, and still chose to stay close.

None of the six sisters seem to ever really spoke about what happened inside that house. I know this because I tried, gently, more than once, to ask. When I asked my Aunties about their childhood, about their mother, I received so little in return. My Aunt’s said their mother was nice, and offered nothing further. My own Mother and Masi Ji, when I asked them, went quiet in that same particular way — not defensive, just closed, like a door that has been shut for so long it no longer remembers being open.

I don't know exactly what happened in that house, and I don't want to turn intuition into certainty. But I know there were silences none of the sisters seemed able or willing to enter. My body has responded to those silences. Dreams have brought me fragments. My own healing has brought questions I cannot entirely explain. And I know enough about how common silence has been in large families and in cultures where a woman's silence was often the price the whole family paid for its own reputation to trust that there are things I may never fully know.

What the Body Would Not Say

What I do know, because I held it in my own two hands as a Reiki practitioner, is where I felt it in their bodies. My Mother had a mastectomy in her late forties, and years later, a growth returned to the same place. My Masi Ji struggled simply to breathe — water gathering slowly in her chest, her heart working far too hard for far too long. When I gave them Reiki, it was always their hearts that asked for the most tending — guarded, tender, quietly exhausted. My Mother carried it in her throat too. Thyroid trouble. A neck that seemed built to hold things back rather than let them through.

I cannot say what caused illness in either of their bodies, and I would never reduce disease to an emotional wound. But through the language of Reiki and energy, I could not ignore what I felt when I placed my hands there. Again and again, I was drawn to the heart and throat — the places I have come to associate with grief, expression, love, and all that remains unsaid. My Mother and her Sister loved each other enormously — and still, so much of what they carried never became words. Not even between the two people in the world who understood each other most.

About a month or two before she passed, I had another dream — her son telling me she was gone. I woke up with that knowing settled in my chest, the kind that doesn't ask to be believed, only listened to. So I made a point of it. I visited more. I sat with her more. I didn't say why, and she never asked. But I think some part of her already knew too — the way she'd sometimes go quiet in a way that felt like missing my Mother, even though she never said her name out loud in those moments. I think by then, she had already started listening for her.

Since She's Been Gone

Since my Masi Ji passed, I've felt something I did not expect — a loneliness in grieving my Mother that has only grown sharper with time. My Masi Ji was the last person in our family who still felt like my Mom to me. The last one who carried her the way I carry her. Now that she is gone too, it is as though my Mother is disappearing a second time.

Nobody speaks of her much anymore. Most of the family has folded back into the current of their own lives, the way people eventually do, and I understand that — but it also means my Father and I are often the only two people still living inside her absence. Once in a while, someone will say her name. Mostly, there is only quiet.

My Mother was the glue of our family. The one who asked how you were doing and genuinely waited for your answer. The one who kept in touch, who visited people, who made sure no one drifted too far from the center of things. She was a bridge — connecting people who might never have stayed close without her holding the thread. I see now that I have become the same. And I wonder, some days, if I am the only one left doing that work for her. Still calling. Still asking. Still holding what she used to hold, so the people she loved don't scatter now that the one who gathered them is gone.

What I feel most isn't a loud grief. It is a quiet sadness living just beneath the surface of things — memories that rise up unannounced, a grief that is present even in the moments I'm not thinking of her at all.

I've also learned, since losing her, how few places there are where grief can simply be allowed to remain grief. People can hold joy easily. They can hold a simple concern if someone is physically unwell. But grief — real grief, the kind that doesn't resolve on anyone's timeline — is often more than they know how to be with. When I am honest, when I say that I still miss her, that it is still present, that some days simply carry more weight than others, I can feel people flinch. They offer the same soft, well-worn lines. Come visit. Stay happy. I understand, now, that it isn't cruelty. Most of them were never taught how to hold their own emotions, so they reach for a bandage instead of sitting beside what is real. But it still lands as its own small ache — being handed comfort I never asked for, in place of simply being allowed to feel what I feel.

So I have learned to remove myself from the rooms that cannot hold me, and lean instead toward what can. Waheguru, through shabad. The plants. Sound and singing, as a way of moving grief through the body instead of storing it in the throat and chest the way my Mother and Masi Ji did. And a small, chosen community — friends doing their own inner work, who have built the capacity to sit with what is real instead of rushing to smooth it over.

I don't say any of this to place blame. I say it because I believe this, too, is part of what gets carried in silence — not only old wounds, but present grief that has nowhere to land, until we build or find the places that can finally hold it.

And when I think about my own loneliness now, I understand something about hers.

When my Mother passed first, something in my Masi Ji went quiet in a different way. Her husband had already been gone for years. And now the one sister who understood her without a single word ever needing to be spoken was gone too. I don't think her grief was only about losing my Mother. I think it was about losing the last place in the world she never had to explain herself.

The night she passed, I had just landed in Bali for a month retreat — far from the mourning that was happening at home, far from the family gathered in grief I couldn't physically enter. That distance is its own story, one I'll tell another time. But that same night, she came to me in a dream. My two younger Aunts were there, crying, holding onto me. Around us sat other women, gathered the way my Aunties always gathered at family functions — except this time they were smiling, at ease, together. I understood, somehow, that these were her other sisters. The four who had already gone before her. In the dream, the space between my two living Aunts and their four sisters wasn't empty anymore — it was full, warm, whole again. I don't know what to make of dreams like that, except that it felt like comfort. Like she wasn't arriving alone. Like somewhere, sisters were still gathering, still keeping each other close, the way they always had.

What Moves Through Us

The silence my Mother and Masi Ji carried between them — the daily calls that said everything and nothing, the way their bodies held what their words could not — did not begin with them. It moved through them, the way rivers move through land they did not choose. It was handed down, the way so much is handed down, without anyone ever meaning to hand it down at all.

To understand what they carried, I have to go back further still — to the women who carried it before they did. To my Nani Ji, who learned that silence could be the only safety a woman had. And to my Dadhi Ji, who carried something not even fully her own, and was called broken instead of gifted.

Their stories are next.