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AAVYA RAJAWAT

It’s been a week since my grandfather passed away, and I still feel… empty. Not the kind of emptiness that fades with time. This one settles in your chest like cement—dry, cold, and permanent. He was the only one who truly saw me. Not the perfect daughter they wanted me to be, not the burden they whispered about in closed rooms—he saw me.

And he stood by me, even when I didn’t deserve it. I stayed at our haveli for four days, wandering through rooms that still echoed with his voice, sitting in the corners he once filled with warmth, but the silence now feels too loud, too cruel. And what hurts more than his absence is the way some of them smiled—not openly, not joyfully, but with a kind of quiet satisfaction that stabbed deeper than grief.