By Akanksha Patil
They told me, when he died,
At thirty-eight I was a widow—
A title heavy as the silence that swallowed the house whole.
“Wear white,” they said, “no colors, no bangles, no laughter.”
No one asked if I wanted to live in a world drained of color,
If I wanted to shrink myself until I fit into the shadow he left.
They taught me the rules, what widows can’t do—
“Don’t smile too wide, don’t look too bold,
Don’t forget you are marked by the dead.”
But no one cared to ask if I was afraid of the dark,
If my skin still remembered warmth.
Thirty-eight, with small hands tugging at my sari,
A mother with half a voice,
Bound to fill both the roles
In a house where his absence clung to every wall.
They grew, those children of mine,
And in them, I tried to plant pieces of myself—
Whatever was left after grief took its share.
But they grew up, like children do,
Married, moved, built lives of their own,
While my hands stayed empty, save for the tasks they left behind.
They call sometimes, send letters,
Ask how my health is, how I pass the time.
But I can’t tell them about the years,
About the vast hollow they’ve left,
Or the things that still wake me at night.
They never knew the nights I spent alone,
When even the walls felt colder,
When the world beyond my window grew silent
And the only voices were memories.
For decades, I carried him with me,
Through every whispered rule, every quiet day,
Through the bite of loneliness that settled in my bones.
I wore widowhood like a second skin,
Never allowed to shed it,
Never free to remember the woman I was beneath.
They told me he was my last love,
That I must bury desire alongside him—
Forbidden to even think of another touch,
Another smile meant only for me.
And here I am now,
In this brittle shell of eighty years,
With the weight of a life that feels half-lived.
No one told me widowhood would be this long,
Or that my shadow would be my closest friend.
I look at the empty room, feel its hollow ache,
The silence like a second heartbeat
That drums in the void he left.
I’ve been so many things to so many people,
But never what I needed to be for myself.
I wonder what he’d think if he saw me now,
A life left on hold, half-empty,
Fading like the last light of evening.
And maybe one day, when I close my eyes,
They’ll let me take back my colors,
Reclaim my laughter and my name.
But for now, it’s just me, in an empty room,
A heart heavy with stories unsaid.
I am the widow they made,
The ghost of the woman I once was—
And the silence is all that remains.
By Akanksha Patil
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