No one cried at the funeral except the dog.
It wasn’t even their dog, just a street dog that had wandered into the compound, sat outside the main gate, and howled once, long and low, like it knew something no one else did. Everyone else looked too put-together, too relieved. The rituals ended like a task checked off a list. Everything was so calm that it felt unfamiliar; it was never this quiet when he was around.
The living room was dressed for mourning, the marigolds were already wilting, incense rings rose like thin ghosts. Ira sat beside her father’s photo, which looked stern, hastily framed, and draped in a garland that felt more like tribute than love. Even in stillness, his eyes held that same command, as if the room still needed his permission to breathe. Neighbours, former students, distant relatives, old colleagues with thinning hair and half-faded respect, walked in. They arrived in slow waves and silent nods, each carrying the weight of their own version of the man. Some came with folded hands and moist eyes, whispering prayers. The room was filled with words for him, rather than by him, just for today.
“He never compromised his values,” one said proudly, as if mourning a general.
“You always knew where he stood.” Others lingered on the threshold, hesitant, as though the memory of his voice still lived in the walls. “He had a way of... commanding,” someone offered, carefully avoiding the word intimidating. “Sharp tongue, sharper mind,” another added with a tight-lipped smile.
Ira noticed it, the split.
Some worshipped him like a monument, and some remembered the tremors he left in conversations, in silences, in dinner parties that turned into debates.
Ira barely heard them until a man in a white shirt, someone who had worked with her father at the newspaper, leaned in and said with a chuckle,
“He once said, ‘You either say something worth shouting, or don’t say it at all.’”
The room laughed. Light and brief. But Ira didn’t.
That sentence. She remembered it. He had said it. Not just once. And always with the kind of certainty that left no room for doubt or reply.
And suddenly, it made sense.
Why she wrote poems she never shared.
Why her words stopped short of the page.
Why silence had always felt safer than trying.
It wasn’t just his voice that had been loud. It was the message underneath it that, unless you roared, you weren’t worth listening to. That was the weight she had inherited. Not just a love for language, but the fear that hers was too quiet.
Ira sat quietly through it all, her silence a gentle rebellion against their words. She knew the full weather of the man, not just the thunder, but the rain that followed, the droughts between. No one mentioned the way he silenced rooms. Or how he loved from a distance. Or the paperweights that held down not just his writing, but her voice. The room buzzed with small talk and legacy. But Ira sat at the center of it all, quietly peeling back the layers of memory.
Once they all left, she was left alone with the silence, a kind that didn’t feel empty, but vacated. The cushions still held the shapes of the mourners. Half-drunk cups of tea sat forgotten on coasters. The faint scent of talcum and incense hung in the air like memory clinging to fabric.
He had been a storm, yes. But what did the storm leave behind?
And who was she, in the wreckage and the clearing?
Her eyes drifted to the corner of the room to his study door, partly open like it always was.
She hadn’t gone in yet. Not since. It used to be his room. Now it was just a room. She walked in slowly. Her feet bare, unsure, as though she might wake something by walking in. The study was dim, the curtains drawn halfway, letting in strips of late afternoon rays. Papers still lay where he had left them, a book half-open on the desk. His chair pushed back slightly, as if he had just stood up to get more tea.
She ran a hand across the desk, trailing dust. Books leaned on one another on the shelf. Each had pieces of paper sticking out, mostly neatly torn bits of newspaper, used as bookmarks. He liked to quote from books he read. Collect lines like ammunition.
Then she found an oddly shaped book. Shorter and slimmer than the rest of his full-bound, solid, heavy collection. The spine was softer, less proud. It didn’t belong there. Only one paper stuck out in it. Yellowed with time. Not a newspaper. Ruled like the kind from school notebooks.
She pulled out the book. Faiz. Pages feathered; spine cracked. She flipped to the marked page.
And there it was. Her handwriting. A poem about a sky with no moon. About silence louder than thunder. And in the corner, scribbled, words written in a rush, defiantly not hers. It was his.
“Softness is not the absence of strength. Some people move the earth with whispers. She may never shout. But she will still be heard.”
The air felt suddenly different. As if someone had opened a window from another time. He had read it. And more than that, he had understood it. Understood her.
Maybe he hadn't hated her words. Maybe she’d mistaken his thunder for disapproval, when it was just... his way. But she didn’t need to roar. Her softness had its own gravity. A quiet force that didn’t demand, but tolerated. That stayed.
She sat down. Pulled out a blank paper from his stack, and she wrote. And for the first time, she let herself begin. Not with hesitation. Not with doubt.
With a title: "The Room After Thunder."
A story he would never read. And finally, a story she was ready to write.
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