The adults around me had names for me. “Completely inattentive, incorrigible,” said one teacher — not without real cause, though. I was failing to collect myself and apply: in school, in learning sessions outside it, in any recognisable social behaviour. I was a silent, fatherless child who had perfected the art of not being there. “Obstinate,” said another, because silence in a child reads as defiance when you’re too tired to look further. A caretaker, worn down by the effort of coaxing, settled on “the quiet ghost.” They weren’t wrong about the ghost part. I moved through rooms without displacing air.
I was twelve and I did not speak. Not mutism — I had words, though not many outside my own very limited circle of friends and family. I simply had nowhere to put them that felt safe enough.
Then one rainy afternoon I reached the safe walls of SOS Children’s Villages, Calcutta — a home, finally, after years of floating through the vagaries of life that visit you when lose your father too soon.
I met Swapna Maasi there. She taught art — paintings, papier-mâché. One afternoon she set up a black-curtained booth in the open-air pavilion and slipped her hand inside a glove puppet: a monkey named Buddhu, red velvet vest, mischievous eyes. She asked us, cheerfully, to help him because he was terribly confused.
The other children laughed and shouted. I watched.
Twenty minutes in, my hand went up. I don’t know why. My body moved before I gave it permission. The other children turned — they knew I never spoke, never volunteered — and the moment crystallised the way a clear drop of dew does on a blade of grass, visible and brief. Swapna Maasi paused, let it hold.
I walked forward. Reached out my hand.
The other children’s stares had weight. I’d spent years perfecting invisibility, moving through rooms without displacing air, but now my body betrayed me with wanting. When I reached out, my fingers were shaking. The cloth was warmer than I expected — Swapna Maasi’s hand had left its heat there. I slipped my hand inside and felt the monkey’s head settle onto my knuckles like a crown, like permission. When I opened my mouth, the voice that came out wasn’t mine — it was truer than mine: I am lost. I am looking. I am still here.
Under Swapna Maasi’s eye and kindness, we formed a puppet theatre group and named ourselves Ha Ja Ba Ra La — after Sukumar Ray’s beloved nonsense spell that dissolves logic into possibility. For us it became a manifesto: broken children turning grief into story, scraps into magic. We’d arrived as pronouns — he, she, they — interchangeable in our brokenness. Puppetry gave us names again, even if those names belonged to cloth and wood. We wrote the scripts together, rehearsed under tin roofs that roared with rain.
Our masterpiece was Kak-Bhasmi Baba — the parable of the Crow-Burning Sage, retold from Vivekananda. A monk so swollen with pride he burns a crow with a glance, only to be humbled by a simple hunter whose compassion reveals what devotion actually looks like. I voiced the monk — arrogant, thunderous, my twelve-year-old voice cracking with uncertain authority. A scrap of black cloth became the crow, flapping with jerky desperation before collapsing. When the hunter appeared, the hall went quiet.
We were the discarded staging a parable about where grace actually hides. We knew exactly what we were doing, even if we couldn’t have said so then.
I discovered a gift for words and voices — drafted the plays, lent them sound: kings booming with manufactured authority, fools muttering wisdom through nonsense, merchants wheedling with comic desperation. Through those voices, I found my own. The boy labelled “the quiet ghost” became the troupe’s anchor. Not because I had healed. Because I had found a mouth that could hold what mine couldn’t.
The puppet’s voice was truer than mine. That remains the most accurate thing I know about how I came back to language.