There is a relationship between language, the body and silence. All three can be used to convey love but the ways that each conveys that love and the way that that love is received are always different. Every Indian shows this love through feeding you—they literally feed you their love. In the part of India that my family is from, feeding is done with insistence bordering on overbearing force (which is a practice called manwar). My mother sends love in her packages that she puts on the dining room table a week before sending them and carefully fills them with items that she cooks especially for us.

In English we rely on words to convey love. Americans say “I love you” in lieu of saying “good bye.” It’s as though they need that confirmation to believe it, to remove doubt. But Americans are also experts at conveying empty forms of civility. Civility is cloaked by a friendly demeanor and an outward appearance of care that often hides cold indifference. 

Silence also can be indifferent. Finns are known to be generally silent. They allow your words to hang in midair, leaving you to wonder what effect those words have had. The effect is jarring for the uninitiated especially but even for those who have had many interactions, the heart can crave the connections that words offer.

It is this kind of silence that I am afraid of falling prey to. 

This fear isn’t abstract or hypothetical. I had a moment of silence that still haunts me.

But first, some background on family life in India. My nani (maternal grandmother in Hindi) cooks three meals a day to show her love and run the household. She also makes tea at least twice a day, oftentimes more for latecomers and unannounced guests. Each time she enters the kitchen, dishes accumulate endlessly and relentlessly (we joke that this is bartan ka vardan-the curse of dishes). To wash them you have to take them outside and squat down by a faucet in the garden while you wash and dry each one. And that’s just the kitchen work. The house must also be swept and mopped twice a day, laundry needs to also be washed by hand. 

All of this is to say that you need help. One person can’t do all of this. Not even two with my mother’s brother’s wife who we call mami there to help. So we have maids, or bai as we call them in Hindi. Bai are a normal part of life in India, and while I could go into the disparities in class and caste, this isn’t really the point of my story. My grandmother hires two who come to the house twice a day. 

My mother says that Nani’s saga of the maids is a Ramayana. It certainly has enough drama to count as an epic in its own right. During one of our trips the maids again abruptly took two weeks’ leave. With my mother, brother and myself added there were seven people in the house and I watched nani and mami struggle to figure out how to make sure all of the housework got done. The three of us tried to pitch in but nani was horrified at the thought of seeing her grandchildren who she only saw once every two years sweeping or mopping. 

The worst was at meal times. Nani and mami would cook, feeding a rotation of family members before sitting down themselves. I watched the dishes accumulating, feeling a panic at the thought of someone having to wash them and realizing that the bai did this everyday. 

My uncle and grandfather sat eating on the dining table, and I fumed at how they took no part in any of the housework. Neither of them would even get up to get a glass of water, preferring to call out to no one specifically “zara pani dena” and wait for someone to bring it to them. I thought about how it was a universal in our Indian community back home for the men to do the dishes, a fact that I attributed to the need for immigrant couples to help each other out of necessity. So I stood in the entry between the dining room and kitchen and suggested in Hindi that we each do our own dishes.

My uncle’s reply cut the air swiftly. “This isn’t your America.”

The tone was what threw me off. It was dripping with contempt. I couldn’t understand what the contempt was for though or how to respond to his attachment to India’s paternalistic norms. So I swallowed my frustration and left the room.

And that is what haunts me. What should I have said? I am not much of a talker and definitely not great at verbal arguments and most definitely not at arguments with family members. I wonder if my silence made me complicit (or if my desire to talk back made me a colonizer.)

This particular instance was complicated by my existence at the border of India and the West. But there have been times when the choice was more obvious and I sat in silence. When another uncle’s colleague, a man who I had never met before, said that the north of 125th and Broadway is a bad area, implying that poor black and brown people made it unsafe, I was unsure of how to respond. Then in Finland, when the Red Cross insisted that we shouldn’t make our anti-racism even “too negative” I again remained silent.

Silence, however, is also necessary for love. I have learned the power of listening to make people feel cared for. But the instance with my uncle showed me that my comfort is in listening. It is speaking out that I need to awaken. I am still searching for ways to find my voice when speaking up is how to show love.

Avanti's name ties her to ancient India but she was born and raised in the Midwest to Indian immigrants. Between trips to the sensory experience of India, she has always enjoyed silence. She is learning to speak while being a doctorate student working to change education for immigrant students in Finland.